Puzzles are at the core of Adventure gameplay, they provide challenges for you to overcome with brains rather than brawn. For Action Adventures, they offer a break from the hacky-slashy-stabby-shooty element of title.
Every week I’ll bring you a new puzzle, drawn from some of the best and worst adventure or puzzle games I’ve ever played. Every two weeks I’ll even leave you one of my own for you to solve. If you do, I’ll find a way to reward you!
It’s been two weeks and no one even tried to solve my numeric puzzle. For the record, the answer is 22.
Sadly, I don’t have a new puzzle this week. I’ve been without internet for some time and it’s made it difficult for me to do the proper research on certain topics for a puzzle I have in mind, but I will try to have a new one for next week. Also, inventory puzzles are a bit difficult to describe in text without making them too obvious, so those I’m working on slowly and carefully to make them appealing and challenging for readers.
This week I’m actually going to talk about two puzzles, from the same game and both really clever. These are two from Tomb Raider: Anniversary and are simple yet clever.
The first one is at the start of the Greece segment of the game. You come across a panel depicting the Perseus constellation and the different stars are targetable. There is a switch in front to reset them if you shoot the wrong one. The puzzle consists on shooting the right set of stars to open doors and make things happen. The clues are very close and don’t take much exploration to find.
It’s an extremely simple puzzle, but I like it for the sole reason that it involves gunplay in its execution. Many action-adventure games separate the action from the adventure, the guns from the puzzling, but TR Anniversary embraced both and this was just one of the many times where you use Lara’s weaponry as part of a puzzle solution. And because of that it deserves a spot on The Weekly Puzzle.
The second puzzle I’ll mention is in the Temple of Khamoon. You find yourself in a room with four rotating pillars, each with four symbols. If you rotate one, its adjacent pillars do so as well. The point of the puzzle is to align the symbols together, and you have murals depicting the images you should align.
What makes this an interesting puzzle for me is that the clue can also trick you into believing you needed to have the pictures facing the murals, and that is incorrect and made the puzzle twice as long as it should’ve been. Perhaps it was just my lack of attention or maybe the designers intent was for it to serve as both clue and misdirection, but either way, I found it very clever and figuring out the pattern and rotation order to properly align the pillars was a joy.
The Tomb Raider series is filled with hundreds of puzzles, and if you have a favourite one, share it!
I always hated these kind cryptic puzzles when I was a kid. I didn’t really understand why a game felt compelled to confuse me for no apparent reason. Took me long enough to decipher the monotonous puzzles in Resident Evil 2! But now I can appreciate the added level of creative breadth that distracts you from the repetitive pursuit of killing things.
I always like it when games play with me as much as I play with them. Clever tricks to confuse you or leave clues extremely well hidden are always fun for me.
To be fair, years ago I would’ve felt the same as you did, but then I got heavily into adventure games and started appreciating these puzzles a lot more.
Thanks for dropping by and commenting!
I didn’t like them as a kid much either but I think it’s because if I got stuck, there was no way to find out the answer given that I didn’t have internet at the time. I would get bored and frustrated so easily when I was younger.
Now though, that I’m old and stuff [haha], I freaking love them, and was a bit disappointed that although the new tomb raider was freaking brilliant, I thought the puzzles were too obvious.
I loved the puzzles in the new Dragon Age. Really enjoyed those.
I hear you. It was the same for me. Now I love it when the game tricks ne 🙂
I haven’t seen that many puzzles in Inquisition to be honest. But I stopped playing about a month ago so I should pick that up again!
Yeah I’m pretty sure they were the quests where you get the map and have to find the location. It was pretty much an ode to Tomb Raider. Worth going to because if you complete it you get purple gear 😀