longest journey rubber duck puzzle

Rubber Ducky

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A bright blue inflatable rubber duck. It also appears to be an innertube designed for children.

The Longest Journey [ ]

April sees the ducky trapped under a rusty grill in the Venice canals, and frees by scattering crumbs so a seagull will peck a hole in it. Once freed, the duck floats down to the Fringe Cafe and gets snagged.

When April retrieves it, she finds that someone has mysteriously put a Band-aid over the hole in the duck. She uses the ducky as part of a complicated apparatus to retrieve a key from the Metro Line . This is one of, if not the most famous (and hated) of TLJ 's puzzles.

Obtained from the canal that runs below April's window.

Dreamfall Chapters [ ]

Zoë finds some unexpected evidence of the ducky in Europolis when she encounters a notice posted on a wall that the ducky has been found.

• In the Norwegian version of the game when April sees the duck floating through the Bridges of Venice, rather than the English "Bon voyage, ducky!", she says "Bon voiage, Donald!": obviously a reference to Disney's Donald Duck.
• The title of the notice: "Hello! Is it me you're looking for?" is a reference to the lyrics of the Lionel Ritchie song "Hello."
• Actual rubber ducks are small, yellow bath toys.
• 1 April Ryan
• 2 Zoë Maya Castillo
• 3 Lady Alvane

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Video game puzzle designers tread a fine line: If the puzzles are too easy, they're boring, but if they're too hard, nobody will finish the game and you may wind up responsible for the deaths of hundreds of innocent controllers. The key is to make the difficulty of a puzzle come from a logical place so that solving it will make sense to the players, giving them a sense of well-earned accomplishment. But sometimes, the closest thing to a "logical place" that a game designer has is the cubbyhole underneath the toilet that his insane mother kept him in for most of his life. And that's how we get puzzles like these:

6 The Longest Journey 's Rubber Ducky

The Longest Journey is the story of an art student, April Ryan, who saves both her world and a parallel fantasy universe from total annihilation (the fantasy aspect comes from the idea of an art student doing something useful). Naturally, the fate of both worlds revolves around a rubber duck .

Early in the game you come across a key stuck on an electrified subway track. Now, this is before you know you're supposed to be a hero -- before you even know a second world exists. So as far as April's concerned, at this point in the game, she's just a regular college student waiting for the subway. It makes no sense for her to drop everything and endanger herself for a piece of garbage on the tracks.

But whatever, that's video game logic for you: Every gamer knows to frantically Klepto-Klutch every item in sight, just in case it might save your life later. So you need the key, sure: But you can't just turn off the power. Clearly, you have no choice but to leave the area entirely and run back to your apartment to fiddle around with a completely unrelated machine .

It controls water pressure, which obviously has nothing to do with subway tracks. But you start screwing with it anyway, because you're an art student: Your whole purpose in life is to fix things that aren't broken.

You want to steal that big ol' clamp, which, remember, you have no motivation for doing at this point. But whatever, maybe you're going to use it to hold your unreasonably large art-kid blunts. The problem is, it's holding down a leak. So you use the gold ring your dad gave you on your 16th birthday to conduct electricity through the cut wire up in the corner, powering the device up and loosening the clamp.

Next, it's up to your room. Glancing out the window gives you this view:

Dropping bread crumbs on the rubber duck attracts a seagull , who punctures the duck with his bill as he eats. After the damaged ducky floats away, you stuff the clothesline in your pocket, because when your father abandoned you as a child, he accidentally took your favorite stuffed animal with him and you've compulsively hoarded ever since. Then you track down the duck and reinflate it, presumably getting raw sewage in your mouth in the process. Now you're ready to get that key!

Wait, what key? Oh, right -- you were doing something at some point before you got high and started fucking with these birds.

All right: Now to tie the clothesline to the clamp and remove the Band-Aid that's patching the hole in the duck. Then you force the clamp open with the deflating toy.

When the duck finishes deflating, the clamp will snap closed onto the key . It makes perfect sense! The following image, to some game developer, was the logical conclusion of a series of problem-solving steps:

"Honey, I left my wallet at home. Can you tie a sausage to the dog, plug in the hair dryer, upend the garbage outside and then turn on the record player -- make sure it's playing the Batoosie -- then start throwing darts at the mailman until he-"

5 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 's Babel Fish Vending Machine

Anyone familiar with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy knows it has a weird sense of humor, so it's no surprise that the game based on it has some bizarre, non sequitur puzzles. But its infamous difficulty level crossed the line from "hilariously offbeat" to "fascist hate-fest" in a hurry.

Early in the game, you need to get your hands on a Babel fish, which functions as a universal translator if you stick it in your ear. They're dispensed from a vending machine , but because this is a video game, it's not as simple as hitting B16 and accidentally getting a bag of raisins instead of what you clearly chose (seriously, why are they always in there? Nobody wants you, raisins ).

The first time you try it, a fish shoots out of the machine and falls into a hole below a hook. OK, no problem, you just take off your dressing gown and hang it on the hook so it blocks the next fish ... and sends it down a "hitherto unnoticed drain."

Shit, OK. Still, no problem. You can cover the drain with your trusty towel. The next fish lands neatly on it ... and is promptly snatched by a cleaning robot.

Dammit! Well, all right, let's think this through. The robot exits through a little panel at the base of the wall, so you need to block that off. Your satchel will do. You press the button again, the robot plows into the satchel and the fish soars into the air ... where it's snatched by a flying cleaning robot.

At this point, we'd take the hint and start spamming "stomp robot." But that won't work here: You have to distract the second robot by putting some junk mail on the satchel, which sends it flying as well ... assuming you bothered to pick that junk mail up earlier. If you didn't, you're screwed. Oh, and the vending machine only has five fish in it, so a single wrong move means you don't get one. Which means you never understand what the hell's going on, which means you'll be inevitably killed a couple of scenes later and have to start the whole game over.

Or just quit and play a different, less painful game, like Russian roulette.

4 Silent Hill 's Poetry

Silent Hill is a series of psychological horror games where you battle disturbing monsters in a surreal otherworld. Silent Hill 3 upped the psychological ante further by cruelly punishing anybody without an English degree: In order to decipher one key riddle, you had to intimately know your Shakespeare . It all starts when you find this in a bookstore:

Each stanza represents a play, and you have to order them appropriately. The above quote, for instance, is an obscure reference to King Lear . What's that? You don't have an intimate, encyclopedic knowledge of King Lear ? "Haha, what are you doing playing video games" the developers of Silent Hill ask, "when you could be discovering the wonder of literature?"

If you do happen to be a professor of Shakespeareology, you eventually end up with a five-digit number. Puzzle solv- wait, shit, the door you're trying to open only takes a four-digit code. That's what the last stanza is for:

Now, obviously we don't have to decipher this one for you. But for all the *snicker* little Snugs out there, we'll hold your hand: It's telling you to double the number for Hamlet , triple the number for Romeo and Juliet and remove the number for Macbeth . Clearly!

To be fair, this poem only showed up on the hardest difficulty -- there was a much easier puzzle on lower levels, for all of you dimwits out there who play video games to shoot monsters in the face instead of analyze the story structures of 16th century English theater.

3 King's Quest 's Gnome

King's Quest is among the oldest of the old school adventure games, created back when men were men, every piece of software came on 147 separate floppy disks and there were no newfangled FAQ sites to hold your hand.

Back in those simpler days, concepts like "fairness" and "logic" were about as important to game designers as "graphics" and "having your parents respect your career choices." King's Quest had way more than its share of baffling puzzles, to be sure, but none were more frustrating than the gnome's riddle . It went like this: You come across a random assortment of colored pixels that are supposed to be either a gnome or a deformed Carnivale dancer ...

And you, the player, must guess his name to continue. Easy, right? Rumplestiltskin!

Shit, now what? Start guessing? Dude kind of looks like a Fred, maybe? Got kind of an Earl flavor to him? Ah, but if you happen to have found a cryptic note in a totally different area a while back, you probably won't recall its contents, which were: "Sometimes it is wise to think backwards."

Backwards? Oh, OK, so his name is Nikstlitselpmur. Frickin' cakewalk up in this bitc- no? That wasn't it, either?

That's because when the game says "think backwards," it wants you to invert the alphabet itself -- A becomes Z, B becomes Y, and so on. That makes the gnome's name Ifnkovhgroghprm, which is just going to be hell on the voice actors once they reboot this sucker.

To add to the pressure, you only get three guesses. Not all hope is lost if you fail, but you are forced to take a different path to the next area -- a path that includes an enemy who can permanently steal items from you , which might make the game unwinnable, thus forcing you to restart entirely. Oh, and technically the fairy tale character's name is RumpELstiltskin. So even if the fable comes to mind, and the phrase "think backwards" instantly causes the language center of your brain to fold inside out, you'll still only get the answer if you're the exact same kind of dyslexic as the programmer.

2 Gabriel Knight's Elaborate Disguise

Gabriel Knight is a suave, badass monster hunter. His third adventure, Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned , finds him up against a coven of vampires. At one point in the game, he needs to rent a motorbike, but the really sweet one he wants is reserved. So what do you do? Settle for a moped, and risk looking like a dork in front of Baron Von Bloodmouth? Not bloody likely! Bribe the rental agent? Nah, that would cost money. Maybe you just steal the damn thing, citing undead-related emergency protocols? Nope -- you have to impersonate the man it's reserved for, a sad-looking shlub named Mosely .

Well, OK. That's straightforward enough: You're supposed to pretend to be the guy who gets this thing. We can see what you're thinking here, game. It's not like you're asking us to wrap a rubber ducky around a backward-speaking gnome and make him hopscotch across a numbered board to make the Fibonacci Sequence. Good job so far.

So you start by stealing his jacket from his hotel room (so you can steal things? Why not just take the bike, then? Can you not bear the disapproval of the fatherly bike shop owner?). You also have to grab a hat from the local church's lost and found, to cover up your luxurious locks. Next you have to get Mosely's passport, which he keeps in his back pocket at all times. But hey, no problem -- just leave a piece of candy sitting in the hallway, buzz Mosely from the hotel's front desk, and then when he walks by, he'll be so distracted with mysterious hall-candy that you can pickpocket him.

Because we all know that hall-candy is the most delicious candy, for it is taboo .

Finally, you need a fake mustache to complete the look. And that's where logic and reason fall to shambling pieces: What you have to do is wander around outside until you find a door with a hole in it, attach a piece of tape to the hole, scare a nearby cat into running through it by spraying the animal with a stolen spritzer bottle , collect the now cat-hair-covered tape and use a packet of syrup to glue the fur to your face. Jesus, that's like going from point A to point B via the goblin road that lives only in the thoughts of CIA pod-transplants. There's absolutely nothing approaching sanity in that mode of thinking whatsoever.

But wait a second. Here's what Mosely looks like again:

There's something missing ...

Observant readers may notice that that man does not have a fucking mustache . Gabriel claims he needs one to disguise the "obvious disparity" between their faces. So a mysterious instant cat-hair-and-syrup mustache is ... less disparate?

So now Gabriel looks nothing like the picture in Mosley's passport, but you can fix it! You just have to draw a mustache on the passport photo with a marker. The cat-stache and coloring book passport somehow fool the motorbike rental guy, who has an impeccable enough memory for faces to identify the legitimate renter on sight, but apparently suffers from a bizarrely specific type of mustache-induced hysterical blindness.

Shockingly, the series did not get a fourth game.

1 RuneScape 's Deaf Prisoner

RuneScape is the world's most popular free MMORPG, which -- now that developers are practically paying people to play the blasted things like the government incentivizes Alaskans to settle the Yukon -- is a pretty impressive accomplishment. One of the game's adventures has you tracking down an infamous pirate. But the only man with information on him is in jail. Now you need to get yourself arrested so you two can have a chat.

Easy enough: We find peeing on a cop is the most efficient means to jail inhabitation, but you can just dress up like a pirate or whatever floats your criminal boat. Ah, but once you get in there, you find out that the man you need to speak to is deaf. Herein lies the puzzle! He's in the cell right next to you, and all that separates the two of you is a barred window. You need to get his attention: If only you could get your hands on some ink and paper ... hey, wait a minute, here's some in your inventory!

Now it's just a simple matter of grabbing a tin cup from your cell and banging it on the door until a guard comes by to douse you in fish stew. Oh, did you think you were going to write a note? Ha, that's adorable.

Next, you break off a pipe from the window, then pour ink all over the paper and head outside to the prison yard, where you smash the ink bottle on a rock and use the makeshift blade to cut a hole in your accordion. Wait, where did you get an accordion? From randomly searching through the rubble in the yard, of course! So there you go: Simply shove your pipe and paper through the accordion hole and voila!

You have a vacuum pump!

Wait, you do? Paper and ink shoved inside an accordion creates a vacuum? Shit, well, OK: Man, we really did not pay attention in science class. So, by merely following the eccentric, rambling, Family Circus -style mental path of a madman, you are now in possession of a vacuum. The next step is obvious: Take your fishy prison clothes and drape them over a rock. This attracts a seagull, which you catch. With the vacuum.

You then go back into your cell and shoot the seagull at the prisoner . This gets his attention, because even deaf people find it hard to ignore a terrified bird projectile right in the kisser. You are now able to have a conversation, most of which is probably going to revolve around why your mother is such whore and, follow-up question: Why you just shot him in the face with a goddamn living seagull .

So the video game gives the player a prompt: Get this guy's attention without using your voice. And the correct solution is not to throw a note, or to start waving frantically and wait for him to turn around and notice you. No, the most logical path of action is supposedly to vacuum-launch a marine scavenger into a stranger's face, and all because some programmer probably had one really weird deaf friend when he was a kid and extrapolated out some faulty assumptions.

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The 10 most fiendishly difficult puzzle games we've ever played

Point and click and curse

By Jack Yarwood

They don't have fancy graphics, they don't have heaps of multiplayer modes, yet point-and-click puzzle adventures can offer some of the most rewarding experiences in the world of video games video game experiences.

However, not all puzzles are created equal. Some defy all basic logic with their tricky puzzles, putting the player at an immediate disadvantage when attempting to solve them.

Whether it’s throwing in a new gameplay mechanic unseen elsewhere in the game or using some phrase you've never heard of, these puzzles are weighted firmly against those playing, leading to some rage-inducing moments.

For posterity, we’ve decided to recount 10 of the most infuriating puzzles from adventure games that had us screaming at our computers for longer than we'd like to admit...

King’s Quest V – Saving The Rat

King’s Quest V was full of irritating puzzles, but it’s safe to say none were quite as maddening as those that left your save file completely unwinnable.

Case in point, you’re walking past a bakery when suddenly a cat appears on screen chasing a rat. This may seem like an innocuous event, but failure to act in this situation will prevent any future progression and ruin your save.

What you need to do is throw an old shoe from your inventory at the cat before it reaches its prey. Obviously. This will allow the rat to enter the story later on and chew through your bonds when you’re tied up in the basement of the Swarthy Hog Inn.

We can imagine many players slammed their keyboard in disdain over this puzzle. We certainly did. 

Broken Age – Wire Puzzle

The first act of Broken Age was a breeze, so when the second part launched a year later many were expecting a walk in the park. What they didn’t expect was a convoluted wire puzzle, which required players to switch between the two main characters, Vella and Shay, for the answer to become clear.

The main problem with this puzzle is that its solution is illogical. It assumes that Shay and Vella are sharing information, which they aren’t at this point in the story. This makes it easy for players to overlook the correct answer, in favour of a more sensible approach. 

Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge – Monkey Wrench

The next puzzle on this list may have been easy for American players to figure out, but it stumped European audiences upon release. Yep, the monkey wrench puzzle from Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge .

This puzzle relied on the player having a rudimentary understanding of American slang, specifically knowledge of the phrase “monkey wrench”.

In the game, you come across a water pump you need to switch off, but the obvious tools you have in your inventory aren’t working. Clueless Europeans must have searched everywhere for a new piece of equipment they might have neglected, but the answer was right under their noses the whole time.

To turn the water pump off, you’re expected to hypnotize Jojo the Monkey with a banana metronome, before using him as a “monkey wrench”, the American slang for an adjustable wrench.

Most European players found the correct solution by trial and error, and when faced with the answer were still left scratching their heads. It’s a case of the developers at LucasArts not having the foresight to anticipate the international response to the game. Bitter? Us? Nah...

Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy – Babel Fish Puzzle

Difficult beyond belief, the Babel fish puzzle in the text adventure of Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy has earned a reputation as being one of the most frustrating in video game history.

Boarding a Vogon ship after Earth has been destroyed, the player is expected to make a Babel fish fall from a dispenser and go into their ear. There are numerous problems, however: the Babel fish can fire across the room and through a hole, it can fall down an unnoticed drain, or tiny robots can clean it up and take it away.

The solution to the puzzle, therefore, is this: place your gown on the hook by the hole, position a towel on the drain, and put a satchel and some junk mail by the robot dispenser. This will cause the Babel fish to fly up into air, out of reach of the robots, and land in your ear.

To arrive at this solution, you have to experiment with the different items in your inventory to learn the necessary steps. This is a massive nuisance, and may require you to reload your old save files over and over, as the puzzle is time sensitive and it demands items you’ve likely missed. We hated it.

Grim Fandango – Ticket Printing Puzzle

A benchmark in the adventure game genre, Grim Fandango isn’t short on ingenious puzzles, but it also doesn’t lack some annoying moments too. The most unrelenting of these has to be the ticket printing puzzle presented to players in the second year of the game.

This puzzle requires players to find out the details of a famous race, with subtle hints spread across Rubacava. But, stumbling about the city, it’s easy to miss these hints, due to the extraordinary size and scope of the area and the amount of characters you have to interact with. Devilishly detailed, this puzzle took many players (well, us) weeks to figure out upon first playing the game. One that needed a knowing friend to help you along.

Gabriel Knight 3: Blood Of The Sacred, Blood Of The Damned – Cat Hair Puzzle

Another infamous example bound to still produce groans from all who've played it: the cat hair segment from Gabriel Knight 3: Blood Of The Sacred, Blood Of The Damned .

To progress, you need a bike to travel, but the rental shop is only giving them out to members of a tour group. The game, therefore, demands that you construct a costume to pose as one of the members of the group, Franklin Mosely. This is where things get weird.

To form part of the disguise, you need to construct a fake moustache out of cat hair, despite Mosely not actually having a moustache. You then have to draw a moustache on Mosely’s stolen passport with a marker.

It’s vague, irrational, and extremely annoying. The rest of it was great though...

The Longest Journey – Rubber Duck Puzzle

The Longest Journey is a great title, but there’s no mistaking that it has some huge flaws. One of these is the obtuse duck puzzle from the first half of the game.

Spotting an iron key on the subway track, you try to grab it with your hand, but you can’t quite reach it. What do you do?

The answer turns out to be anything but simple.

To be successful, you have to combine the clothesline found outside of the Border House with a clamp and a steadily deflating rubber duck. This will craft a makeshift fishing pole, letting you retrieve the key. Only then can you breathe a sigh of relief, and collect up all the hair you'd been pulling out.

Broken Sword: The Shadow Of The Templars – Goat Puzzle

Revolution Software’s Broken Sword: The Shadow Of The Templars baffled players when it was first released, including a puzzle that adheres to rules not previously established elsewhere in the title.

In the game, you’re trying get past a goat standing guard over a castle in Ireland. But if you try to approach it, you’ll get charged at and forced back.

In this situation, it turns out what you have to do is time-sensitive, unlike all other puzzles in the game. It requires you to get charged at, before running over to the plough iron and moving it onto the goat’s rope. This will restrict the animal’s movements, giving you the freedom to travel as you see fit. Obvious really.

Codename: Iceman –Dice Game Puzzle

One of the few Sierra Adventure games not to spin out into a franchise, Codename: Iceman is notable for having complete contempt for the player. Don’t believe us? Read on.

In typical Sierra fashion, you progress in Codename: Iceman through solving puzzles and collecting items. But some of these puzzles rely heavily on chance rather than on a demonstration of intelligence or skill.

The most notorious example of this is the dice game puzzle, where you have to play against a drunken crewman to get essential items that are needed to progress.

During this segment, you’re limited to one restore, allowing you to load an old save file only once. Should you try again, the crewman will instead accuse you of cheating and break your save file.

Mean-spirited and infuriating, it’s unsurprising that this game never got a sequel.

King’s Quest – Gnome Puzzle

You didn’t expect there to be only one King’s Quest entry, did you?

Sierra’s original King’s Quest game had many nonsensical puzzles, yet none were quite as brutal as the incongruous gnome riddle that asked players to guess a character’s name.

To arrive at the answer, the game somehow expects you to associate a letter found in the witch’s hut with the gnome. This tells you to think backwards. Though rather than simply spell Rumplestiltskin back to front, it expects you to write out the alphabet in reverse and find the corresponding letters that are present in the fairytale name.

We can only assume Sierra’s helplines were crammed with callers, crying out in anger over the difficulty of this puzzle.

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The Longest Journey - A Retrospective

A game that almost vanished.

My earlier post about story reminds me of a piece I wrote for PC Gamer a few years back, looking at The Longest Journey, and its lasting effect on me. There was never room for my full thoughts then, and the full length 'director's cut' version has sat on my hard drive since. Clearly Dreamfall has been released since, telling us more about April Ryan, and another retrospective is due for that. Meanwhile, here's the full-length version of the original piece.

“Mystery is important. To know everything, to know the whole truth, is dull. There is no magic in that. Magic is not knowing, magic is wondering about what and how and where.”

The Longest Journey almost vanished away unnoticed, another obscurity ranted about by a few, but never reaching any acclaim. In the mire of pre-millennial adventure gaming, it could so easily have been drowned by the density of its peers, ignored by pessimism, never given the chance it so strongly deserved. How it was joyously liberated from this fate is mysterious. And in mystery, there is magic. In The Longest Journey, there is magic.

As a point and click adventure, The Longest Journey already defied conventions, ignoring the genre’s desperately floundering attempts at “catching up”. Developer and writer Ragnar Tørnquist and his team at Funcom understood that “catching up” was meaningless – they had a story to tell, and a world in which it needed to be told, and so this was the game they made. The natural instinct to say how it recaptured the adventure’s previous glory is strong, but this just simply isn’t true. Adventure gaming had never been as glorious as The Longest Journey – it hadn’t ever even come close.

Eighteen year old art student April Ryan provides the most perfect eyes through which to witness this tale. Sceptical, sarcastic and sassy, she tight-rope walks the same line as Buffy, mouthing off but never quite tumbling into the irritating. And yet still somehow gets away with normally grating late 90s Ameriteenisms such as, “That’s SO not appropriate.” You forgive her, because you realise, as do the games’ twin worlds of Stark and Arcadia, that she’s important .

A friend was recently explaining to me how Silent Hill 4 manages to spook so effectively by blurring the two worlds of the normal, and the horrific. When an element of one leaks into the other, stability in the known is shaken, and fear drip, drip, drips in. In April Ryan’s life, it is the fantastic that begins to disturb the normality of her existence, the world of dreams invading her world of rational and science. And where a good horror story shows you fear in the every day, The Longest Journey shows you magic. Set 200 years in the future, April’s world is enough like our own to allow us to identify, but distant enough to allow it status as a metaphor.

The meta-narrative tells of how, long ago, the united Earth was divided into two: Science and Magic, Stark and Arcadia. The Bladerunner-inspired future version of our known world allows the effects of this severance to have been demonstrated even more, well, starkly than they are now. Wars have increased the degree of global apartheid, Capitalism’s punishments are more prevalent, authority rules over democracy, and people simply get on with being people as it happens around them. It is unavoidably our future.

In contrast, Arcadia refers back to so many fantasy lands, simplicity bolstered by magic, thus creating seismic instability and inevitable fracture. But Arcadia at least possesses hope. Stark’s worldview is blind, eyes gouged out by its people’s own hands. It allows the coming destruction of Chaos without even the consciousness to question. And so it is through April’s dreams, through her powerful imagination, that she is drawn to ‘shift’ out of that world, and to learn her part in the shaping of the future.

I was unaware of how much I’ve been influenced by The Longest Journey, until returning to its tale for this piece. I’ve been writing a children’s story, on and off, for a couple of years, never getting very far with it, but always driven to persist by its unstoppable urge to leave my head. I’m now wondering how much I have to remove because I’ve simply plagiarised it from my subconscious. The ideology of this game is lodged deeply inside me, partly because I so strongly identified with the message I took from it, and partly because that message is so powerfully told. It is always a point and click adventure. There are always daft clicking the rubber duck on the clamp and tying it to the string puzzles. But it works with these elements, not despite them. Nearly every voice is perfectly cast, and the recording supervised by the game’s creator and writer, Ragnar Tørnquist. Yes, there is swearing, but there is swearing where real people swear. And wow, are the conversations long. But they are telling you a story like no other.

April is not a simple character, a template onto which we may impose ourselves to experience a world. She has issues with her father, trouble letting people get too close, and a propensity to run away rather than face difficulty. She is a complex and broken human being, thrown into a situation too big to understand, and arguably destroyed by it. She’s a person.

The opening quote, said to April by her mentor when she is persisting with him for answers, speaks for the whole game. The Longest Journey is epic and magnificent, but completion makes you aware that this is only a tiny fraction of a created world. Indeed, these are only weeks in the whole of April Ryan’s lifetime. So much remains unknown. But to know the whole truth is dull. Magic is in not knowing, magic is wondering about what and how and when.

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8 Hardest Video Game Puzzles Ever

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Astro Bot - Every Collectible Location In Hieroglitch Pyramid

I’m worried the robot in astro bot isn’t attractive enough for me to enjoy, astro bot - every collectible location in frozen meal.

Puzzles appear in a lot of different types of games. Of course, there is an entire genre based on them, but they also feature in other genres, such as action-adventure, survival horror, RPGs, and more. They're an enjoyable part of gaming, as they provide plenty of variety and test you in different ways. At least, it's easy to see them as a positive thing when you're regularly solving them.

RELATED: Relatable Things We All Do When Playing Puzzle Games

However, once you're faced with a very difficult one, your opinion of them may change. After all, there is nothing more frustrating than getting stuck on a puzzle for a long time. That happened to most people when they tried to complete the following ones, as they're extremely difficult.

Updated July 14, 2023 By Ben Jessey: Video game puzzles are often great as they provide clever and unique challenges for you to overcome. Yet, some developers go too far with their level of challenge, as they task you with puzzles that are almost impossible to complete without a guide.

In the original version of this list, we highlighted the hardest puzzles gaming has ever seen. Now, we've returned to the piece to add a few more extremely taxing puzzles.

8 Owl - Metal Gear 2

The hardest puzzle in the entire Metal Gear series tasks you with getting past a laser gate. There's no way to squeeze through it or go around it. So, you need to turn it off. Luckily, a guard switches the thing off at night. Yet, there is no day and night cycle in the game.

This is where things get absolutely ridiculous as you have to convince the guard at the gate that it's nighttime. To do that, you have to hatch an owl egg. The sound of the said owl will somehow make the guard think it's getting late, meaning he turns off the gate. He doesn't take a look at the clock or realize that the sun is still out. Hearing an owl is all he needs to believe it's nighttime. It doesn't make any sense, which is why most players struggle with this puzzle.

7 The Goat Puzzle - Broken Sword: The Shadow Of The Templars

To complete the Goat Puzzle, you have to find your way past an aggressive tethered goat and reach a ladder. The problem is the goat knocks you back when you head to the said ladder. To solve most puzzles in the game, you need to find and sometimes combine items. This is why the goat puzzle is so difficult, as it requires a different sort of method.

RELATED: Every Broken Sword Game, Ranked

You need to get hit by the goat on purpose, and when it's moving back into position, you need to move a piece of machinery on the other side of the screen. This will cause the goat's tether to become tangled, which stops the animal from halting your progress to the ladder. It doesn't sound particularly complicated, but it's so different from players' expectations of a Broken Sword puzzle that most never think of it.

6 Rubber Duck - The Longest Journey

The most convoluted puzzle in The Longest Journey begins with a key on an electrified subway track. You need to get your hands on the key, but the electricity makes it difficult. So, you have to first return to your apartment and use a gold ring to get a clamp. Then you must throw bread crumbs on a rubber ducky outside your window to convince a bird to damage and move it.

Following that, you pick up a clothesline before heading outside to get the damaged duck. Finally, you need to combine the clamp, clothesline, and rubber duck to make a makeshift fishing line that can be used to grab the key from the subway track. It is unbelievably complicated and seems impossible to figure out without a guide.

5 Babel Fish Dispenser - The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy

The Babel Fish from The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy game is one of the best fishes the industry has ever seen . This is because it can translate the language spoken by the alien race known as Volgons. As such, one is required to beat the game. Unfortunately, acquiring one is very difficult.

Initially, it seems easy, as they're available from a dispenser. Yet, you can't just input a code to get a fish. There are all sorts of obstacles, from holes to cleaning robots, that will take your fish away. And you don't really know they're there until they snatch your scaly translators. So, there's plenty of trial and error needed. This wouldn't be so bad if there weren't a limited amount of fish. If you run out of them, things will go bad for you later in the game.

4 Steal The Gold Belt Buckle - Discworld

At one point during this point-and-click adventure game, you must hand over a bunch of gold to a dragon, including items such as a gold belt buckle. The only one in the game is helping to hold the fishmonger's pants up. So, you must figure out a way to steal it. It sounds simpler than it is, as the process is needlessly complicated.

RELATED: Most Addictive Puzzle Games On Steam

To start, you must tie up the octopus the fishmonger is selling and pick it up. Then you must put the creature in a nearby outhouse before feeding him a pot of custard. After that, you must place some prunes in the fishmonger's caviar. When he eats it, he'll immediately have to visit the outhouse. In the process, he gets attacked by the octopus, and you can steal the buckle from his discarded pants. Working all of that out without any help seems impossible, as a rational person wouldn't consider doing any of that to steal a buckle.

3 Shakespeare’s Stanzas - Silent Hill 3

The developers of Silent Hill 3 thought that everyone playing their game on hard must be very knowledgeable about Shakespeare. After all, they included a riddle you can only solve if you're well aware of the writer's work. The basic premise is that you must figure out a four-digit code to a door, and your only clue is a poem.

The piece references several Shakespeare plays. And you have to figure out which ones and put them in order based on when they appear in the poem. When you've put them in the correct order, you receive a five-digit code. Yet, that's one digit too many. So, based on the poem, you have to work out which number needs removing while multiplying a few of the others. Even for a series known for having several tough puzzles , this one is particularly taxing.

2 Guessing The Gnome's Name - King's Quest

Guessing somebody's name with no real clues is less of a puzzle and more of an impossible task. However, this is what the original King's Quest game has you do. If you know fairy tales, though, you may think it's easy as the subject is a gnome. So, you may guess the common gnome name, Rumpelstiltskin.

RELATED: Puzzle Games That Are Harder Than They Look

Yet, that guess would be wrong. Then you may remember a vague note in the game that mentions thinking backward. The reverse of Rumpelstiltskin is "Nikstlitslepmur," but that is also not the correct answer. By things going backward, it's actually talking about the alphabet. So, as the letter 'R' is the 18th letter of the alphabet, you have to count 18 back from 'Z' to find the first letter of the name. Then do that for every other letter in Rumpelstiltskin. It's a ridiculous puzzle.

1 The Black Monolith - Fez

Fez is one of the best puzzle games around due to its clever design and beautiful art style. However, it is also a tricky game to beat. But the true challenge is in new game plus, when you attempt to collect the red cubes. This is because one of them is inside a black monolith. Getting the monolith to come out in the first place takes a bit of working out, but that part is doable.

You need to do another button sequence, though, to get the red cubes to appear. And figuring it out on your own may literally be impossible, as it seems nobody has ever actually solved it. The game's community painstakingly came together to figure out the sequence by brute force. There have been theories about how you figure out the code in a legitimate way, but there has never been anything concrete.

NEXT: Puzzle Games That Are Good For Your Brain

• Triple-A Games
• Silent Hill

The Longest Journey

Ursprungligen skrivet av Magma : I hope the rest of the game doesn't end up like this puzzle...I don't like to rely on walkthroughs but I don't have time for absurd difficulty spikes.

Ursprungligen skrivet av holychair : I just had to resort to the walkthrough at the community guides section for this. Good to hear that the rubber ducky puzzle is not a sign of what's yet to come because I really liked the game thus far. April is a very slow walker, though ...

Ursprungligen skrivet av henrikh1984 : Whatever I do, all she says is "I can't reach down far enough". The clothesline is already attached to the clamp... I don't know what to do...

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Veliky Novgorod

The whole city of Veliky Novgorod is a big museum; there are many well-preserved monuments dating back to the 11th century and later centuries.

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Novgorod kremlin, trade side and yaroslav’s courtyard, st. george's monastery, vitoslavlitsy museum of wooden architecture.

Request a private tour, tailor-made for individuals and small groups to meet your needs and preferences.

Discover historical attractions of Veliky Novgorod

• Private trip from St. Petersburg
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Veliky Novgorod Region: Why you need to see the jewel in Russia’s ‘Silver Necklace’

Valday Iversky Monastery

For those of you making the trip to Veliky Novgorod Region, here is a list of unmissable activities and places of interest to really get you acquainted with the area and its history.

1.    Learn the history of the Russian state in Veliky Novgorod

Of course, this city is unmissable; being the historical center of Russian statehood with the most ancient cathedral in the country, Sophia Cathedral, erected more than one thousand years ago, is a place of power for the whole of Russia. The city was the first-ever Russian settlement straddling both sides of a river (Volkhov), with the imposing Kremlin on one side, and medieval churches and buildings in the historic market district on the other.

Veliky Novgorod Kremlin

You can spice up the historical tour with various custom ones available, including the ancient cemetery at night or an alco-tour of the city (where you get to try local food and drink). For more information on the city excursions, you can go here .

2.  Explore traditional folk craft at the workshop in Kresttsy settlement

Krestetsky stitching is a traditional Russian pattern - a folk craft that was born and developed in this area since the 1860-s. In Soviet times a small factory producing original unique linen products was built here. During Perestroika it was nearly closed due to the catastrophic economic crisis in the country. The risk for the Krestetsky stitch being completely forgotten was quite real. It is now a private factory and shop with guided tours.

NOVGOROD REGION, RUSSIA - JANUARY 24, 2019: Linen products of the Kresttsy Stitch clothing factory reviving and implementing the Kresttsy stitchery, a traditional local embroidery technique dating from the 1860s, in the village of Kresttsy, Novgorod Region

The pattern is very beautiful and difficult to master, so the possibility to observe the birth of a masterpiece is quite unique. Head over to the factory website for more details.

3.  Meet the old believers in the village of Lyakova

Russia’s so-called ‘old believers’ did not accept the reformation of Orthodox Christianity in Russia in the 17th century, choosing instead to keep the old traditions in church services and rites, in defiance of the state’s persecution, lasting centuries. Old believers are divided into two groups, those who accept the church hierarchy and those who do not accept priests at all, pray in their own houses, and are governed by the community leaders. At this time there are about one million old believers scattered around the country with no official statistics to confirm that figure.    

The old believers of Lyakova village will gladly welcome you in the old traditional peasant’s house, explaining how it was organized, and how life, in general, looked in the distant peasant past.  This immersion is accompanied by a traditional dinner with borsch, salo (pork scratchings) and tea brewed in a traditional samovar. Book your ticket here .

4.  Take the eco-trail at the Valdai national park 

This national park is one of the largest specially protected natural areas in the European part of Russia. Russian president Vladimir Putin has one of his ‘datchas’ here. The territory of the park that covers an area of 159 thousand hectares includes several lakes (Borovno, Valdai, Velje, Seliger) as well as rare animals and plants.

Many nature lovers come here to hike, swim in the lakes and camp. This year the big eco-trail was opened. If you enjoy hiking, you can walk all 59 kilometers in five days, starting from the town of Valdai and covering around 12 kilometers a day. On the way, you will have all the facilities needed for camping and spending time in nature, from toilets to camping equipment and various amenities. Visit the park’s website for more info.

5.   Visit the Valday Iversky Monastery

Located on an island 10 kilometers from the town of Valday, this monastery appears to be floating on the lake, when you look at it from a distance.

This is a male Orthodox monastery established in 1653. It was one of the three monasteries founded by the Patriarch Nikon (his reformation of the Orthodox Church in Russia and its unification with the Greek Orthodox church caused the split between ‘old’ and ‘new’ believers). The icon of the Mother of God – Iverskaya – is the treasure of the monastery and the reason for the active pilgrimage to this place.

6. Ring the bells at the Valday Museum of Bells

The region of Novgorod was the center of Russian statehood under the rule of the Rurikovich dynasty. After the collapse of Kievan Rus’, the region was an autonomous Russian state with a republican form of government, the symbol of which was a big Bell that every citizen could ring in order to gather the townspeople for a vote or resolve a community issue. So it is not by accident that the first-ever Museum of Bells in Russia was opened here.

Valday Museum of Bells

If you manage to get Nadezhda Yakovleva for a guide, you are guaranteed a one-person performance along with your historical facts, it’s fascinating and great fun as well.

 7.   Immerse yourself in 10th-century life at the settlement in Lyubytino village

This village of ancient Slavs has been restored in order to give tourists the impression of life centuries ago. Different types of Russian wooden cottages (izba) are represented here, as well as utility buildings and the ancient burial mounds, used by Slavs for burial rites.

Lyubytino is an urban locality (a work settlement) and the administrative center of Lyubytinsky District of Novgorod Oblast, Russia, located on the Msta River. Municipally, it serves as the administrative center of Lyubytinskoye Urban Settlement

For those seeking total immersion, there is the possibility of getting dressed in the traditional clothing of the time and have a photo session.

 8.   Visit the museum of local lore in the town of Borovichi

This is one of the oldest museums in the region, established in 1918, and located in a 19th century stone house with a mezzanine. It is devoted to the history of the region from the Stone Age to the Revolution of 1917.

By the end of the 19th century, Borovichi became an industrial city that attained fame in Europe due to the first international agricultural handicraft and industrial exhibition held here, which was established under the auspices of the Prince of Oldenburg, who underlined the importance of this region between the two Russian capitals. France then presented half of the items at the exhibition.

The region is also known for a unique material produced here: Franco-Russian pyro-granite plants of Prince Golitsyn were located in Borovichi, and the recipe for producing it remains secret to this day. This material got a large silver medal at the World Exhibition in Paris in 1889.

We highly recommend that you take a guide here, as there are many activities including role play and various fun games, as well as just beautiful stories told during it. Find out more here .

If you need some guidance in the area, feel free to address the Rus Novgorodskaya touristic center.

If using any of Russia Beyond's content, partly or in full, always provide an active hyperlink to the original material.

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