Cutting The Knot / Video Games

Cutting the Knot in Video Games.

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• The properties of the boss weapons mean that there are a lot of platforming challenges in 20XX that can be rendered easier by using the right one, especially in the later levels. The Splinterfrost disables fireball traps, the Force Nova shuts down laser beams, the Flameshield can tank an arbitrary number of ice trap shots, and the Shadespur can lock in holographic platforms. This means that, for example, a difficult platforming sequence of moving platforms criss-crossed with laser beams can instead become a much easier exercise with no laser beams with 1-2 well-placed Force Novas, or a grueling gauntlet of fireball traps can instead become a morning stroll thanks to a Splinterfrost shot.
• Absinthia: In the Typh Village sidequest, the party comes across a complicated puzzle that's supposed to get them to a lever. The guest character, Ruthea, simply jumps across the gap to pull the lever, preventing the need to complete the puzzle. However, completing it will still net the party a unique accessory.
• Baldur's Gate: If you don't have a thief, or (s)he doesn't have enough lockpick skills, you might also simply knock out any locked door or closet by forcing it.
  • In the first game you can either infiltrate the bandit camp and investigate undercover... or just plain kill everybody.
  • The default approach to deal with Lady Galvena's criminal activities in the sequel is to disguise as a customer and stealth in through her chambers and prison... but the game points out that you may also just cut through with steel.
  • The recommended action to deal with the Unseeing Eye is to undergo the quest to assemble the magical rod, but if you dare enough you can ignore it and storm the beholder lair. Which is normally VERY difficult for most parties, unless you equip the Shield of Balduran.
  • It is also totally possible, although not advisable since you would lose tons of xp from the associated quests, to storm Ust Natha until you find the dragon eggs rather than infiltrating disguised as drows.
  • Baldur's Gate III puts you in such a situation right from the beginning: to free Shadowheart you either pass a wisdom check to disclose how to open her tank, or a strength check to force it.
• One of these appears as an Anti-Frustration Feature in Batman: Arkham Knight. Batman has to get the code to a door by watching a Joker infectee open it through a mirror. If the player still hasn't figured out the code after a few tries, Batman just punches the console, and the door opens automatically.
• In the final chapter of Bendy and the Ink Machine, Allison gives you a list of items she needs to open the door to the Ink Demon's lair, before Tom decides to take things into his own hands:
  Allison: I'll need three gears, a crowbar... hmm, some kind of counterbalance.
  [Tom walks over to the door and punches it open]
  Allison: Huh. Well, that works too... I guess.
• Traps show up throughout Betrayal at Krondor. Passing through hostile areas will do a lethally massive amount of damage, forcing one to figure out a means of disabling or circumventing them. Or one can cast a shield spell, cheap and available in the first chapter, that absorbs all damage for a few turns and walk right through the hostile traps instead. The shield option usually is quicker even if you know how to disable the trap.
• The Binding of Isaac offers a lot of methods of using items to do, albeit most are luck-based at best since there's no guarantee you will get the items or map layouts required to pull them off:
  • If a secret room is beside a Curse Room or a Challenge Room, you can blast through the wall to gain access without meeting the health requirements to go through the front door.
  • Mama Mega! can blast open the entrance to Boss Rush and ???, allowing you to access these events without meeting the strict time requirements to access each one (get to Mom in 20 minutes for Boss Rush, get to Mom's Heart / It Lives in 30 minutes).
  • Using Dad's Key will open the door to almost anything. Even the door to Mega Satan in Chest or Dark World. Pretty much the only things it can't open are things that don't actually have doors, like the boss room for Mom after beating her, or the entrances to Boss Rush and ???, among a few others.
  • Flight lets you fly over pits and over most obstacles, and thus can be used to fly over spikes to reach the reward unharmed or to fly around obstacles to avoid using keys or bombs.
• Borderlands 2 invokes this in the "Tiny Tina" DLC. Tina (as the GM of a Dungeons & Dragons-style tabletop game) creates a Rubik's Cube-type puzzle for the players. You can either attempt to solve it (by pressing the buttons in the reverse order of when they activated when you first enter the room), or you can simply punch the puzzle. Solving the puzzle, however, unlocks a door where a loot chest is hidden.
• In Call of Duty 2, during the Battle of Stalingrad campaign, you get a bunch of Germans barricading themselves in a building. Instead of trying to talk them into surrendering or trying to beat down the door, the commander simply orders you and the others to place charges on the building supports. As the smoke clears, he screams: "That is how you negotiate with fascists, comrades!"
• Car Escape: In one of the ending chapters, the protagonist finds a locked safe. Instead of searching for a key, he decides he's finished with all the puzzles and opts to destroy it with a hammer, doing what any point-and-click adventure game player probably wanted to do for a long time.
• Level 18 of Chip's Challenge: You can push water-removing blocks into the moat to build a bridge, or... you can walk all the way around the level to the flippers.
• One of the trials in City of Heroes was the Cavern of Transcendence. With a 90-minute time limit, a team had to travel into the tunnels under the Hollows, fighting their way through the groups of enemies there, to the door of the Cavern. Once they entered the Cavern, to complete the trial the players would have to simultaneously press 8 buttons scattered around a single, massive, room that was full of monsters between the door and the buttons. The obviously intended method of completing the mission was clearing the room of monsters first. On the other hand, if a team had at least one member with some kind of stealth capability (including superspeed) and Recall (able to teleport a teammate to your location), the preferred method of players who wanted the award the easy way was to wait at the tunnel's entrance for their stealthy teleporters to zip through the tunnels to the Cavern door, Recall the rest of the team to the door, then enter the Cavern. Then the stealth teleporters would go to each button and bring one teammate there, not aggro'ing any monsters, and then the buttons would be pressed. Depending on the number of teleporters on a team, you could complete the entire Trial in about five minutes and never enter combat once.
• Near the end of Counterfeit Monkey, you have to cross an ocean. Normally the game expects you to go through a lengthy puzzle to get a kayak. However, since the main mechanic of the game is altering words to change the objects they represent, if you're still carrying the rock, you can turn it into a roc, then climb on its back and fly across the ocean.
• All the minibosses in the Run N' Gun levels of Cuphead can just be dashed through with the Smoke Bomb upgrade or, if their spawn animation is slow, you can run right past before they appear. Not only does this save you having to actually fight them, but it's also the only way of getting the Pacifist rating in these levels.
• Dawn of the Dragons has an instance where You and your party are traversing a dungeon laden with traps, one of which is a corridor rigged with a number of spears shooting from the walls at set intervals. You spend time studying the trap, trying to work out its pattern. Roland simply cuts the spears down and walks through.
• Destiny 2 has the Last Wish Raid. The Final Boss of the raid, Riven of A Thousand Voices is an extremely puzzle-heavy encounter that involves splitting the party up into two teams of three, juggling buffs, pointing out which eyes to shoot, and other tasks to whittle down the boss's health over several damage phases... until an exploit was discovered. By gathering all six players into one room (and exploiting a teleportation glitch if you pick the wrong room), and then having the entire party unload on the boss with heavy ammo, you can effectively skip the entire fight and go straight to the last phase in about a minute.
• Deus Ex: Human Revolution:
  • There's a quest requiring you to sneak into gang territory and identify an item with the side objective (bringing additional XP) of not being seen, which traditionally requires a convoluted path of stealthiness and/or silent knockouts. However, the emphasis is on "seen"; as long as they don't actually see you, nothing prevents you from sniping everything in sight (by that point you're very likely to have either a sniper rifle or a silenced handgun with a laser sight). Or blowing them up with grenades from cover. Or, if it isn't your first playthrough, walking in the building with the loudest, strongest weapon you have, wiping out everyone, and then accepting the quest - nobody to spot you if everyone who could do so is already dead.
  • The Final Boss is shielded by a pane of indestructible glass. The conventional method of defeating them is to use one of several options to lower the glass. However, despite being indestructible, it's still glass and thus transparent, meaning if Jensen is carrying a Laser Rifle, he can simply shoot through the glass and end the fight in less than a minute.
  • In The Missing Link DLC, the player is presented with the choice of saving either a credible witness to Belltower's atrocities or dozens of innocent victims from dying by diverting poison gas away from one and towards the other. Savvy players can Take a Third Option by destroying the (well-hidden) pumping mechanism for the gas, saving everyone.
• Devil May Cry 4: During Nero's portion of the game, he's forced to go through a rather long board game puzzle, attacking a giant dice to roll it in order to move a statue "game piece" of himself across the board. When Dante comes across the same puzzle, he declares that he doesn't have time for it (not helped by the fact that the room he's in is filling up with poisonous gas) and cleaves the dice in two, bypassing it entirely.
• Disgaea:
  • You can defeat an enemy Prinny by either stuffing him with physical and magical attacks...or you can simply throw him, causing him to explode upon landing and damaging any adjacent units, and if any other Prinnies are caught up in the blast, they'll explode too. It doesn't matter if it's a Level 1 Prinny with two-digit HP or a Level 9999 Prinny with HP that would not fit on a conventional calculator, a tossed Prinny is a gone Prinny. Downplayed, however, in that you get no reward for killing a Prinny and his comrades in this fashion.
  • This is Adell's modus operandi in Disgaea 2. He even lampshades it at one point by solving a complex Geo Symbol puzzle in no time when he explains that it's not that he can't think, it's that it's usually faster to just beat your problems into submission.
• In Dishonored we're given the opportunity to practice this method. Case in point: You can sneakily teleport on the rooftops, through open windows, stealthily avoid the guards, and make your way to the target, then perform a short sidequest involving a plan that will leave that individual to a fate worse than death... or you can just bang your weapon against a wall, gain the attention of all the guards nearby, and then murder every last person in your way until you reach your target, kill him, and murder your way out again. On any difficulty but hard, this is relatively simple, given how common ammunition is, how common and effective healing potions are, how deadly your sword is, and how deadly several of your powers are. Once everyone in any given area is dead, you can search every nook and cranny for loot and items that you need, with minimal interruption. Since there are only three endings, and two of them are reached by a high chaos playthrough, this method is pretty effective if all you plan on doing is beating the game. Of course, unless you've invested in the full power of the Time Stop ability, you're in for a serious Downer Ending.
  • Dishonored 2 gives us the Dust District, in which you're tasked with breaking into a mansion secured with a supposedly unsolvable puzzle lock. In order to learn the solution to the lock, you have to get involved in the complicated politics in the Dust District, either taking sides in an ongoing gang war or playing both sides against each other. But in reality, the puzzle is merely difficult, not actually unsolvable, and there's nothing stopping you from solving the puzzle, waltzing straight in, and skipping most of the level. There's even an achievement for getting past the gate this way called "Eureka". Or, for an even cheesier method, you can use the fact that the structure of the riddle is always the same, just with the details swapped — for instance, on one run it might say "Lady Winslow wore a jaunty red hat", and on the next it might say "Madam Natsiou wore a jaunty yellow hat", but in both cases it will always be the case that the first-mentioned character owned the third-mentioned heirloom.
• Divinity: Original Sin II: An intelligent magical ruby poses the player character nonsensical riddles before it will admit them to its Pocket Dimension. The PC can answer that they'll smash it if it doesn't cooperate.
  Ruby: Oh. [gulp] Rightly rightly rightly right! How very rightly right! Come inside!
• In Doom (2016), when dealing with the Argent Energy Filters, the Doom Slayer is told to carefully deactivate them because it's all very important tech that could lead to an energy crisis if mishandled. The Slayer instead just stomps the hell out of them, much to Hayden's frustrations.
• Doom Eternal: The Doom Slayer needs to get to a spot near the core of Mars quickly, with no known pathways to it; Samuel Hayden only says it will take time... cue the Slayer immediately looking up the schematics and location of the gigantic BFG-10000 orbital defense cannon. A few minutes and one gigantic swirling crater in the planet later, it works.
  Samuel Hayden: ...you can't just shoot a hole into the surface of Mars.
  GUI: New Objective: Shoot a hole in Mars.
• In the backstory of Dragon Age, the future Archon Darinius was tasked with tying an egg into a knot. While his rivals searched for a way to do it by magical means, Darinius coated a strip of cloth with the insides of the broken egg and tied that into a knot.
• In Dungeon Crawl, there are labyrinths that pose a significant threat to under-prepared adventurers. While they feature almost no enemies, the entrance disappears shortly after discovering it, leaving little to no time to prepare for the maze itself. The maze can often be long and elaborate: The autoexplore feature is disabled while you're inside, the game doesn't remember any map tiles for long after you're out of view of them, and the clues to the location of your goal are obscure at best. Worst of all, the maze regularly shifts itself, rearranging and making it that much harder to solve. Finally, while wands of digging do exist, and can be used by a canny player to help reach the goal, they will only have an effect on the weaker rock walls, and not the harder metal and stone walls that compose much of the maze. But it is still possible for a player to cut the knot, with just the right spell: Lee's Rapid Deconstruction can tear down nearly any wall with high enough spell power, allowing you to bypass parts of the maze with a bit of effort.
• The Elder Scrolls: The recurring in-game book Proper Lock Design talks about this in regards to lock-picking. It recommends using steel locks for maximum security. Anything weaker and the thief will easily be able to smash the lock, while anything stronger is just a waste of money because the thief can always just smash the thing it's locking instead, and in fact would be encouraged to do so if faced with a lock that's Made of Indestructium on a chest or a door that clearly isn't.
• In Enchanter, there is a jeweled egg with all the Gordian handles and buttons needed to open it. There are a few ways to open it, and besides the time-consuming way, you either break the egg to get a shredded scroll, or you can use the REZROV spell on the egg... only for the egg to open and reveal a shredded scroll anyway (don't worry, it just needs repairing).
  • Later on, you come across a jeweled box with the MELBOR protection spell, bound shut by magical coils of thin Gordian rope that prevent the box from opening (and not even REZROV can open it). You only need a knife to cut the rope, and the only way to obtain the knife is by Human Sacrifice... provided that you have the right kind of spell that can help you cheat death, of course.
• The FOEs in the Etrian Odyssey series and Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth are absurdly powerful enemies that halt the player's progress in an assortment of ways in each labyrinth. More often than not, the game suggests alternative, lengthier methods to get around each one. While it's suicidal to do so initially, if your party is strong enough, you can simply ignore sidestepping and just beat the FOEs instead.
• Late in the second Fairune game, you're faced with a statue-pushing puzzle, which is seemingly impossible. It is, the loose statue is a red herring. You're supposed to turn into a Dramos and step on the statue's podium.
• In the Fallout: New Vegas DLC Old World Blues, a challenge/experiment involves securing a document without being spotted by patrolling robots. One solution is to destroy the robots, then start the test. Likewise, a later part of the test involves getting past tripwires in the same test. You can disable those before (or during) the test then walk right through them. The latter two portions of the test can't be cheated, though. For extended knot cutting, if you have a high enough lockpick skill, you can bypass the test entirely, and just get in the final room through the back stairs. Or get to the observation deck above, blast the force field with upgraded Sonic Emitter and drop into the final room below.
  • The Honest Hearts DLC allowed you to do this, although it was not necessarily easier than the alternative, just quicker (and it is morally problematic except possibly for Legion-aligned Couriers to do it deliberately): instead of helping out Daniel and Joshua in exchange for a map of the way back to the Mojave, just kill one of them (or a friendly tribal) and steal the map. You lose out on experience and achievements, but it is always an option if you just want to get back to the Mojave quickly. However, it should probably be noted that Joshua Graham not only has a pistol that does as much damage as a sniper rifle with a high chance to crit, but he also has more DT than even the toughest Power Armor (Daniel is easier to deal with, though he's not a complete slouch with a gun). However, a stealth-inclined Courier might be able to cut the knot more reliably by reverse-pickpocketing an active grenade into Joshua Graham’s inventory with the right perk...
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy VI:
    • The boss Wrexsoul can be rather annoying to defeat; he possesses a random party member at the start of the fight, and you're intended to kill your characters one by one until he reappears so you can attack him. Or, you can just cast Banish on the minions that he leaves behind. Those minions are supposed to respawn endlessly, but Banish delays their revival script one turn, so if it takes on both of them at once, they die and take a turn longer to revive; the game reads the enemy party as all being dead and you win. Notably, this still works in the Game Boy Advance version of the game; while that version fixed numerous bugs (like Vanish/Doom, and the evade bug), this alternate method of defeating Wrexsoul was left in. As winning the battle in the knot-cutting manner does not give the player loot or experience from the battle (but still allows Cyan to unlock his full potential in Bushido), it's a bit of a trade-off.
    • Number 024. He appears soon after you get magic, and he changes weaknesses at will, giving the idea he's a test of how good you are at magic. The thing is, he lacks the same insane physical defence that everything else in that dungeon possesses, so you can just beat the tar out of him with your weapons until he goes down. To make him even weaker, you can demonstrate your understanding of status magic and cast Imp on him leaving him only able to do physical attacks.
    • There is also his Palette Swap, Magic Master. Due to his location, you can only use magic, and you're supposed to use your strongest magic to beat him, and he's also a Barrier Change Boss. Or you can just cast Berserk on him so he can only do physical attacks, which you have any number of ways to neuter to render him entirely incompetent. Also, when he dies he casts Ultima on the party. You're supposed to use Reraise to let him kill you and then automatically revive, or you can use Rasp to drain his MP so he can't cast it. Oh, and if you don't wanna worry about his elemental shifting, don't; by this point your party can easily all have access to Flare, which is non-elemental and out-damages most elemental spells anyway.
  • Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII: The Children of Etro fanatics in Luxerion hold midnight meetings at the graveyard, with a secret code to be spoken into a ringing telephone outside the gate. They convey this code to their followers via glowing numbers in Etro script painted in four locations across Luxerion, one of which can only be entered at night. Oh, and giving the wrong code has them send out a Pulsian Dreadnought. Lightning (who is learned in Etro script) can hunt down their code and present herself as one of them... or she can insult the fanatics and the goddess they worship, exploit the fact that she's fought Dreadnoughts before, and slip inside before they close the gate.^note Warning: This is highly inadvisable on one's first time through the game.
• Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes: One mission involves saving a group of allied Imperial troops from a siege by Claude's army. When it comes time to help them escape, you'll have to choose one of two escape routes by defeating an enemy commander, but both possible paths lead right into ambushes—something Claude had planned all along. If you prepare the strategy to let Count Bergliez (the general in charge of the allied troops and one of the strongest men in the Empire) decide for himself, he'll ignore both paths and lead his troops to what looks like a dead end...until he whips out his magic gauntlets and punches a hole in the mountain, bypassing the ambushes and creating a much shorter route for the allied soldiers to escape to safety.
• In Flashback, a scenario has Conrad blowing up the current level you're on and you have to escape in time before it goes off with Conrad. Normally you're supposed to run like crazy to the escape point. However, you also have a portable teleporter with you. So instead, you could just throw the teleport beacon near the exit, continue on like normal, set the charges, and teleport.
• Used in the opening of Freedom Planet by the game's Big Bad, Lord Brevon. When Brevon and his forces invade the Imperial palace, the Emperor declares that such a thing is impossible, since their walls are impenetrable. Brevon remarks that the floor isn't; he got in by burrowing his ship underground.
• Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas:
  • There is a mission where CJ must quickly gather boxes of explosives, with a time limit indicating when the man at the detonator will set them off. Alternatively, CJ can just kill the man, which makes the timer disappear.
  • In an early game mission, CJ has to sneak into an old man's house and steal some weapons from him but if he makes too much noise, the old man will wake up, grab his shotgun and chase you out. While the intended solution is just to move carefully and not make too much noise while you grab crates, there's nothing stopping you from obtaining a silenced weapon, sneaking into the old man's room and putting a bullet in his head while he sleeps. Then you can make as much noise as you want as you retrieve the rest of the boxes.
  • In a later mission, as part of CJ's preparation for the Caligula's Palace heist, he needs to obtain a keycard held by a female croupier. The standard approach is to date the croupier and go through the standard and time-consuming raising of Relationship Values until she gives him the card...or CJ can just kill her, take the keys to her house and get the card there, assuming you don't mind losing the minor bonuses you'd get running through the whole thing.
  • To kill one of the story antagonists, you have to fight your way through a pier full of goons, only for your target to dive into the water and make for a boat. You could do the same and follow in the other boat parked nearby, leading to a high-speed chase as you attempt to either capsize or gun him down. Or you could save yourself the trouble by whipping out your sniper rifle and popping him in the back a couple of times while he's still swimming.
  • During the mission Wrong Side of the Tracks you can either follow the damn train and shoot the gangsters on top to clear the mission or, if you're skilled enough, simply outrun the train to a rooftoop and then jump on the train and gun down the gangsters all in a row with very little fuss.
  • Thanks to an odd glitch, a late game mission where you need to chase down an enemy in a beefed up sports car, force them to bail out and then kill them in a shootout can be cut short by running to their car before they get the chance to pull off and carjacking them in such a way that it kills them instantly.
  • Several missions in the game can either be made significantly easier or be completed in their entirety with some strategic C4 placement and good timing.
• Grand Theft Auto V:
  • During an early prep mission of the online Doomsday Heist, you are required to obtain an Ambulance. While you can travel to a hospital and take one from the parking lot, or get lucky in finding one randomly on the road, there's always the option of simply calling for an ambulance to come right to your location. If you do this, Lester will even lampshade this by stating that he didn't mention that possibility in the mission briefing since he thought that it was too obvious.
    • You can do a similar thing with a Fire Engine in the Single Player campaign for the FIB Raid.
  • For the Peleto Bank Heist, the characters are faced with an issue: said bank is used by multiple drug cartels as well as the corrupt local police force to stash and launder their ill-gotten cash, so the bank's alarm system is way more advanced than what a small-town bank would normally have. Furthermore, if the alarm is triggered, the police response is disproportionately quick and heavy (four cruisers at the scene in under 60 seconds with eight more on standby), and to use extreme force to basically lock down the town. Shutting off the alarm is not an option, it would be impossible to get in and out before the cops show up; and even if they somehow could, slipping out past them with all the loot would be equally hard. So how do the protagonists get the job done? They steal a military convoy, get their hands on some bomb suits, Light Machine Guns, and a freaking minigun, and fight their way past the cops when they show up.
  • This is basically what Ending C amounts to. Franklin, when faced with the option of either killing Trevor or killing Michael, decides "fuck it, let's just team up and kill everyone who's threatening us" and they do. Taking out Merryweather, the Triads, the Ballas, Steve Haines, and Devin Weston all in one fell swoop.
• At the climax of Guilty Gear 2: Overture, Sol has to analyze and deactivate the Key before it can unlock the Cube while his party tries to hold off Valentine. After he accomplishes this, he reveals that even though his analysis was going well, he got bored and decided to just break the Key instead (this also has the beneficial effect of making it so that the same Key can never be used again).
• Half-Life: Alyx, being made to show off the potential of VR, allows a resourceful player to fend off headcrabs by just grabbing them and tossing them out a window or into a trash can.
• Meta example: The Halo 2 map "Backwash" suffered from severe lag on the Xbox 360's backwards compatibility - this was resolved by simply pulling the match from online matchmaking.
• Violence is usually an option in Harvester. Getting annoyed by the paperboy forcing you at gunpoint to give him your newspaper every morning? Just kill him! Don't feel like going on a lengthy Fetch Quest for an item you need? Just find the person who's carrying it and kill them! Tired of those weird "Temple of the Mystery of X" puzzles in the Lodge? Just kill everyone in the room! Granted, there are limits to this, like having a few important NPCs that are off-limits, and if you don't blackmail the sheriff into giving you a "Get Out of Jail Free" Card, you'll get arrested and executed for killing anyone outside the Lodge.
• The Freaky Fun House in Killer7 has a game called Squeaker's Attack, in which you have to shoot all the rats that pop out of the holes in a giant spinning wheel of cheese. You could take the time to shoot each rat individually while Heaven Smiles keep spawning and attacking...or just switch to Mask and use his dual grenade launchers to blow the cheese wheel to bits.
• The final boss fight in the optional "Me and My Nemesis" sidequest in Kingdom of Loathing is preceded by a rather brutal stepping stone puzzle situated directly in the heart of a volcano. Getting stuck will prompt you to "Swim Back to Shore," and will cost you a decent amount of health points each time this option is taken. Doing so enough times will eventually reveal a new prompt, labelled "Skip this Bastard Maze." (Note that taking this option will cost you time and reduce the rewards you get from the quest.)
  "After getting stuck and swimming across boiling hot lava back to the beginning of the maze several times, it occurs to you that you could shortcut this whole stupid sonofabitch by simply swimming to the goal. However, your adventurer's instincts kick in, telling you that your final rewards will probably be lessened if you take the easy way out."
• Kreia of the second Knights of the Old Republic game has been Jedi and Sith, historian, exile, master, archivist, and teacher. She has seen the constant pattern of the two major Force schools squabble endlessly, hunt down each other to near-extinction, only to have a handful of survivors come roaring back to repeat the Cycle of Revenge. Her idea the stop this nonsense? Kill the Force entirely!
• In La-Mulana, there's a particular block puzzle in the Twin Labyrinths that is impossible to solve. You get around this by simply jumping up to the shop door that would've served as the reward for solving the puzzle. However, the remake defies this trope: the puzzle is now solvable, and attempting to jump up to the door without completing the puzzle first will get you hit with a Bolt of Divine Retribution.
• Ultra-muscular folk hero Braum in League of Legends tends to solve any problem that he can't talk down by punching it. When confronted with a door set into a mountain that was magically enhanced to be too durable for him to punch, he punched his way through the mountain instead; he currently used the door as his shield.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • In The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, getting the Cane of Somaria as soon as possible allows you to bypass a number of tricky block-and-pressure-switch puzzles by just creating a block on top of the switch rather than actually solving said puzzles.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask has a minor Sequence Break where you can hurl Goron Link over the fence to Great Bay with a bomb and a well-timed Ground Pound. By picking up the Hookshot and the Zora Mask before visiting Snowhead, you can bypass most of the puzzles and rolling segments by latching onto crates, torches, and treasure chests with the Hookshot, or using Zora Link's extra height to climb normally insurmountable ledges.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess:
    • Early on in the fifth dungeon, you have to deal with ice by aiming stationary cannons with hidden cannonballs at it, carefully avoiding it, and so on. The item for this dungeon is the Ball and Chain, which you can immediately pull out and go to town smashing the ice you had to maneuver through to get it.
    • The entire gimmick for the Temple of Time is that you have to traverse the temple in order to find a statue, bring it back down to the first level, and position it in the correct place in order to unlock the way to the boss. Going up to retrieve said statue, you have to deal with tedious puzzles involving sliding gates that are controlled by specifically-placed switches. However, once you get the statue, it turns out that it's also equipped with a big honking hammer that you can use to just bash the gates down (along with any other monsters in your path) on the trip back down.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild:
    • Shrine puzzles can often be handled in more than one way, not necessarily by tackling the intended challenge. For instance, most fire-based puzzles are intended to be handled with clever use of the bow, but fire arrows, a torch, and/or the Remote Bomb completely trivialize them, as does liberal use of Chuchu jelly and metal weapons for electrical puzzles. A lot of switches are meant to be held down by objects hidden in the shrine, but ten apples will do just as well, or you can temporarily lock a pressed switch in place with the Stasis rune. Of course, this kind of experimentation is encouraged, as it doesn't matter how you reach the monk at the end; they praise your resourcefulness, no matter how you get there.
    • The Myahm Agana Shrine features a rather challenging ball-rolling maze similar to the Rollgoal minigame of Twilight Princess, but controlled entirely with the motion controls of the Wii U GamePad or the Switch's control options. Naturally, you can turn the whole maze over by flipping your controller upside-down and letting the ball roll on the flat underside. That, or tilt the maze so that when the ball respawns, it's dropped into the final stretch rather than the start. The former is actually recommended by the official strategy guide for those who have difficulty maneuvering the maze, but the latter is much easier.
    • Rin Oyaa Shrine has a puzzle called Directing The Wind where you must meticulously place blocks so you have enough time to run to an elevator before the wind can roll an orb into its receptacle. Or you can simply place the orb on the lip of the receptacle, start it rolling, use Stasis on it, and have plenty of time to reach the elevator before it wears off and gravity does its thing. It should have been called Ignoring The Wind.
    • Setting foot on Eventide Island starts a challenge where Link is stripped of all his equipment (including materials and food) and pits him against all sorts of monsters, including a Hinox, in a quest to recover three orbs and drop them onto pedestals. You can partially subvert the no-gear part simply by dropping your stuff on your raft you used to get there before you touch the shore, and then pick them up again when the challenge commences. However, upon completing the challenge, whatever you found on the island is lost, including your own equipment that you "scavenged" (although you could just drop them again before you put the last orb in the hole). If you have the DLC Expansion Pass, there are also several armor pieces in metal chests in the overworld that can be moved with Magnesis, the nearest of which (the Phantom Ganon series) has decent defensive stats and a stealth bonus.
    • The Rinu Honika Shrine for the Champion's Ballad DLC has a puzzle consisting of several fire streams that are meant to be blocked by convenient use of Magnesis items. However, a full series of Flamebreaker armor enhanced to level 2 by the Great Fairies gives him the Fireproof set bonus, which means that fire cannot harm Link - and if the flames don't hurt him, they won't throw him into the lava on either side of the walkways.
    • Fighting Vah Rudania is both an Escort Mission and a Stealth-Based Mission...except you can remove the latter by using Magnesis on some metal crates to destroy Rudania's patrol drones.
• In the earlier Lego Adaptation Games you could strategically park vehicles to use as stepping stones to pass segments of areas, parts of puzzles, or to reach minikits without doing the puzzle or having the character needed to get it period. Later games made it so you can't jump from the roofs of vehicles.
• In Magicka, at the end of Chapter Four, you need to enter a barricaded building and are supposed to hold the position while a fuse slowly consumes and finally triggers explosives that blow up the door. Instead of doing that, you can just shoot a fire spell at the explosives and trigger them immediately.
• Mass Effect:
  • In Mass Effect, a sidequest has you trying to stop a rogue AI from self-destructing. You can use your computer skills to disable the AI before the self-destruct finishes warming up...or you can just shoot it a few times. Granted, the brute force approach is the least beneficial option, as while it's guaranteed to work, it deprives you of the large sum of credits the AI had stored in its system.
  • At one point in the sequel, during Thane's loyalty mission, a drell named Kolyat takes a turian politician hostage at gunpoint. You don't want to kill Kolyat because he's Thane's son, and you certainly don't want Kolyat to kill Talid because preventing him from becoming a murderer like his father was the whole point of the mission in the first place. Renegade Shepard just shoots Talid him/herself. Granted, Talid really deserved it.
    Kolyat: All of you, back off! I'll kill him!
    Shepard: No you won't. (BANG) (Talid falls over, dead)
    Kolyat: Oh my gods...
    Shepard: Hostages only work when your enemy cares if they live.
    Thane: Interesting solution.
    Shepard: He was a racist and a criminal. Isn't that enough?
  • In Mass Effect 3 during Priority: Rannoch, at one point you have to bypass a cyberlock. James might simply stomp it to breakdown.
  • Mass Effect: Andromeda: During Jaal's loyalty mission, the Roekaar blow up a bridge to slow Ryder down. Jaal starts outlining how they'll need to carefully navigate a way across the rocks. Ryder just leaps the gap using their jetpack.
• Mega Man 11: In Block Man's stage, there are some segments with massive stone walls, each containing an intricate maze that Mega Man must get through quickly enough to avoid the Advancing Wall of Doom behind him. Or, if you have the Chain Blast weapon, you can use the Power Gear, shoot a powered-up bomb at the stone wall, and blow the whole thing up. (You also get an achievement for this in the Steam version.)
• In Mercenaries there are several missions where the player character can employ stealth tactics to sneak into enemy compounds in order to accomplish objectives. Or you can run over all the defenses with a tank. Or call in an airstrike to level the place. In this game, Stuff Blowing Up is always a viable solution.
• Metal Gear:
  • Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty has an Escort Mission with a woman who is too afraid of sea lice to walk past them, forcing you to find a way to get rid of them. Or you can just grab her in a choke hold and drag her across them. You can also shoot her with a tranquilizer gun or punch and kick her (smacking her with the Nikita missile launcher works too) to make her fall unconscious and drag her through the sea lice.
  • Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater has many knot cutting scenarios:
    • Early on you need to sneak into a lab and disguise yourself as an enemy scientist, with the "proper" means being to sneak onto the compound and crawl through a vent. However, you can just knock, and the enemy guard will think you're one of the sentries and open the door for you. If that is too much work, just throw on the scientist uniform and be spotted by a guard — he'll think you're a scientist trying to escape and escort you "back" inside.
    • If you don't want to be pestered by helicopters later while in the mountains, you can blow them up earlier in the game before they even take off with TNT.
    • The Fear can be taken down easier by dropping spoiled food, which will stun him for a while.
    • The End can be defeated by not playing the game for two weeks or just simply changing the clock. If you're particularly sharp with a sniper rifle, you can take him out after a cutscene much earlier in the game and have his boss room occupied with Ocelot Soldiers instead.
    • When escorting EVA in the end, who is slow and keeps trying to stand her ground against enemy soldiers, rather than trying to coax her along you can just drag her to your destination like a caveman.
  • Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots has you fight Crying Wolf as a callback to the Sniper Wolf battle, meaning in a normal game you should run around finding hiding spots. It can be rendered trivial by hiding under a truck and tranquilizing the FROGs so that they can't bother you. It's more preferable than straight out killing them because doing so will cause them to respawn.
• Minecraft:
  • Any block, with the exception of bedrock, can be broken given enough time. This proved troublesome for map makers, because frustrated players would often break through a wall rather than solve a puzzle, so Adventure Mode, where you can't break a block without an item specifically coded to break that particular type of block, was added to defy this trope. Of course, it is still possible to change yourself out of adventure mode or use server commands to give yourself TNT; both of these can be stopped with command blocks but then players could teleport to those command blocks and break the redstone wiring (which is breakable even in adventure mode), and will also prevent players from breaking themselves out of softlocks.
  • In Survival, the default game mode, there are temples just sort of lying around in the jungle, with an elaborate series of levers connected to the treasure room. You're supposed to solve a puzzle involving the order in which you pull them, but provided you know how the traps are arranged, and with some care even if you don't, it's much faster to tunnel down to the treasure room and get at the goods, then break down the traps and steal their materials to make your own.
• In Monaco, you ordinarily have two options for getting into a locked room. You can pick the lock, which takes time and is only a temporary solution, or, if the Mole is in your party, you can opt to have him smash a hole through the wall next to the door. Unless you have a Locksmith in your party, this is usually the quickest option.
• In Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer, there is a puzzle consisting of two rooms, each with a mixture of fire and ice mephits randomly flying around. Your task is to put all fire mephits in one room and all ice mephits in the other one. You can carefully time openings of the door between the rooms... or you can use an obelisk to kill them all, and then drag their corpses around. You get less XP the brutal way, though.
• The survival horror game Obscure has surprisingly realistic solutions to puzzles. Need to get in this room because you want to advance the story? Break the glass; step right on inside.
• Overwatch: In the A GREAT DAY cinematic, Sombra, Reaper, and Mauga are tasked with infiltrating a Null Sector carrier to steal the data on its power core. Mauga, unbeknownst to his teammates, realizes it would be far easier to steal the power core itself (it can fit in the palm of your hand) and just destroy the ship. Also doubles as a case of Exact Words - Doomfist wanted the operation to be clandestine. While Mauga made the operation loud, he first ensured that the ship's radar dish was destroyed, so while the world saw Talon destroy the ship, nobody knows they retrieved the core intact.
• In PAYDAY 2, Bain usually has a "Plan B" for any heist that can be stealthed, which usually involves having their chopper pilot dropping you a thermal drill or some other explosives to breach the door to the safe. There are also several doors that can be blown with C4 or just flat out have their locks shot. You can also either slowly lockpick each and every deposit box...or bring a high-powered saw and blaze through them in a matter of seconds. The same goes for mission-critical civilians; you can either shout at them to get them to cower and tie them up, move them to a place that can't be seen and then get the item, or you can just shoot them and bag the body (and, in some cases, just flat out shoot them into the water where no one will see their corpses).
• Done in the Penumbra series, which tends to use a fairly realistic approach to solving puzzles. The most notable example happens early in the game where you need to open a locked chest. You can look for the key...or you can just break it open with your pickaxe.
• Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers: During Igglybuff's Special Episode, Igglybuff and Armaldo come up to a giant stone door blocking their progress. Armaldo points out that this is clearly a puzzle to open it, pointing out the features around the room that would need to be arranged a certain way or from which trap could be sprung to punish failed attempts. Igglybuff listens to this with a nod, walks up to the door and then cheerfully blows it off its hinges.
• In Portal 2, there is a point in which Wheatley must "hack" open a door. He tells you to turn around, then smashes the window, allowing Chell to portal herself into there. He does the same thing when attempting a "manual override" on a wall.
  • Villainous example: while it's certainly possible to read a Hidden Heart of Gold into her actions, GLaDOS characterizes her decision to release Chell as this trope.
• The Hero of the Quest for Glory series applies this trope liberally, especially as a Fighter. Right in the very first game, a minor subquest easily completed within five minutes of leaving town the first time involves retrieving a ring from a pterosaur nest. You could climb the tree, then slowly walk out on the limb, carefully bend down to collect the ring, then retrace your steps and climb back down. Or just throw a rock or a fireball at the nest and remove the ring from its remains.
  • Locked doors and chests can often be accessed by either picking the lock or casting the Open spell, particularly by characters who take cross-class skills. Or if you're a Fighter (or playing a later game where puzzle solutions are less class-dependent), you can just smash them open.
  • Sometimes you can take this approach, but doing it turns out to be a very dumb idea: It's possible to retrieve the seed from the Spore-Spitting Spirea plants in the first game by hacking apart whichever plant has it. Unfortunately, the dryad you have to give it to in order to learn how to win the game doesn't take kindly to this, and transforms you into a Non-Standard Game Over.
• From Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando, we get this exchange when the duo comes across an upgraded wrench in a glass container:
  Clank: It says, "In case of emergency, break glass with wrench."
  (Ratchet pulls back his wrench to smash the glass.)
  Clank: Hold on. (Looks at a smaller glass case with a rock inside) This one says, "Use rock to break glass to get wrench to break glass to get rock." Oooh! I love logic puzzles! Let's see, if you break the glass with the-
  *SMASH!*
  Ratchet: (Has broken open the wrench's case with his own wrench) Solved it!
  (Victory music plays.)
  • In the same game, while not a real puzzle, Planet Joba contains multiple doors with switches wired to them, but the doors often have enemies behind them, and a smart player will have to prepare themselves with an appropriate weapon so that they can find a switch and react in time in order to defeat the resulting attacking enemies. An even smarter player will just hop on a nearby turret, blast open the door, and then blast the enemies inside.
• Red Faction was pretty much sold on this premise alone. It boasted a real-time environment damage-modeling system called GeoMod that actually took rocket fights to their logical conclusion, which was completely wasted buildings. It was actually necessary to blow holes in walls with grenades and mines at some points in order to progress. One of the taglines on the back of the box was "Can't find the key? Make your own door." Coming from the world of FPSes where a BFG9000 blast could lay waste to every ounce of organic tissue in a 100x100 room but a series of 10 of them couldn't even put a scratch on a door, a lot of gamers found it refreshing to be able to say "Screw the red key" and blast a hole in the adjoining wall instead.
  • ...and then found themselves feeling ripped off once the game started throwing completely indestructible buildings and doors their way at around halfway through the game.
  • This tactic works pretty well in Red Faction: Guerrilla. Pretty much all buildings are destructible so if you encounter soldiers taking pots shot from a doorway or holed up in a bunker you can eschew FPS convention by approaching the structure from the side and smashing your way in with a sledgehammer. That or drive a truck through it.
  • Relatedly, Battlefield: Bad Company and Battlefield 3 allow this by way of the Frostbite engine, especially in multiplayer; you can either force your way into the building housing an M-COM station, set it to detonate, and keep the other side away until it blows up, or you can shoot at the walls around it with a tank or RPG until the entire building collapses and takes it out.
  • Most FPS clones of Minecraft allow for this, as well. Tired of that sniper constantly killing you and your teammates from a tower you can't take from him? Blow out the floor he's sniping from, or just take down the tower entirely.
• At the end of the DLC "Not A Hero" in Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, Chris is tasked with stopping the server to prevent the research data regarding the E-Type B.O.W. from reaching Lucas' buyers. Veronica suggests using transformer relays, but Chris fires gunshots at the server cords instead.
  Veronica: OK... that worked. Gonna be some pissed computer techs up here, but—
  Chris: Cry me a river.
• This is pretty much the defining characteristic of Johnny Gat from Saints Row. Presented with any intelligent, well-worked-out plan, his own suggestion is invariably to simply kill everyone in the general vicinity until the problem goes away. This isn't for ease or effectiveness (although it almost always is effective); he just loves to kill people.
• In Second Sight at the end of the game, the Big Bad hides behind bullet/psi-proof glass. Too bad the frame wasn't psi-proof as well.
• The Secret of Monkey Island has Guybrush thrown into the sea tied to an idol. You have ten minutes to escape before Guybrush drowns. There are several sharp objects that could cut the rope to free you just out of reach. The solution: Pick up the idol (which, just moments earlier, you were carrying in your inventory with absolutely no problem) and walk out with it.
• Shin Megami Tensei:
  • Noah of Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne is a Barrier Change Puzzle Boss which also reflects physical attacks and resists almighty ones, forcing a player to play by his rules. However, a combination of Freikugel^note physical almighty attack and Pierce^note allows physical attacks like Freikugel to ignore resistances barring repel allows the player to skip all that tedium and defeat him in about half the number of turns.
  • Like its predecessors, Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse's battle system is all about exploiting enemy weaknesses to do as much damage as possible, and reap extra turns from them so you can continue damaging them. Or, just go do either of the "neutral" routes, unlock Nanashi's Awakened Power which makes all of his attacks bypass resistances (and boost his damage output, just to add insult to injury), and blast everything with Charge- and Concentrate-buffed endgame attacks of your choice.
• In keeping with the phantom thief theme of Persona 5, all of the major boss battles bar the fifth and seventh ones involve the player performing "special orders" that serve to debilitate the boss in a more efficient manner. A good idea in practice, but some brute force renders the orders virtually useless for the second and third bosses, while the orders for first, fourth, and final bosses are not optional at all. To elaborate on the former two:
  • For the second boss, if you let Shadow Madarame transform back into his four-portraits form a third time, you can order a party member to slather him in the same Weaksauce Weakness-inducing paint that he throws on you. A sufficiently leveled party on lower difficulties can defeat him before he transforms for a third time, and even if he does, it takes a nonsensical four turns for a sent party member to perform the order (the paint is in plain sight of the group a few feet away; the other orders at least had the person sneaking in and attacking above or below the boss), and the portraits never revive on full health anyway.
    • The Updated Re-release, Persona 5 Royal, changes this fight rather significantly: the special order is no longer available. Instead, after defeating the portrait form, Madarame creates copies of himself (keeping more in line with his personification as a shameless plagiarist), that are all weak to a specific element and strong to the rest. This creates an entirely different method of kicking the crap out of him: because Baton Pass is now a standard action instead of something unlocked through Social Links, it becomes easy to hit the weaknesses of the copies, Baton Pass to another character to boost attack and hit another copy, then to the third character, and finally to the last character (usually Fox, given his "hit every enemy with physical damage" that none of the copies are strong against) and blast the entire group for massive damage.
  • For the third boss, you can stop Shadow Kaneshiro's robot's March of the Piggy attack one of two ways: distract him by throwing an item, or hit him enough times (he rolls on top of the robot for the attack) to knock him off. Since he only gets distracted by valuable items that your party cannot easily obtain (namely SP-healing items), the distraction method comes off worse than intended.
  • Played with, in a way, for the sixth boss. You can't brute-force your way past Shadow Sae's cheating roulette game, but you can bypass the Special Order to have a party member snipe the pane of glass that causes the cheat in the first place by only having the protagonist fighting her. When the boss cheats for a second time, Futaba will call her out for cheating, triggering the second half of the boss battle. Also doubles as Developer's Foresight.
  • Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey: In the Grus sector, you're presented with a dilemma. A Grendel has sealed the path leading further in, and refuses to let you pass unless you murder Jack's Squad (who performed hideous experiments on large numbers of demons). Zelenin, who has become an angel, suggests using her song instead. Murdering Jack's Squad (who at this point are harmless) is the Chaos option; using Zelenin's song (which causes horrible pain to the demons and reduces them to their component data) is the Law option. There is, however, a Neutral option: since the Grendel is personally sealing the path, you can just kill it instead.
• Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell:
  • In the ending of Pandora Tomorrow Sam encounters a Time Bomb that will spread smallpox throughout the ventilation system of Los Angeles International Airport when it goes off, and he doesn't have the time to defuse it or get it far enough away from people to not endanger lives. He ultimately just takes it and leaves it in the main terminal building right behind a pair of cops, knowing the bomb squad will show up with the proper gear and training to contain it for him (which they do).
  • In Chaos Theory and Double Agent, locks can either be slowly but quietly picked open, or Sam can cut through them with his blade. This makes a lot of noise, and enemies are smart enough to know when doors have been tampered with.
  • Also in Chaos Theory, in the "Displace" level, Sam has to get codes from a laptop by accessing it wirelessly. This would require Sam to stalk the men carrying the laptop. Or he could just use his gadgets to take them down by force.
    Sam: Finesse is for the young and the cocky.
• An accidental example in the Star Trek Online PVE raid "Azure Nebula Rescue". The procedure presumably intended by the devs is to destroy the Tholian ships before deactivating the tractor beams they're using to hold the Romulan ships. But the way the objectives are coded and the activation points positioned means it's perfectly possible, if somewhat difficult, to just sneak up from the other side and turn off the tractor beams without even aggro'ing the Tholians.
• In the Sith Inquisitor storyline of Star Wars: The Old Republic, Xalek's way of passing the final exam of the Sith Academy is to simply let his rival get the tablet he's supposed to be looking for, beat him to death and then take the tablet for himself. The Overseer is absolutely furious at this, since aside from the fact that open murder is forbidden he's not even trying to be sneaky about it. Regardless of your actual opinions on the matter, he's now your new Apprentice.
• One of the Game Breakers in Stellaris is 'Fortress World', a planet with Planetary Defense Shield and chock-full of Fortresses. Sure, the planet will be a drain on your energy, but placing one at a chokepoint means your enemy will have to spend years and years to capture the planet first just to invade your territory, possibly reaching maximum War Exhaustion first and having to concede the fight. That is, unless they get sick of it and just whip out their Colossus...
• Super Mario Sunshine has several such examples, excluding ones achieved via glitching:
  • Pianta Village can be accessed right at the beginning of the game via careful use of the Hover Nozzle rather than having to wait to get the Rocket Nozzle after finding 25 shines.
  • The Runaway Ferris Wheel expects you to climb the rear side of the titular attraction, which is crawling with electro-koopas, to take out a mecha-koopa that's making it run wild. It's also possible, and much easier, to climb the attraction in front of the ferris wheel and glide with F.L.U.D.D. right to the top.
  • It's possible to cheese The Goopy Inferno in about a minute if your balance is good. Rather than navigating the arduous path beneath the village you can run along the fences and make one Leap of Faith to F.L.U.D.D.
  • The Secret of the Dirty Lake asks of you to use lily pads, that quickly dissolve after you've jumped on them, to navigate a lake of poisonous water and reach a cave entrance. However it's also easy to climb the windmill, take a running spin-jump, and just hover to reach the cave without ever going near the water or the lily pads.
• 6-Extra of Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island is an absolute gauntlet of thorns and moving platforms that don't even give the player a safe spot to stand and think. Getting through requires perfect platforming skills ...or you can just stock up on watermelons and blast your way through with their seeds.
• Steve? is an unlockable character in the Nintendo Hard Super Meat Boy and can make most levels extremely easy because he can literally mine through the level to the end.
• In one mission of SWAT 4, you can choose to enter a building through the back door. However, the door has metal bars on it to prevent its use. Instead of removing the screws, bolts, or whatever held it together, the team simply attaches a hook and rope to a car and the metal bars and has it pulled away from the weak bricks. This is Truth in Television, as SWAT teams in real-life will do this to deal with reinforced entrances to drug dens and such.
• The fictional Book of Cataclysms from Syndicate Wars featured this passage:
  "When tact is required, use brute force. When force is required, use greater force. When the greatest force is required, use your head. Surprise is everything."
• In Tales of Eternia, the party encounters a gate that will not open unless they figure out how to open it from a riddle. As the party laments that The Smart Guy stayed behind, Max simply rams it open.
• At the end of Tony Hawk's Underground, your former friend Eric challenges you to a skate-off for a videotape of an otherwise career-making stunt you performed, which Eric stole. Normally you are forced to accept the challenge, but if you've beaten the game before, your character just punches him out and takes the tape.
• Trover Saves the Universe: If you spend enough time trying to solve a tree button puzzle in Schleemy World, Trover will impatiently request you to have him just smash the door down.
• Some puzzles in Uncle Albert's Adventures have alternative solutions that are simpler than the intended one, but they are not hinted at, so the player may not learn about them except by accidental luck.
  • In the "Caracas" page of Uncle Albert's Fabulous Voyage, you must enter a four digit password. You can either play a maze mini-game four times to get each number one by one, or you can click on Alberto while he's on the page to make him say an impossible hour that corresponds to the password.
  • In Fabulous Voyage, there are two ways to break the bottle containing the papyrus: one is evident but long and complicated to pull, while the other is easy but not obvious. The long way is to use an animal to push a stone (which can't be interacted with by the cursor) on a tilted plank, then make a frog jump on the other side of the plank to make the stone roll to the bottle and damage it. This way is annoying to pull off out because the animals are difficult to control and you need to do it twice. The alternate solution is to take another, actually interactable, stone from your inventory and drag it to the bottle to instantly break it.
• In Watch_Dogs, the climactic showdown between Aiden Pearce and Lucky Quinn has Lucky Quinn standing behind a completely bullet-proof glass wall. Not even the most powerful sniper rifle in the game, the "Destroyer", can pierce the glass, making it seem as if Lucky Quinn can't be killed. For anyone who's played the game up to that point, the solution is actually fairly obvious: Hack Lucky Quinn's pacemaker!
• The Witch's House: The "_______" Ending, which involves waiting around on the first map for an hour; the house and flowers will all disappear on their own. Why? Because Ellen simply waits for Viola (in her body) to die, rather than take the direct approach.
• At the end of Brog's segment of Zork: Grand Inquisitor, he is confronted with a complicated puzzle guarding the Skull of Yoruk. After making a valiant effort to solve the puzzle, the solution presents itself in the form of smashing the cage open with a wooden plank.
  • Also, when stuck on the tech support hotline from hell (literally), you can copy down and work through the complicated set of rules to figure out which buttons to press... or just cast the "Simplify complex directions" spell left over from a previous puzzle.

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