Tile-Flipping Puzzle

One of the Stock Video Game Puzzles. This one is also known as "switch light puzzle," on occasion.

Hitting a switch, Ground Pounding a tile, or otherwise activating a device, causes it and two or more close (or related) objects to change state, with the goal being to achieve a specific pattern of states.

Tile Flipping Puzzles can be done by Trial-and-Error Gameplay, but linking the devices to a visible result is one way that it differs from a Control Room Puzzle which is more about Trial-and-Error Gameplay. Another way is how there's no exact failure state, and tile changes usually are reversible by just triggering the device again.

The oldest version of this puzzle appears to be the 1978 "Magic square" game of the Merlin console, which we categorize as a Toy.

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Examples:

Toys

• The Merlin console of 1978's "Magic square" game is reported to be like the Lights Out game of 1995, where a square grid of square lights is randomly activated, and pressing a light switches the state of a cross-shape of both itself and the 4 adjacent squares. Another similar toy is reported to be the "XL-25" of 1983.

Video Games

• The Borderlands series:
  • Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel!: For "All the Little Creatures", there are 5 sewage pipes, each with a valve, and the set of pipes toggled by each valve sometimes doesn't include the pipe they're on. If the wrong combination gets entered, Cybil reminds the player of the goal:
    Cybil: What are you doing?! Turn the pumps off. I'm trying to save the cuties, not drown them in more effluence!
  • Borderlands 2: In the main game, the mission "Splinter group" unlocks a new area in the Bloodshot Stronghold level, where you have to kill four Rats called Lee, Dan, Ralph and Mick. Once that's done, another new area opens with a flipping puzzle of four switches attached to items, and 5 lights. Each switch controls a group of those lights. Figure out the right switches to turn on all the lights so the boss is summoned.
• Dungeon Master: The first dungeon level has a 3x3 grid of pressure plates that toggle one of the two doors at the end. In this case, the party can only move from adjacent plates, activating them when they move on.
• Deadly Rooms of Death: "The Eight Gates of Bill" has nine switches to change the state of eight gates, where they can open, close, or toggle the state of gate(s), and switches can possibly do all three to gate(s). The goal is to open all eight gates so the third way out of the room is open. In the earliest version of the game, the switches were not annotated, thus the player had to figure out what each orb did as well as figure out the right combination.
• Exile II: Crystal Souls: This tile-based movement game has two instances of a 3x3 room of pressure plates:
  1. Chapter 2 - Dark Waters's "Pressure Plate Room" has only one passage, serving as both entrance and exit. Each tile is a pressure plate that changes the states of three portcullises nearby leading to the rest of the dungeon.
  2. The Test of Mind: The puzzle is impossible and instead requires exiting by a secret door.
• The Fool's Errand: One puzzle type are Mask Puzzles, where the player is presented with a series of buttons under a display of square tiles in a rectangular formation. Each button toggles the state of some tiles and diagonal-split half-tiles between colored and black. The objective is to set these toggle buttons where the masked word is revealed in black. Later games based on the same puzzle engine also have a "decoy" word that seems correct but is misleading. The ones in the first game are The Singer, The Moon, Despair, and Judgement.
• Guild Wars 2: "Where's Balthazar" of Living World Season 3 has two of these puzzles. Each is a "ring" of 8 square glyphs to just fully set to either of two settings. Toggle one, and the two adjacent ones would toggle as well.
• Konaes Investigations: Door unlocking is a minigame of getting switches to all be "on", where activating switches along a wall toggles switches that are near them, where "near" may be directly adjacent, or a switch-less gap 1 switch wide may be between the activator and its target, or a switch might only control itself.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening: There's a room in Color Dungeon, exclusive to color versions like DX, where Link has to hit statues to swap their colors (red or blue) until they show a certain group pattern to open a door.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass: In Mutoh's Temple, there are grids that consist of red and blue tiles. With the Hammer, Link can hit a tile and flip it alongside the surrounding tiles. Depending on the case, Link has to either have all tiles in a grid match the same color or make an interactable grid match an unreachable one.
• Pokémon Reborn: Corey's Gym features a puzzle where the player must turn two rows leading to 6 tubes in total a certain colour, with the tube that the player changes also changing the colours of its immediate two neighbours. In the route where all the police officers have been found, the puzzle is mandatory and requires the player to turn all the tubes blue, whilst the route where the police officers are not found has the puzzle being merely optional, with the colour change being to red instead.
• Professor Layton:
  • Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask: There are three puzzles where a pizza has several of its pieces faced upside down. When you flip a piece, the two surrounding pieces will also flip. In all cases, the goal is to continuously flip the pieces to make it so the whole pizza properly faces up.
  • Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy: Near the end of Chapter 5, once all Azran eggs (including the one that was replaced with a fake by Targent) are retrieved, they can proceed to activate them in order to assemble the key that opens the way to the eponymous Azran Legacy. The involved puzzle requires illuminating all tiles that turn the eggs' power on so they take the shape of the key's parts. The problem is that, for each grid, the tiles will be flipped by using a pointer that has a distinct pattern (for example, a cross that touches five tiles: one at a center and its four adjacents), so when a tile that is turned off is turned on it can also make a tile that is turned on to be turned off. Therefore, it'll be necessary to continuously touch the tiles in a way such that, at one point, all of them are turned on. This has to be repeated with all eggs to fully assemble the key and solve the puzzle.
• Remnants of Isolation: In the Prison Of Flesh, Melchior must manipulate a series of about 10 switches, that control the positions of neighboring switches, and a corresponding bridge's sections' existence or non-existence. The goal being to make a working bridge.
• Runescape: One of the puzzles you can encounter in Dungeoneering is a 5x5 variation, where the tiles on the floor all have to be flipped to either green or yellow for doors to unlock. While flipping one tile will make up to four adjacent tiles around it flip in concert, players can force individual tiles to flip at the cost of some Life Points, as the magic of doing so causes a backlash.
• Ruphand: An Apothecary's Adventure: Tor Torken is a basically-still-intact Forruno facility and has some treasures locked behind laser walls that unlock when a "light wall", a.k.a a square grid of 9 tiles of circles and/or squares, is in certain configurations. There's a button corresponding to each tile, and pressing said button flips the states of the tiles that form a cross-shape from the corresponding tile being the centre and its 4, 3, or 2 adjacent squares, since the grid doesn't wrap around.
• Science Girls!: When falling into a pit, 5 Slirrup tongues must be pulled or left unpulled to alter sections of a wall, with the goal being to stop it from blocking the exit.
• Sonic Adventure: The entrance to the Final Egg area features the switch light variant of this puzzle, which needs to be solved to enter the stage.
• Submachine 1: The Basement: Tile D at the bottom right of the basement is locked inside a big stone that's unlocked when the cubes it's supporting are removed, by ringing four bells, each bell's ring adding or removing specific sets of cubes.
• Super Mario RPG: In the return to Bowser's Keep near the end of the game, one of the puzzles consists of a 4x4 grid of buttons, pressing a button causes the immediately adjacent buttons to switch from pressed to un-pressed and vice versa, you cannot manually un-press a button, and the goal is to make all the buttons pressed.
• TinkerQuarry: Camime's puzzle room contains a puzzle like this. There are 4 switches along a hallway, and at the end of the hallway is a wall of drums blocking a prize. To get the prize, you must flip the switches in a certain order to move the drums out of your way. However, you can't see the drums while you're flipping switches, you have to walk to the end of the hallway after flipping a switch to see how the drums moved.
• A Very Long Rope to the Top of the Sky: The lower sections of Polaris are locked behind doors that are unlocked by stepping on switches that control whether groups of crystals are lit or unlit, with the goal of getting all the crystals to light up.

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