History Main / ThatOnePuzzle

* The final puzzle in ''B.A.T. II: The Koshan Conspiracy'', where you need to open a safe by fiddling with some buttons. The puzzle is fairly simple by itself; it's a short circuit made up of binary logic gates, where you need to press buttons on the left, so that lights further down the circuit turn orange or blue. The goal is to get four orange lights at the end of the circuit. However, there are two complications: 1) one of the lights is bugged, so that it always shows up as blue, thus making it harder to figure out the pattern of the logic gates; 2) there is an invisible timer starting the moment you enter the room -- and once the timer runs out, pressing ''any'' button will instantly cause a game over, without explaining why. These two aspects make the puzzle unexpectedly difficult, to the point where pretty much no walkthrough on the Internet actually provided a solution, until [[https://advgamer.blogspot.com/2018/06/bat-ii-won.html a blogger figured out the puzzle in 2018]].

* Many people considered the turtle puzzle (see the page image) to be "That One Puzzle" for ''VideoGame/{{The Dig|1995}}''. However, it became about ten billion times easier if you were lucky enough to [[PixelHunt accidentally mouse over a fossil in the foreground that basically gave you the answer]]. If you were one of those lucky few, then your "That One Puzzle" would have been the Planetarium, where the results of your dicking around in the planetarium could only be seen ''from a particular spot'' on a ''completely different spire'', which you wouldn't notice unless you were taking screenshots before and after accidentally moving at least one of the moons into the right position. This was only ever solved by blind dumb luck or by reading the hint books.

* ''VideoGame/{{Obduction}}'' features a rotating maze with sections that must be swapped out to form a complete path. Except the maze sections that need to be swapped are on different planets, and some of them need to be rotated. There is no way to quickly check what pieces need to go where, nor what orientation they need to be at. And you have to do three of these one after another. The incomparable ''WebVideo/DesignDelve'' has [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42SDc2Fhkm8 an entire episode]] dedicated to why he believes this puzzle to be the worst of all time.

** In the end of the first half of the third case in ''Justice For All'', you must figure out who it was that a witness saw. The problem is that this particular segment requires a huge leap of logic to point out that [[spoiler:it was actually a cape that got snagged on a bust of the defendant, Maxmillion Galactica.]] Not only are there ''zero'' hints to this, [[spoiler:the cape seemingly defies logic by somehow getting stuck on said bust instead of flying off elsewhere.]]

** In ''Castle of Dr. Brain'', it's either the magic square in the maths hallway or the find-a-word in the language hallway.
** In ''The Island of Dr. Brain'', it'll be the randomised magic square in the volcano or the microscope puzzle on any difficulty other than Easy.

* ''VideoGame/TheLionKing'' on UsefulNotes/SuperNintendo and UsefulNotes/SegaGenesis has the infamous monkey puzzle in "Can't Wait To Be King", the '''second''' level: To advance, the player has to roar at a selection of monkeys to get them to change their position, after which the player has to jump into them to let the monkeys toss them around - and if they're lucky, all the monkeys will have been organized in such a way that they can move on to the next section. It's especially aggravating in the second section, where the player will have to organize one set of monkeys perfectly to even get to roar at a specific monkey, who needs to be turned to finish the level. The fact that these puzzles sandwich an infuriatingly difficult ostrich-riding section doesn't help, and rumor has it that the game's chief designer had never once passed the second level.

* ''VideoGame/AloneInTheDarkTheNewNightmare'': The flashlight puzzle in the Morton family crypt. It's as simple as moving your flashlight to draw a M. However, the controls in the UsefulNotes/PlayStation versions, while good elsewhere, are horrible for moving the flashlight, which means you'll likely mess up the drawing and spend a long time there having to restart over and over.

** Also the TabletoGame/{{chess}} puzzles. "Here, this is an 8×8 chess board. Jump on every single space, and you can only move as a knight. Also, there is only one known way to solve this puzzle, and only one correct direction to jump for every single jump. [[HintsAreForLosers To top it off, we've replaced your hints with random chess trivia that is no help whatsoever.]] Oh, quit crying, you wuss." There are easier variants but none of them (except for the first one) are that much easier and also suffer from the hints being useless. Luckily, by this point, the game has a memo function, which proves invaluable for planning the Knight moves before you try to put them into action. It actually makes life a bit easier.

* ''VideoGame/ProfessorLaytonAndTheCuriousVillage'': The infamous "Chocolate Code" puzzle proved so troublesome that the European edition of the game replaced it with an entirely different puzzle revolving around probability[[note]]It was also removed because the QWERTY keyboard layout isn't consistently used throughout Europe, and was therefore changed in order to prevent CreatorProvincialism from making this puzzle become more of a MoonLogicPuzzle than was originally intended[[/note]]. The player has to decode a message written on a chocolate bar with seven squares (one blank to represent a space), and there are small bites taken out of some of the squares. The bites indicate the position of decrypted letters relative to the encoded letters on [[spoiler:a computer keyboard (so for example a bite on the left would mean "d" gets decoded to "f")]] but since the in-game hints never mention the bites, most players simply assumed they were just eye candy (no pun intended).

* ''VideoGame/LaMulana2'', while a little more forgiving than the first game, is no slouch in this department either. A standout is the puzzle required to access the Ancient Cog. While opening the chest isn't particularly difficult, getting to the chest definitely is this. Throughout the game, there are tablets hinting about an Infernal Fiend biting into the neck of a Colossal Dragon, with one even giving you a mantra combination to use at the dragon's neck, but with no indication of where the dragon or the fiend actually are. While the save tablet in Heaven's Labyrinth (where the cog is located) makes reference to the Infernal Fiend, almost nothing is said about the Colossal Dragon. The solution? [[spoiler:You need to work out that the Infernal Fiend that the area references is the weird blob-like creature that appears on all of the tablets in the area, ''and'' that the shape of that creature roughly corresponds with the shape of the area, with the mouth the Fiend being the room where the Ancient Cog is, ''and'' remember that the image appearing on Takamagahara Shrine's tablets is a dragon, and realise that that's the Colossal Dragon it's making reference too, and use the mantra on the room corresponding to the dragon's neck, which opens a path that drops down to the Ancient Cog chest in Heaven's Labyrinth. Luckily, there is a secondary hint for the location where the mantras are needed: a tablet in that room is written by the Olympians (who live in Heaven's Labyrinth) simply states "Where is this?". Most players end up solving this puzzle through trial and error on this tablet rather than through the intended method]].

* The Crossword puzzle in ''VideoGame/JumpStartAdventures5thGradeJoHammetKidDetective'' You are given clues about Art History and Geography to fill in the clues. What you are intended to do is to walk around the museum and click on paintings, the globe, or pictures of the world for what it’s talking about. In practice, this is a massive pixel hunt and many players simply brute-forced it by going through the alphabet until a “Correct” letter is detected by the game.

See StockPuzzles for all the types of puzzles that might become this if difficult enough.

[[quoteright:349:[[VideoGame/TheDig https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/thedigskeletonpuzzle.png]]]]

* Many people considered the turtle puzzle (see the page image) to be "That One Puzzle" for ''VideoGame/TheDig''. However, it became about ten billion times easier if you were lucky enough to [[PixelHunt accidentally mouse over a fossil in the foreground that basically gave you the answer]]. If you were one of those lucky few, then your "That One Puzzle" would have been the Planetarium, where the results of your dicking around in the planetarium could only be seen ''from a particular spot'' on a ''completely different spire'', which you wouldn't notice unless you were taking screenshots before and after accidentally moving at least one of the moons into the right position. This was only ever solved by blind dumb luck or by reading the hint books.

* There's a puzzle in ''VideoGame/DarkFall: The Journal'' which, while not difficult to figure out, can be ''incredibly frustrating'' to actually complete: placing four alchemical symbols on a table in '''exactly''' the right places. All four of which need to be lined up ''perfectly'' with some chalk lines and the wood-grain of the tabletop. With your only guidance being two halves of a black-and-white photo, which depicts their proper positions from ''a tilted angle'', so it's extra-hard to see exactly where the symbols' edges are supposed to lie. Did I mention that one of the scraps of photo isn't even on the same ''floor of the building'' as the puzzle, and neither clue can be removed from its location?

** One end-of-case puzzle in Trials and Tribulations requires you to notice that a character accidentally said a detail he shouldn't have known. Said detail is hidden in a ''very long'' and almost seamless testimony, where pressing any statement other than the correct one ''results in an instant Game Over''. Sure, an obvious contradiction, but you'd be surprised how many people miss it.

* Many people considered the turtle puzzle (see above) to be "That One Puzzle" for ''VideoGame/TheDig''. However, it became about ten billion times easier if you were lucky enough to [[PixelHunt accidentally mouse over a fossil in the foreground that basically gave you the answer]]. If you were one of those lucky few, then your "That One Puzzle" would have been the Planetarium, where the results of your dicking around in the planetarium could only be seen ''from a particular spot'' on a ''completely different spire'', which you wouldn't notice unless you were taking screenshots before and after accidentally moving at least one of the moons into the right position. This was only ever solved by blind dumb luck or by reading the hint books.

* ''VideoGame/DungeonEncounters'' has Math Riddles, which are puzzles where you must solve for the location of a tile somewhere in the 99-floor dungeon (with 88,000+ tiles) given a hint card. Problem: [[MoonLogicPuzzle many of these puzzles are downright insane]] and appear specifically designed by whatever cruel employee at Square Enix or Cattle Call to make the player scream at the game in frustration after racking their brain for an hour before [[GuideDangIt going on the internet and looking up the answer.]] Many of these puzzles require acquired knowledge of mathematical concepts that the average player would most likely not have memorized ("What do you mean I need to know [[spoiler:the digits in the square root of 2]]?" or "What's a [[spoiler:cyclic number]]?" or "What's a [[spoiler:perfect number]]?"), and some of them aren't even related to math and expect you to recognize a relationship between the given numbers that is not only not hinted within the game itself, but ''isn't even related to video games'' ("What the fuck do I need to know [[spoiler:Super Bowl scores]] for?!" is a fun one).

* ''VideoGame/AssassinsCreedValhalla'': The puzzle to get into the sacred well in Asgard is next to impossible to figure out. There are no hints, and the trick to beating the puzzle is actually sneakily hidden. The majority of players admit they had to look up how to do it, after spending close to an hour trying to figure it out. Almost every other puzzle like this is similarly difficult.

* ''VideoGame/TalesOfSymphonia'' features a puzzle in the Ymir Forest that is infamous for causing even the most casual player of [=RPGs=] to notice the FridgeLogic and GameplayAndStorySegregation required to make the puzzle work, on top of being both long and frustrating. Put simply, you have to get a piece of fruit out of a high tree, which is solved by knocking it into the water. From there, it's a very long, very drawn out puzzle of using musical cues to have animals act in such a way that the fruit moves closer to you. All the while, you have to get into RandomEncounters, trek through the dungeon, and avoid using the wrong command that could potentially force you to start completely over. The FridgeLogic comes in from at least half your party having magic and skills that should allow them to get the fruit with ease, including one character that can call upon the Summon Spirit of Water, and another character that can ''fly''. The option to have them help never comes up.