Solve the Soup Cans

"Procedure" here must stand for "Arbitrary Adventure Game Rules".^{Puzzle Solution} The answer is 1. The equations are referring to the time on a twelve-hour clock (8 o'clock +/- 6 hours = 2 o'clock).

"I mean, what the hell kind of villain thwarts the hero's progress with soup cans in the kitchen pantry?"

— Russ Bryan, on The 7th Guest

"Soup cans" is a derisive term for bizarre and disconnected elements included in a video game purely to serve as an obstacle to the player. The nonviolent equivalent of Everything Trying to Kill You.

In a game which includes puzzles, often, anything at all can be a puzzle. Using a Mastermind game as the electronic lock on your door might seem like a dumb thing to do, but at least the one is associated with the other. To reach the true height of Solve The Soup Cans, it's not merely the case that the puzzle seems like a contrived way to bar the player's progress: it doesn't even make sense that the puzzle should be an obstacle.

It's like this. You walk into a room. There's a chessboard in the middle, and an exit at the opposite end. It seems like you ought to be able to just walk right past the chessboard and exit via the opposite door. But you can't. The chessboard is a puzzle, and, like vampires and running water, the player can not cross the path of an unsolved puzzle.

Less egregiously, the puzzle may have a direct effect on the game world (when solved, you are given some key item, or prompt a response from some NPC), but the connection between cause and effect is not conveyed beforehand, nor is the effect something that follows naturally from solving the puzzle. Needing to Solve The Soup Cans reverses normal puzzle-solving logic: it's not that you want to accomplish some goal, and have to solve the puzzle to get to that goal, but rather, you've got to solve the puzzle because the puzzle is there, and that's what puzzles are for, and the fact that you end up closer to your goal is, at least in terms of the storyline, more or less coincidental.

Used poorly, this reduces the player to The Fool, just purposelessly blundering forward solving puzzles at random, hoping something good will happen.

This class of puzzle ran amok in the middle-era Adventure Game, and can sometimes still be seen in the Action-Adventure genre, especially during the non-action-oriented scenes of Survival Horror. When the game is educational in nature and the puzzles are designed to teach the player, then they're Alphabet Soup Cans.

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Examples:

Literature

• S.D. Perry had way too much fun with Resident Evil's soup can puzzles in her novelizations, throwing Hand Waves and Lampshades every which way that often fall into an affectionate Take That!. For example, in the game you had to push a button to open a glass cover and take the MacGuffin, but if you didn't cover the air vents with moveable statues first the room flooded with deadly gas. In the book Jill considers all the terrible things that pushing that button could do, and just says "Screw it" and busts the glass with her gun.
  • She even threw soup can puzzles into Caliban Cove and Underworld, two original works that weren't based on games, just because "Resident Evil needs silly puzzles".

Fan Works

Omen IV: The Awakening

• Always Visible: Used in Act Three when Galbraith first guesses Delia's name from individual letters, then converts them into numbers and ends up with the number 8. This makes no sense, as the Inspector himself says, although this number matches the age at which Delia met Jo.

Tabletop Games

• Pathfinder: The "Sacred Geometry" feat lets a spellcaster add free Meta Powers to a spell if the player can create an impromptu math equation to derive specific prime numbers from a pool of random dice rolls. It is generally considered to be a waste of everybody's time if you do the math by hand, and broken if you use an app to solve the math for you.

Video Games

• The 7th Guest: The trope-naming puzzle is particularly egregious about this. You're given a bunch of soup cans with letters on them, and must rearrange the cans into a coherent sentence. Until you do, you cannot pass through the kitchen, for no explained reason. This puzzle is also a famous example of Guide Dang It!, as the only vowel it features is "Y". By far the worst part about the puzzle, though, is that all the letters start together. So all the Y-cans are together, all the S-cans are together, etc. The only hint you are given is that the cans are arranged in the correct spread (so the first word is three letters long). And that's it. You have to use the clue book three times to even get a hint as to what words you should be writing, and even then, you'll be breaking out the thesaurus. The sentence you have to spell is "Shy gypsy, slyly, spryly, tryst by my crypt." It only makes any kind of sense in hindsight, since you have to go through a crypt puzzle later.
  • In addition to the Trope Namer soup cans, The 7th Guest and its sequel The 11th Hour will also throw puzzles at you in the form of crypts, chess pieces, bathroom tiles, chess pieces ON bathroom tiles, decorative carpets and bedspreads, microscopes, pianos and cakes.
• Alfred Hitchcock's The Final Cut had a puzzle based around cooking Apple Crumble for the sake of advancing your serial killer investigation. Of course, the puzzle was less a "test of wits and intelligence" and more a tedious instruction following exercise.
• The Bonte Room 2:
  • The game requires you to feed cactus-flavored roasted peanuts to a parrot to get the key. Aside from the moon-logic procedure to make said nuts (including the combination-locked fireplace), there is no indication that this brand of nuts is required (since the bird ate everything else you fed it, with no visible response) or even that the key is in the cage in the first place. And if you knew the key was there (perhaps by mentioning that when you looked at the bird, instead of telling the obvious "it's a parrot in a cage"), wouldn't a sensible person have wanted to open the cage and just grab it?
• Cradle Series: Some of the puzzles that have to be solved to get plans for buildings are bizarre or hardly fitting. To be able to build a farm in Cradle of Rome 2, you have to find three pairs of identical butterflies.
• The Dig has two Soup Can puzzles:
  • There is absolutely no reason for your character to futz around with reassembling a turtle skeleton and putting a bomb in it, because the existence of a newly accessible secret underwater cave is not revealed until AFTER you blow up the elasmosaur. You just create an explosive turtle because you have all the pieces and there's nothing better to do.
  • There's definitely no indication that moving moons around in the planetarium will cause the planet's real moons to move, which will in turn cause light to hit a patch of dirt on the ground at just the right angle and reveal the secret location of the Ark of the Covenant or whatever was supposed to happen next. You just move the moons around because you know that you're in a puzzle game and therefore the planetarium is supposed to do SOMETHING and you want to find out what the hell it is. And also because you have run out of bones and stuff you can use to make turtle bombs, so you need to waste your time on something else.
• American McGee's Alice has several of these, including a version of the aforementioned chessboard puzzle (twice, though it at least fits the Through the Looking Glass theme, unlike some others). Mind you, the chessboard literally blocks your path, and you're impaled by sharp blades for trying to continue without solving it.
• At one point in the early PlayStation RPG Beyond the Beyond, you are being pursued, and hide behind a church, where you are confronted with a sliding tile puzzle. Trying to leave the screen except through the exit unlocked by the puzzle results in the Big Bad showing up and killing you.
• Devil May Cry 4 has a blatant example of this when Nero must play a standard move-from-start-to-finish board-game built into a room, where the piece is a statue of Nero, he must roll a large, demonic die cube by smacking it with his sword or shooting it, and different circles may spawn enemies, spawn orbs, or send you back. It's worth accepting it as part of the game just for Dante's reaction to the puzzle; he just slices the huge die in half and the room, apparently unable to cope, lets him through^note of course, Dante also has the excuse that the room he's in is filling up with poisonous gas, and he doesn't have time for a little board game. The reason for this is because Nero has a way to cheat and get whatever number he wants, whereas Dante does not.^note Using Nero’s Devil Bringer causes the die to land on whatever was on the top at the time he used it.
• Tesshi-e's Escape from the Living Room. A key you need is hidden under a couch, all the way back against the wall. A sensible person would move the couch away from the wall. Here, on the other hand, you have to combine a cell phone, a straw and stick you've cut in half, some corks, some tape, and a piece of string to make a little car that you can roll at the key so that the tape sticks to it, then pull back with the string. Nothing at the game even remotely hints at this being either the solution^note and the only hint that this is even doable is the fact that many of Tesshi-e's games feature similar construction projects... mostly because the game, like so many higher-quality room escapes, is entirely in Japanese.
• Eternal Darkness has a couple of these; lighting candles to open a locked drawer is probably the most obvious. It basically boils down to just screwing with the player.
• The Fatal Frame series does this a lot, but at least they tried to tie it in to the story. During one part of Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly, the story deals with haunted dolls, and one puzzle requires the player to find the head and arms of a doll standing on a locking mechanism. This is soon found to be insufficient, however, because the head is missing its eyes.
• Fur Fighters has a lot of these, it being a mix of shooting and platforming it can be quite jarring. One actually involved making a special soup in a jungle with an elongated fetch-quest to boot. The final indignity is when you complete it, the quest giver is revealed to have been deliberately wasting your time.
• The Wii/PS2 version of Ghostbusters: The Video Game has a few of these. One required the player to match dancing skeletons in order to open a gate. Though the game does have soirees into the "ghost world" where reality is muddled, this part was not one of them, making it a particularly odd task.

• Hotel Dusk: Room 215:
  • You have to solve random puzzles (e.g., a matchstick puzzle and a 12 Coins Puzzle), tap the bottle of bourbon, or check the jukebox before you can get vital information from one character. Not because the character cares about the problems —because you're in the bar, and the character hasn't shown up yet, and playing with the puzzle games in the bar is the only way to make time pass so that the vital character shows and is there to talk to you. And for some reason you have to actually solve them, not just play with them.
    • Later, Louis invites you to a quick bowling match and if you lose or give up, you have to keep trying again until you win. It makes a little more sense since it leads to you finding an item.
• The Institute - this adventure game was almost nothing but Solve The Soup Cans. And yet, the game actually worked well, because most of the soup cans were inside dreams, giving them an excuse to dispense with real world logic completely. So Tropes Are Not Bad. Even when you weren't, maybe your sanity (or possible lack thereof) is to blame?
• Killer7 was made primarily of these. One puzzle forces the player to light the candles in a candle holder in the correct order. The effect of this? A locked cabinet opens. They do fit the Mind Screw nature of the game well enough, though.
• King's Quest
  • The first half of King's Quest V is spent walking around in Serenia, solving puzzles and collecting a lot of items that will admittedly come in handy later. But we're given absolutely no indication why King Graham should be bothering with all this, considering he needs to journey through the mountains to save his family. It's just aimless wandering about. All because of what's preventing him from just going up into the mountains right off the bat: a single snake. And instead of just beating it with any number of things that end up in your inventory (like a hammer) or just walking around it, you instead have to wander all over hell and back until you get a tambourine to scare it away with.
  • At least with one or two items it would be justified for Graham to go out of his way to get them, as crossing a huge snowy mountain pass is dangerous and he'll at least need something to eat to keep his strength up, as well as something to protect him from the cold. But, the mountain pass isn't accessible until you pass the snake! It just so happens that acquiring the tambourine leaves him with an inventory full of other things, which happen to get him across the mountain.
  • Lampshaded in King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow: after Prince Alexander manages to overcome the three magical barriers on the Isle of the Beast by using certain items he had serendipitously acquired from other Isles, the Beast approaches him and asks him why he did it. Alexander's response: "I suppose it is simply my nature to break through magical barriers." Turns out, they were for his own protection, rather than the Beast's - and by breaking through them he was cursed. Oops.
• In The Legend of Zelda games:
  • Link very frequently must kill all of the monsters in a room for a door to unlock, a ladder to fall into place, etc., even though he can often just run past enemies to the next room at other times. Of the hundreds of dungeon puzzles Link must solve throughout his adventures, maybe five of them make any logical sense...especially since the reward for completing many of them is a treasure chest that appears out of thin air for no discernible reason.
  • A stock puzzle is "light all the torches" to open a door or make a treasure chest appear. This is lampshaded in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess as a "not very subtle" way of opening a cellar.
  • In one dungeon in The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, you must kill the three monsters in one room in a specific order in order to proceed, and while the game gives you a hint (located halfway across the dungeon), you have to know the names of the monsters in question to interpret the hint correctly (or even have the faintest idea what it refers to). And the names aren't in the manual - they're to be found only in the manual of a different game for a different console. Though there are only six possible combinations, part of the problem is even recognizing that the order matters at all since this is the only time it ever does. And before you think you might stumble on the answer out of luck, the enemies need to be killed in an order that is highly counter to what you'd do without thinking about it. Specifically, the one hit point wonder monster needs to go down second and the completely harmless monster stuck behind blocks needs to go down first. The clue does say "the imprisoned Pols Voice", which can at least clue you into which monster that one is at least.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Oracle Games take the "kill all the enemies" puzzle even further: sometimes you're required to push a specific block in order to open the door or reveal the chest, and that block is not pushable until all the enemies have been defeated, with no indication at all that they have (the "puzzle solved" jingle is not played until after the block has been pushed). Made even worse when there are Zols in the room, since they hide in the floor until Link draws near.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks has an especially unnecessary example. While possessing a Wrecker Phantom, Zelda can't carry Link across a lava field because she turns into a sphere and rolls instead of walking (not because lava is hot), so you have to track down a regular Phantom for her to control. The problem is, she can walk normally as a Wrecker—she does it whenever you aren't directly controlling her movement, and should be perfectly capable of carrying Link over the lava in that form... but the game goes out of its way to dissuade you from even trying, and if you attempt it anyway she stubbornly starts rolling and tosses poor Link into the lava. It seems someone forgot that the whole situation only makes sense if Wreckers cannot walk.
• In The Lost Crown: A Ghosthunting Adventure, the first puzzle involves finding the pieces of a sign and placing them back together. It's somewhat justifiable as a tutorial, but you have to align the pieces perfectly before you can carry on. When you get it right, the boy blocking the path to Saxton disappears.
• Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals contains many unlikely ways to lock a door, occasionally devolving into this trope.
  • A door that opens when all of the grass patch nearby is fully grown, for example. And you make the grass grow by walking over it.
  • There's also a similar puzzle where the door won't open until all nine patches of grass are cut and you fail if it overgrows. The grass grows back every time you take a step. You can't even make it to the exit doorway before the grass overgrows - unless you solve the puzzle perfectly.
  • A puzzle where you need to walk a specific way through a small room's grid. May not sound like much, but the problem comes that there is a grid of plants nearby and, with every step you take, some of them begin to grow. And if one of them grows enough to puff some smoke out, you have to redo the room.
• In Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent the protagonist, Nelson Tethers, is from the FBI's Puzzle Research Division, and is as such obsessed with puzzles. However the town he's sent to investigate is equally obsessed with them with everyone having puzzles for you to do and everything you need to do being a puzzle. The in game explanation is that most of them are in a cult that worships gnomes who communicate through puzzles... Because that totally makes sense.
• Almost all the puzzles of Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh evolve naturally from the story, while exceptionally lame and usually based around some variation of "Just click at random and something good might happen". The most blatant exception to this is a pattern-matching tile puzzle which locks a door—in a bondage club.
• The Professor Layton series. Literally every single person in the games, as well as a number of animals and inanimate objects, will set you puzzles that have nothing to do with the game world. The first game at least justifies it as a plot point. All of the townspeople are robots created for the baron's daughter; the puzzles they ask you are to prove your worth as a protector for her. Now, why they think that someone who's good at answering puzzles would be a good guardian for Flora... well, that never gets explained. The next two gave handwaves, but the fourth finally gave up trying to explain it. The out-of-setting reason for this, incidentally, is that the game is actually inspired by a series of puzzle books... you might have read that sort of book as a kid, they typically have a puzzle a page with (sometimes) a loose plot linking them together, or a few sentences of humorous framing text. For the 'genre', this is expected. As a plus, the writers have been making fun of themselves for doing this since the very first game. At least one character in every title will comment on how ludicrous it is for someone to be reminded of a puzzle by looking at a dead body/flight of stairs/car/what-have-you, and then expecting the other characters to solve it when there's far more important work to be done.
• Relicta: The paths to the emergency controls are blocked with puzzles that cannot be turned off or bypassed, meaning that characters without the fancy magnetic gloves literally cannot reach them. Justified early on in that the paperwork to skip/disable the puzzles would be more hassle than just solving them; but even when that justification no longer makes sense, you still have to solve the puzzles.
• Practically a staple of the Resident Evil series:
  • Resident Evil has the mansion with really bizarre puzzles. An emblem can only be reached if you play Moonlight Sonata at the bar and you can only keep the emblem if you have a different one on you to swap the two so the secret door doesn't close on you. A crest can only be gotten by inserting a blue jewel into a tiger statue's eye socket, another crest is gotten by pushing four statues on top of vents so that poison gas doesn't spill out, and another crest can only be gotten by pressing buttons under each painting in the correct order (youngest to oldest). Future material in the franchise would later state that Spencer was a big fan of the spy genre and hired someone to build the mansion with the nonsensical puzzles.
  • Resident Evil 2 has a chess puzzle in the sewers entrance. Statues to be moved around until they click on special switches, too. And a whole lot of other senseless puzzles. There's typically a lame attempt at justification for this in the form of a letter lying around that will note that the person who designed the place was insane, but why the person was hired to design a secret high-tech laboratory isn't addressed.
  • Resident Evil 0 has an emergency brake system on a train that can only be activated by solving a math puzzle. On a pair of terminals found on opposite ends of the train. Don't, just don't, think too much about that one.
  • The Darkside Chronicles. The trope is even given a Lampshade Hanging and a justification of sorts with the explanation being that the people who place the puzzles about really don't want anyone else to get around that easily.
  • Resident Evil 3: Nemesis takes the nonsensical puzzles to a whole new level. For starters, the majority of the puzzles are within the city itself, which makes them completely stand out compared to the puzzles being confined to a strange mansion from the first game. Some of the bizarre puzzles involve things like swapping out statue items to retrieve a battery, guessing a password based on an advertisement on TV, and the most infamous puzzle involves lining up a bunch of squares and rectangles on a machine to verify the quality of the water sample in order to allow you access to another room.
  • Resident Evil 7: Biohazard:
    • The game forces you to contend with Lucas Baker's traps and puzzles, one of which involves solving a series of puzzles in order to get a lit candle onto a birthday cake. Lucas, being a Psychopathic Man Child who wasn't right in the head even before becoming infected, gets his rocks off forcing people into elaborate Saw like traps. His cake puzzle is even rigged to murder the person who solved it, as the cake explodes upon inserting the candle and ignites the oil that is spilled during the course of the puzzle.
    • An invoice found in the house specifically describes installation of one of the bizarre secret doors opened using a shadow at the direction of Jack Baker — the family's insanity cannot even be credited for it because the installation occurred well before the incident that turned the Baker family into monsters. Even better: Ethan can find a receipt for the shadow puzzle and the company that installed it is the same one that built the Spencer Mansion.
      Ethan: Who builds this shit?
  • Resident Evil 2 (Remake) cranks the soup can puzzles to eleven. To get a jeweled scepter from a statue, you have to find the statue's missing arm, place a book in the hand of missing arm, and then place them onto the statue itself. There's also a block puzzle in Sherry's segment where you have to rearrange the blocks in a certain order just so that the drawer containing a pair of scissors opens up. Rather than just having a pair of scissors lying around, you have to solve a puzzle just to get one (or just tearing down the cardboard barricade that the scissors are meant to cut through).
• Sherlock Holmes: The Mystery of the Mummy: One such puzzle involves a door that won't open unless Holmes finds three missing gears, and something to burn, for the steam-powered mechanism that opens it.
• Shivers (1995):
  • The hero (that is, you) has no in-game reason to actually do anything other than sit by the door until morning. Even if he's just curious, most of the "puzzles" have no reason to be solved, nor is there any reason to suspect they have solutions — other than the fact that the game focuses in on them!
  • In a recording the museum's creator, Professor Windlenot, even lampshades how the puzzles become annoyances when there are real emergencies going on (like Ixupi on the loose).
• Silent Hill: The series is built on Chaos Architecture, and things tend to have have some relationship to where they are, such as putting the right pill in the right creepy-doll that corresponds to the right insane asylum patient. Other times, the puzzle makes much less sense, to put it lightly. In either case, Silent Hill does it for dramatic effect. Questions like 'what's wrong with this town?' and 'what brought me here?' seem to go beautifully with 'why is this tin can full of light bulbs?' On harder difficulties, this goes straight into Moon Logic Puzzle territory.
• Starship Titanic. After being wowed by the fancy animation and pseudo-AI, you soon realize that you're just wandering around aimlessly pointing your mouse at everything trying to find an object you can interact with/pick up/break/fix/manipulate.
  • You need a long stick to push something out of a tree. You find a long stick behind glass you need to break with a hammer. You find a hammer dispenser with a button 10 feet up in the air you need a long stick to press! Of course, you find another stick being used as a bird perch and get the hammer with that, after an even stranger puzzle. Of course, it's a game by Douglas Adams, so maybe not making sense makes sense.
  • The music lounge presents the player with a dozen knobs, sliders, and controls for half a dozen robotic musicians and are told to reset them to play a particular song...one you've never heard before. Each consistently changes something like the pitch, key, or speed of a part, but due to the nature of music, making adjustments with a critical ear can sometimes create a listenable variation instead of the intended composition. The solution? If you didn't spot the correct configuration represented in the fabric pattern of a chair tucked in the other end of the room, an unlabeled screenshot of the controls set correctly is in the last page of the instruction manual.
• In the graphical adventure Still Life:
  • You have at one point to bake cookies for the player character's father. For some reason, you can't go forward with your serial killing investigation without doing this first. The ingredients in the recipe have all been replaced with codewords (like "love" and "compassion") and no hint to what each codeword means. With a general idea about cookie recipes you can figure it out... after hours and hours of trial and error.
  • Another puzzle involves the protagonist's ancestor picking the lock of the door of the suspect's art gallery. Too bad that said door has what seems to be the most complex tumbler lock ever built...
• Tales of Symphonia
  • One needs to find the Ymir Fruit in Ymir Forest before being able to reach Heimdall. This evidently necessitates the painfully tedious process of making the fruit drop into the water, and then getting the little fishies to guide the floating fruit all around the forest before one can obtain the item. Apparently, eight people cannot try anything else other than this — like summoning Undine, using their various weapons to try knocking it somewhere closer by (although it drops into the water reasonably close to the player anyway), asking the party member with wings to fly up and grab it, or best of all, just reaching down and grabbing the freaking item (something about "dangerous-looking fish in the water"). "Dangerous-looking fish" is made all the more pointless when you realize that the party contains a Messianic Archetype, a pair of incredibly powerful magicians, and an angel. Over the course of the game they've dealt with bunnies more intimidating than the "dangerous-looking fish" Lloyd is bitching about. Genis even poked fun at Lloyd for "squaring off" against the fish.
  • To top the whole shenanigan off, an optional skit features Lloyd expressing interest in trying a Ymir fruit for himself. Now, up until this point, anytime you make a mistake in the overly-tedious series of maneuvers required to get the fruit into a position where anyone's willing to expend the effort to reach over and grab it, you could knock a new one into the water and try again. But once you finally nab one, it is apparently the last one in the world ever (those stupid fish took all the rest), because everyone gets on Lloyd's case for wanting to eat it when a sick woman needs it as medicine.
  • You have to solve a puzzle to open a door. It's not particularly weirder than any other puzzle, except it happens in a facility in which people work and walk around all day. It gets Lampshaded by the two goons that show you how to solve the said puzzle:
    Desian 1: Oh, yeah. This room has a special mechanism.
    Desian 2: It's annoying to go through all the trouble of electrifying them and moving them over the panels just to open the door.
    Desian 1: Lord Botta sure likes to do things the hard way....
  • Symphonia is an especially egregious example, because, puzzles aside, Gameplay and Story Integration runs rampant. Your summoner has absolutely no problem using her summons for the sake of convenience when it's not a puzzle section.
• Tales of Legendia had a few puzzle rooms placed randomly throughout some dungeons which required you to push blocks and shoot crystals. There was a light Hand Wave for why these rooms were scattered across the world, but no in-depth explanation was ever given as to how and why they were placed. You didn't even have to solve them; if you wanted, at any time, you could just skip a puzzle you were having trouble with. Completing every puzzle without using any help earns you a fancy title for Senel, but this title is worse than most other titles he naturally obtains by leveling up, making it a Bragging Rights Reward.
• Vagrant Story demands you solve the push-pull-lift-place-destroy block puzzles, or you will never proceed. Ever. In fact, it's the Trope Namer for Block Puzzle.
• Lampshaded in the white chamber, in which random human body parts lie throughout the space station, just enough for a single complete body. If the player collects them all and assembles them on a bed in the medical room, the protagonist wonders why she did that in the first place. At the end of the game (the proper end, not the dozen-odd ways to kill yourself) you're given the suggestion to replay the game and input a code before the character actually learns it.
• Xenosaga games are full of these. Random puzzles are everywhere, and have no possible bearing on getting where you want to go.
• The Core series of Flash games. In the installment "Tower Core" this is especially egregious because the framing device is that you have to power up the defense system to fend off an impending meteor strike, or something like that. Since this appears to be the only purpose of the titular towers, one would expect actual human security to be the better option, instead of wasting time trying to solve random puzzles.
• Schizm II: Chameleon. Through various cunning methods, the player finally gains access to an elevator. The elevator promptly takes them down to a single room, which contains nothing but a code panel. Finally switching the symbols around correctly... gives a cutscene of NPCs finding you there, and so advancing the story. The act of solving the puzzle does nothing in the game world.
• The entire game of Alundra is based around this. Every dungeon is full of puzzles that yield random switches that open gates; the gates won't open without hitting all the switches in a particular order, for example, or lighting all the torches. Most of the dungeons are inside dreams, so make a little bit of sense - but many aren't.
  • The sequel in-name-only just straight gave up common sense about puzzles and they're often put randomly as a traditional "solve this otherwise you won't advance" puzzles and also serves as a Broken Bridge in early sections to be figured out later in the game.
• This happens a lot in the Frogwares Sherlock Holmes games, complete with sliding puzzles, using the Kabbalah to open a safe in a Jewish club, measuring out exactly 478cc of gunpowder with three different receptacles of different sizes... The puzzles became better integrated in later games, thankfully — Sherlock Holmes Versus Jack the Ripper has a deductions system replacing random quizzes, for one.
• In Sherlock Holmes: Secret of the Silver Earring, Holmes has to visit the home of one character in the game in order to acquire some intel, and the whole house is full of puzzles that he has to solve in order to continue. The game justifies it by claiming the character is a big fan of toys and puzzles and also possibly because the puzzles that have to be solved would enable Holmes to unlock a safe that one of the conspirators tried to break into, only to fail because the character’s love of puzzles proved to be a very effective security system.
• Final Fantasy VIII gives you a clock pattern on the floor and a bunch of paintings with Latin names, and you have to combine three Latin names for the answer.
• Final Fantasy X gets a pass for its ridiculous Cloister puzzles because they were designed as tests of persistence. Final Fantasy X-2, however, has a final dungeon that forces you to repeatedly find contrived ways to play the same sequence of notes using the objects around you. You can just skip the puzzles — if you don't mind facing a long, difficult boss each time.
• The Interactive Fiction game Not Just an Ordinary Ballerina is better than it sounds — but includes more than one pointless puzzle nailed to the wall. The worst example is a Magic Fifteen puzzle that spells out the words of a song. Hope you know the song...
• Wild ARMs 2 is full of these. Every single dungeon/new area has at minimum 3 and up to 10 puzzles placed in your way which must be completed in order to unlock a door, reveal a passage, or reveal/open a treasure chest. Sometimes, the puzzle you needed to complete in order to open the door/activate the machine/etc. is actually 2-3 rooms back.
• The Wind Road have a puzzle where you're trapped in a cage, with the area filling with Deadly Gas. There are skeletons besides your feet as well (probably belonging to the past victims), and a few discarded darts. What do you do? Well, pick up those darts, aim for the two torches burning in the cavern, and when the torches are extinguished the trap deactivates, that's what.
• XBLA indie game Decay subverts this in Part 2 - the game is a point and click horror, so players are already in the puzzle seeking mindset, and the game is obliging with a steady supply of actually very logical puzzles. When the player is confronted with a soup can in the form of a Breakout game on a computer, it seems odd, but the player gets right down to business... only to be confronted with the reflection of the game's Creepy Doll staring at you in the screen, its horrible glowing eyes.
• In Pilot Brothers: Theft of the striped elephant, the main characters fail to just open the door to pursue the criminal, and must instead open the fridge. Said fridge is locked on a large hang lock (with the key guarded by a crocodile) and the infamous hardest puzzle in the game. When the fridge is opened, a cat walks out of the fridge and easily opens the door (by pushing it, the characters were knocking and pulling).
• All over the place in the Zero Escape series. While a lot of puzzles seem arbitrary (e.g. putting dice in the correct order), others are symbolic and foreshadows the entire plot (e.g. arranging a mannequin will trigger a discussion on the Ship of Theseus, which is actually important). The series' take on Psychic Powers is dependent on two things to trigger, one of which is the sensation of Epiphany. The puzzles are so bizarre because that would cause a greater Epiphany when solved. Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors in particular puts a lot of focus on number puzzles using greater-than-base-10 numerical systems. This is revealed to be building up a Chekhov's Skill in Junpei and the player in preparation for later plot twists, as certain numbers on certain bracelets and doors aren't normal numbers, but base35 letters.
• Zork: Grand Inquisitor
  • The cocoa recipe. An answering machine tells you of a recipe for a cocoa blend. With the ingredients at hand, you naturally try to make it, for no conceivable reason. Once you do, your companion is reminded of a spell of his he developed while drinking it, and teaches it to you.
  • Subverted in Brog's quest. Brog is incredibly stupid, and the final thing to do in his subquest is to get a skull out of a cage. Surrounding the cage are three circular chess boards. Clicking them just causes a pawn to go back and forth. The solution is to bash the cage open with a plank of wood.
• In Parasite Eve 2, in order to get back into Dryfield after leaving for the first time, you have to figure out how to open a gate with a puzzle that relates to the stages of the moon and Japanese calendar phraseology. In addition to requiring some very esoteric knowledge, you don't get much in the way of clues, with the only ones you get are being asked to name the "age of the full moon" and having Aya note that there are some Japanese characters she can't read framed as an incredibly vague hint. It's entirely optional, but skipping it locks you out of the Golden Ending.
• NetHack has an optional Sokoban sidequest, with pits blocking your path that must be filled by inconveniently-placed boulders. The presence of four Block Puzzles in the middle of a monster-infested dungeon is jarring, to say the least. There are quite a few ways to cheat — smashing boulders, summoning boulders, levitating over the pits — but doing so will severely damage your Luck Stat, because... magic.
• In Rana Rama, fighting monsters involves rearranging the letters of the game's title into the proper order as the "life force" counter ticks down.
• Heroine's Quest generally avoids these sorts of puzzles, but one in particular stands out: The slide puzzle in Andvari's shop. There's nothing in the game that says you need to do it (and indeed, it's entirely optional), and no indication of what it even does. It opens passages to where Loki is bound, and to a Marathon Level where you can fight a number of monsters and attempt to beat your best time.
• 1912 Titanic Mystery is an entire game built out of Solve the Soup Cans. The game has you trying to discover a bomb that has been placed aboard the ship by locating pages of a diary that the bomber has scattered for you. How do you do this, you ask? By visiting 30 rooms aboard the titanic and playing about 100 rounds of "find twelve randomly selected photoshopped images in this picture." Also, the first time you visit a room you have to solve a special puzzle. Puzzles such as placing chess queens on a board so that they can't attack one another, solving slide-puzzles of the Titanic, and paying Othello. You are given no context for any of these puzzles, and only three (arguably four) have ANY relevance to the story of tracking down the bomb.
• Parodied in Undertale. Papyrus and Sans, doing border patrol, set puzzles in your path to slow you down so they can capture you. One of the puzzles is a word search, just set on the ground, with no added mechanisms. Nothing actually forces you to so much as look at the thing, much less actually try to solve it (and due to a typo, you technically can't anyway). When you walk past it, Papyrus freaks out that it's not stopping you, while Sans just quips that he should have picked something harder, like a crossword. In the Genocide route, you don't even have to solve any of the puzzles, as either Flowey solves them for you, or you just walk right through them and refuse to play along, to Papyrus' increasing irritation.
• The main puzzle of the additional chapter of Scratches, Last Visit, could be summed as clean the bathroom's window so that light can come in and illuminate the African tribal mask that's sitting at the bottom of the bathtub.
• The Cube Escape games are chock-full of puzzles like having to cut a birthday cake so that each slice has exactly one candle on it.
• In Colobot, there is a level that literally boils down to your spaceship landing in the middle of a desert, you being ordered to fight off the giant alien ants that are heading in your direction, and then having to fly away when you're done. No reason is ever given for why this needs to be done, making you wonder exactly why couldn't your ship just not land there at all.
• The Pokémon games feature many such "puzzles" are part of their gyms, although other areas like Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire's Trick House have similar puzzles. These "puzzles" generally serve as obstacles so the player cannot challenge the gym leader directly. Going the wrong way or doing the puzzle wrong may result in battling a trainer in the gym (many people intentionally mess up to challenge as many of the trainers as possible for the experience). The most famous of these puzzles is the Vermilion Gym from Pokémon Red and Blue. The gym leader has locked himself in a room and you need to press two switches in order to open the door. The switches are hidden inside trash cans that are set up in a grid fashion around the gym. When you find the first switch, you need to find the second one, otherwise the puzzle resets and you need to find the first switch once more. The game gives you hints about where the second switch is in relation to the first, but since the second switch is still randomly chosen from the possibilities, the puzzle is annoying enough that many young players skip the gym and progress through the game without obtaining Lt. Surge's badge.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Super Mario 64 has a few of these. One power star is won by punching three books on a bookshelf in the right order (Basically, It Makes Just As Much Sense In Context). Another involves opening three treasure chests in the right order, which somehow causes the boat you're inside to arise from the ocean as well as a power star to appear. And one of the secret levels is reached by ground pounding (in other words, hitting with force from above) two pillars, which causes the water underneath to disappear for some reason.
  • Mario Party 4: Compared to the other Story minigames, where the Party Stars and the hosts participate in challenges that put their speed, strength and/or dexterity into test in a reasonable way, Archeologuess (which corresponds to Shy Guy's minigame when the Party Star wins in his board) is merely an odd-one-out puzzle that requires, in each turn, pointing at the figure whose shape stands out from that of the other four figures shown. The first character to make the correct guess in three turns wins.
• Kingdom Hearts has the player find and arrange library books as an integral part of progressing through Hollow Bastion.
• In The Feeble Files, there is a puzzle where Feeble has to take a chair from a bar... but he's not able to take one until he uses DJ machinery to shine light onto it (since it's somewhat dark inside). Even though the chair that Feeble is supposed to take is still visible without it and nothing holds it in place, nor is it out of his reach.
• Broken Sword fangame Broken Sword 2.5 has been designed by people who think it makes sense to aquire a flashlight by trading with a bum for the pair of panties Nico left in her handbag (which you rummaged in). Yup.
• Mortadelo y Filemón computer game Balones y patadones had a puzzle in which, in order to open a trophy cabinet, the player would have to flip a series of switches up or down in the correct manner. Most notable for the big fat lampshade the character you're controlling when facing the puzzle (either Mortadelo or Filemón) will hang on it:
  Filemón: Hmm... Looks like one of those combinatorial puzzles shoehorned in to slow down the game's pacing.
• In The Mystery of Grimstone Manor, a special Halloween Episode game released by the makers of The Cabinets of Doctor Arcana, most of the puzzles are of this variety. The player must collect clues throughout the eponymous manor, then figure out how to connect the clues to find the six numerical codes and incantation needed to unlock the Spirit Gate and win the game.
• Divinity: Original Sin II: Part of The Very Definitely Final Dungeon's security system is a puzzle where a grid of overlapping pipe segments needs to be rotated to make three specific connections. Unlike the rest of the dungeon's security, the puzzle can't be researched in advance.
• Tormented Souls: Some puzzles are more of this trope than others.
  • Working out the password for an electronic lock and writing it on a floppy disk: not soupy.
  • Setting the right time and date on a clock to get a jade eye to put in a stone head to open a case with a musical puzzle which opens a hidden door: very soupy.

Web Animation

• Dorkly Originals pokes fun at Resident Evil's famously nonsensical puzzle logic in their Resident Evil Roommate short.

Webcomics

• The Adventures of Dr. McNinja parodied one of the more famous recurring Zelda puzzles in this strip.
• Parodied in Problem Sleuth, where all sorts of "weird puzzle shit" blocks your path. The solution is typically either giving up and checking GAMEFAQS for a cheat code, or activating a switch halfway across the building. Eventually the character encounters a puzzle so mend-bendingly obtuse that they reload the game from a save state made after it was solved. Of course, this still leaves the question of who solved it in the first place. A time traveling Pickle Inspector, as it turns out.
• Lampshaded in Silent Hill: Promise. "Who makes an arcade token into a key?" indeed.
• Texts from Superheroes lampshades how Resident Evil tended to use this trope.
• Parodied in this strip from Penny Arcade, in which an Umbrella employee complains about how he needed four crests, three keys, and a jewel just to get to the kitchen. PA also mocks the Professor Layton series here.
• This Unwinder's Tall Comics alludes to this trope with an actual soup can.
• This xkcd comic on a natural human tendency: "Whenever I learn a new skill, I concoct elaborate fantasy scenarios where it lets me save the day."
• Skin Horse: Black ops agency Anasigma makes you do this to apply to see its org chart.

Western Animation

• An episode of Phineas and Ferb has the brothers use a computer to generate a complicated maze, and several doors are locked out with various puzzles, including but not limited to a chessboard, a jar of jellybeans with a numeric pad asking the number in the jar, and a room with the "Idol Switching" scene from Indiana Jones. They even have the jacket and hat on the wall. On the aforementioned jellybeans in a jar, Buford, in true Cutting the Knot fashion, simply eats all of the jellybeans, then puts the jar back and enters "0".
  Baljeet: OK, technically, you are correct. But you did not show your work!
• The Powerpuff Girls: In "Him Diddle Riddle," HIM kidnaps Professor Utonium and challenges Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup to a solve a series of puzzles before time runs out. His final riddle is the hardest: "Where is boiling and freezing at the same time?" The girls are stumped until, of all people, the Mayor chimes in with the answer: they need to find where the latitude and longitude lines 212 and 32 degrees—the boiling and freezing point of water on a Fahrenheit scale—intersect, which happens to be the Outta Time diner right there in Townsville. Or there's an ice cream truck on fire.

Real Life

• A textbook for 8th grade Spanish class tried to frame the lessons with a very loose narrative. You, the reader/student, were a secret agent airlifted onto a Spanish-speaking island somewhere and repeatedly had to rendezvous with other agents. Invariably, your contacts would always give you twenty pages of silly Spanish exercises to work on (learning how to say useful phrases like "Oh, it's the king who used to play funeral chants on the drum.") to prove your identity. The exact same narrative existed in the same grade-level class for French, Italian, and probably some other languages, too.
  • Many, many K-12 textbooks, in a misfired attempt to "make learning fun," will feature word problems with all kinds of strange, contrived situations that must be solved by mastery of the subject at hand (like, say, using algebra to help a friendly space alien figure out whether Jesse or Miguel ate more sloppy joes at the school picnic), as opposed to offering realistic scenarios where understanding the subject can be vital in day-to-day life (like using algebra to calculate how much compounded interest you'd end up owing on a loan).
• Escape rooms rely on contrived situations to some degree. A combo lock may be placed somewhere unexpected, like a dollhouse. The digits needed to unlock this combo lock might be written on various objects scattered around, with no apparent reason except that it's fun to search for hidden things. The correct sequence for a series of buttons might be revealed by solving a Sudoku. Some rooms will concoct an in-story justification for its puzzle barriers in an effort to avoid this trope, but many don't bother since playing the escape room game is why most people are there in the first place.

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