Adventure / Point-and-Click / Narrative Games

Iirc there's a puzzle in Druids that requires you to poison a homeless guy and steal money from his cup to make a phone call.

Washing the car to get it to rain in maniac Mansion: day of the tentacle is a classic example of adventure brain puzzles relying on some idioms that aren't universal

The robots builder puzzle in armikrog I definitely got stuck on, not sure if that was common or it just didn't click for me

Kyrandia 3: Malcolm's Revenge - the "puzzle" that broke me was the cat/dog island and bushwhacking in the jungle.

Basically how it goes is:

• you travel maze like jungle, throw away ticks from your inventory to stay alive and use a machete on bushes.
• each bush can leave 3 things after it: snakes, a bone, or NOTHING! The snakes kill you unless you quickly smack them with the machete.
• After gathering an inventory full of bones, you take them to a dog, give them to the dog one by one. For each bone the dog goes and buries it on the ground. The dog MAY dig up a gem while burying the bone, more often than not it doesn't. You need (IIRC) 8 gems.
• I just save scummed this: reloaded game every time a bone didn't give a gem, and saved if it did. Took me about 10-15 minutes of save/load nonsense to get all gems. Imagine doing it legitly?
• The gems are used few screens over on cat statues. 1 gem per statue. But which gem for which statue? Something about gem color (eg. blue) and matching cat statue (eg. cat statue with fish tail, so blue = water, put it in that statue). Not all of the combinations make sense.
• If you put the gems in to wrong statues -> POOF, gems are gone, afaik you need to do the jungle-grind again! Or just reload the game, hopefully you saved before the attempt.

The game has pretty wild item gathering logic overall, some items you can only get randomly from a trash heap. You basically pick stuff up until you get the item or the heap is exhausted, in which case you walk out of the screen and back in and start picking items.

One particular trash heap requires a walkabout of few screens to get to, and your time on the heap is limited. You need to do the walk several times until you get the mission critical items.

Overall, the game was fairly maddening to play. Did not vibe with it at all.

In Kyrandia 2, there were few puzzles that were quite hard to solve. Eg. one potion recipe requires something called "a windy woof". It's not referring to wind, but windy as in twisting. And there's an item that's "gnarly bark", it's a twisty piece of wood (woof = bark, ha).

Towards the end of Kyrandia 2 there was a puzzle that wanted to build potions to match the colors of a rainbow. Orange got me stumped, until I looked up a walkthrough: need a sandwitch potion. The thing is, earlier in the game when you made the sandwitch potion, it didn't produce a bottle with liquid, the bottle had a sandwhich. But in THIS puzzle, the recipe produced an orange potion... What is consistency?

I don't know if I'd say it's the worst, but it must be in the top 10: The cookie baking puzzle from Still Life.

TL;DR The author of the puzzle mocked complaining players for not having basic cooking knowledge, but I think that the more you actually know about cooking, the less likely you are to find the "correct" solution.

The player character has promised to make a batch of Grandma's special Christmas cookies. However, Grandma wrote her method in code (e.g. "a cup of love", "a tablespoon of romance"), and while the PC can remember the list of ingredients, she can't remember which is which.

Now, some things are pretty clear; the recipe isn't going to call for two cups of ginger and a teaspoon of flour. And there's only one item given without a quantity, so that must be the egg (even if it goes into the mix at the completely wrong time). But there are literally no other hints in the game, and the puzzle's author confirmed (more on this later) that you're supposed to solve it by having some real-world, basic cooking knowledge.

The problem is that the author didn't seem to know quite as much about cooking as they thought they did. Also, there are places where swapping ingredients would be perfectly acceptable (it would change the flavour, but how is the player supposed to know how the finished cookies are meant to taste?)

When I played the game, I did have some basic cooking knowledge. I'd made (from scratch) cookies, cakes, soups, stews, and even done a couple of roasts. I tried to solve this puzzle on my own multiple times. And the game won't tell you you've got it wrong until you've mixed everything and put it in the oven. I'm sure this would've been annoying enough with a mouse, but I was playing with a controller on an OG XBox, moving a slow pointer around with a thumbstick. Ugh.

Anyway, after spending far too long on it, I hit the net for a walkthrough, but in the process I found an interview with the author, in which this very puzzle was discussed. The interviewer mentioned that a lot of players hated this puzzle, and asked if the author had any response. As much as smugness can be transmitted through plain text, he smugly stated that it wasn't his fault if players didn't have basic life skills like simple cooking.

I won't go into details, but the more I've learned about cooking in general, and baking cookies in particular, the less sense the method of that recipe makes.

the goat thing in broken sword

I remember struggling with one of the puzzles in Myst that requires memorizing a song and playing it on a piano, but the resolution of the game and the size of the piano made the individual keys super fucking small and actually hitting the right keys in the right order was stupidly hard for a puzzle that itself wasn't really any harder than the others in the game.

The cat hair moustache puzzle in Gabriel Knight 3 is pretty infamous, for good reason.

There's a few in The 11th Hour that I think might qualify lol

If I recall the old PC game, the seventh guest has a puzzle that requires you to play the computer in a game of cool spot. The computer AI is so good that if you play anything less than optimally you'll lose every time. Fortunately the game has a built-in puzzle skip system which you can use to avoid it completely.

the crab races in Cryo's Atlantis.

it works like this:

1. pick one of five crabs
2. the crabs race. their stats are random every race.
3. if your crab wins three races, you get to continue the game.

Use Max on cat. In Sam 'n Max Hit the Road. For some reason you are supposed to remember that an informant is waiting for you and have to deduce that this silent cat is that informant but you only get information out of it when you use Max to pull a paper out of the cat's stomach.

The fire marbles puzzle in Riven. It’s outrageously difficult, and it was one of the major complaints about the game at the time. Even now, it’s still very very difficult. Way more so than any other puzzle in the game.

Zero Escape VLR's pantry room puzzle for me - was stuck on it for hours and had to look up a guide because of how unintuitive it was. Can't say it was necessarily an awful puzzle though.

Probably something in Gobliins 2