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?
when your main stat is strength, and you've entirely ignored int/wis
Seriously though, if the cable doesn't want to come out with reasonable force, the solution is PROBABLY NOT to apply more force. What kind of cavemen do you have working there?