7 Impossible Puzzles You Had No Chance of Solving Alone

Some videogame puzzles are so impossibly hard, so brain meltingly complex, that we cannot fathom how anyone was able to figure them out without a walkthrough. Watch on for 7 of the toughest puzzles in videogame history, and subscribe for more videos like this from Outside Xbox!

---

Outside Xbox brings you daily videos about videogames, especially Xbox games. Join us for new gameplay, original list videos, previews and other things (ask us about the other things).

Thanks for watching and be excellent to each other in the comments.

[chrisschoenthaler]

The fact that the Fez puzzle was solved by hundreds of people working together to brute-force an answer through process of elimination is both inspiring and disappointing.

[lozzimusprime]

People who create walkthroughs for ridiculous puzzle games are true heroes.

[brknglasses]

One of the best feelings in all of gaming is coming back to a hard puzzle you couldn't solve as a kid, and nailing it!
One of the worst is coming back to those puzzles you could never solve; and realizing nothing has changed.

[saoirsedeltufo]

I'm so used to clickbait that I naturally assumed these would be tricky but doable puzzles but no, you weren't wrong, these are absolutely ridiculous. 10/10 video

[mattball]

I love that you can tell that Andy's 'instructions' are actually a D&D character sheet

[MegaBearsFan]

Really surprised not to see the final puzzle of P.T. in this list, considering that it was deliberately designed to require international cooperation over the internet, it was only solved because somebody accidentally stumbled onto the solution, and (like with Fez) the community still doesn't exactly know what the solution actually is supposed to be, or how the developers intended players to solve it.

[Daijaga]

My teenage son and I solving the Tunic puzzle together was the highlight of my gaming year last year. Ill never forget us flipping the pages and drawing the map, finding the extra save file, hurriedly jamming in the hundred keys....such a cool culmination of gaming we got to share together

[KRNGE]

"A good puzzle makes you feel smart once you have that 'AHA!' moment, while a bad one hides half the pieces from you!"

- Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw

[obelus]

My mom and I used to play Riven together back in the day and the puzzle that stumped us was the animal sound in the stone circle puzzle. Ended up buying the guidebook just for that answer and played the rest clean. We had a full notebook going and circled around so many times trying to figure out what we... myst. I'll see myself out.

[twinklefeet]

You could probably make an entire list of these purely from the Discworld games. I love them, but some of the puzzles are incredibly inscrutible. Such as the one where you need to travel back in time to the previous evening, put a frog in your past self's sleeping mouth to attract a butterfly, the wings flapping causing a localised rainstorm over a monk in a completely different location via "chaos theory", who then hangs his robe out to dry, which you can then steal and use as a disguise. The puzzle was so obnoxious they made fun of it in the second game.

[Jaknize]

Played myst and Riven back in the day with my Dad. Took us 2 years to figure out the marble puzzle. One day it just hit my Dad and we got it. It was overly complicated.

[BenMarcWilliams]

8:05 MacBeth is the _one_ Shakespearean play I'm familiar with, yet that hint somehow did _nothing_ for me. I can only imagine how "helpful" the other hints must be.

Also, the difference between the difficulty of the Normal version of that puzzle and the Hard version of that puzzle is a gap wider than the grand canyon.

[kevin_f]

I loved Tunic, but there was no way I was figuring out that save file path. Thank you, walkthrough makers!

[vt-]

Tunic's puzzles actually go even further. There are actually some puzzles in the game that you wouldn't even know are there unless you learn to read the "Incomprehensible Language" runes. Spoilers to follow for mostly "beyond critical path" content.

On one of the last pages of the manual, in the memo section, is a series of hand-written notes meant to give you hints on how to translate it. First there is a picture of a Sword and the Fox, with the last rune of Fox and first rune of Sword circled to highlight that they are the same Rune. That is supposed to clue you in that the Runes are actually phonetic English; Fox ends and Sword begins with the same "s" sound. Next to that is a chart that shows a bunch of runes split between their outside portion and inside portion, which shows you all of the possible phonemes and clues you in that each Rune has two parts, a consonant (inside, which you know from "s") and vowel (outside). On a completely different page it notes that a circle at the bottom of the Rune flips its order; it's normally Consonant then Vowel, but for a word like "is" you need to do the vowel first.

From there you need to guess at what a word is in order to fill in your translation chart, which lets you read more words, which lets you make more educated guesses for more phonemes. Eventually it is possible to translate all of the text in the game, which lets you read up on the game's story (or you could look up existing translations online).

It also reveals a few more clues. For example, if you stand in water for 60 seconds then the first page (back of the front cover you got after the mountain door) will have more text on it, which translates to a poem, which you have to interpret into button inputs (ex. "Corrected" means Right), which needs to be entered in at a location specified by the adjacent picture. The reward is a golden statue.

There's 12 of those golden statues. If you get half or more of them then a portal appears in their trophy room (which itself is easy to miss). That takes you to a new area which has runes show up if you start using the 'holy cross.' What you need to do here is use another clue in the manual to enter the 'golden path' (the mountain door puzzle)... backwards and as viewed from the inside. There is no indication that you did it right except the Runes can be read. The runes give you a URL for a website with a looping gif.

I managed to get all of that on my own with only minor hints, mostly from spoilers. The rest I've only read about. If you inspect the website's source you will find it has an audio file available to download. It has music, but also some interesting sounds. People decided to turned it into a Spectrogram, and lo and behold there are Runes hidden in it! With corresponding series of rising or falling notes... Wait, you mean there is an audio version of the language encoding too?! Things like the Turrets talk?! ... Is this one of the reasons the game is named Tunic? Yup!

[AshtarteD]

The worst part of the Fez puzzle is even after the community brute forced and tried to reverse engineer how they were meant to get there many members asked creator Phil Fish how it was supposed to work. He proceeded to do the most Phil Fish thing he could, bitching that they cheated the solution and he'd rather die with the secret than reveal it to cheaters.

I'm so glad Marcus Beer drove Fish to ragequit gaming.

[alamand]

Immediately thought of west of loathing's military cemetery puzzles, it starts out with fairly straightforward morse code before getting more and more complicated until near the end you're expected to see random times and realize you need to convert them into naval semaphore flag codes. Even more evil it gives you a reward soon after that step that a reasonable player might think meant they had solved it, but there's still a couple steps to go until you get the final reward.

[staceyb]

I managed to do the mountain door puzzle with the help of my mum! I got the 9th page by accident simply because I was trying to find something hidden in the page, gave up for the day and quit. When I came back, spooky save file! Then noticed the line, mum figured I should record the directions and the rest is history!

I still have the piece of paper with the huge pattern of the directions on it XD (we drew it all as one consecutive line)

[Alipes]

The Witness has what could be considered an even harder puzzle - "Hall of the Mountain King". It's more of a puzzle gauntlet - timed and randomized - so you can't just lookup a solution online to get through it.

[laterkater]

I have a mate who's favourite game as a kid was Myst and who ended up going to uni for game design. They somehow managed to solve the Tunic puzzle while streaming on twitch with no hints and I still have no idea how they cracked it, even with Mike explaining the solution to me. 🤣

[Cuiasodo]

I audibly groaned in frustration when the marble puzzle from Riven came up. I spent SO LONG going through that 3D pin map, writing down coordinates, only to be off by like two spaces and have to look up the solution. Which, back then, required one of those Prima Official Strategy guides.