Mind-Bending Challenges Await You
Ever felt completely outmatched by a game that seemed to read your mind—and then outwit it? Some puzzles aren’t just tough; they’re masterpieces of design meant to challenge even the sharpest players. These aren’t your average in-game roadblocks. They push limits and live in gaming legends. If you're curious about the most brain-bending moments ever coded, check out these 20 hardest puzzles in video games.
1. Piano Puzzle – Silent Hill
Inside Midwich Elementary, a broken piano becomes your next big obstacle. To move forward, you’ll need to solve a riddle called the “song without sound” by pressing the right keys. Unlike later puzzles, this solution never changes with difficulty.
2. Water Temple – The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time
Things get real the moment you enter this sixth dungeon. Constantly adjusting water levels while swapping Iron Boots turns progress into a headache. It became so notorious that Ocarina’s 3DS remake added a shortcut just to ease the pain.
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3. The Challenge – The Witness
Present in the secret caves, this timed trial doesn’t play fair. Each puzzle panel gets randomized, so memorizing won’t help. If you haven’t fully mastered every mechanic by now, this final test will send you straight back to square one.
4. Monolith Puzzle – Fez
Unlocking the Black Monolith Room leads to one of the most cryptic puzzles ever made. No clues, no prompts—just a strange input sequence. Players spent years trying to solve it, and when they finally did, it only rewarded a cube.
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5. Riven Marble Puzzle – Myst: Riven
This grid-based puzzle on Survey Island expects sharp eyes and sharper thinking. You’ll need to place fire marbles using subtle clues like sound effects and telescope views. Even though the answer stays the same, piecing it together still feels intense.
6. Shakespeare Anthology Puzzle – Silent Hill 3
Inside a quiet bookstore, Heather stumbles across five scattered Shakespeare volumes. Arranging them just right reveals a code you’ll need to move on. Depending on your chosen riddle difficulty, this literary puzzle can shift from simple to downright brain-twisting.
7. Goat Puzzle – Broken Sword: The Shadow Of The Templars
At Lochmarne Castle, a goat blocks your path in the most stubborn way possible. Figuring out how to distract it requires thinking completely differently. The challenge frustrated so many players that the Director’s Cut later toned it way down.
8. Braille Chamber Puzzle – Pokémon Ruby & Sapphire
Route 134 hides this puzzle behind a wall of unreadable text. You’ll need to use Dive and Surf, then decode Braille just to enter. Many players unknowingly learned real Braille while chasing the legendary trio hidden behind this tricky challenge.
9. Hatching The Owl – Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake
During the Zanzibar Land mission, Snake finds two eggs—but only one hatches into an owl. You’ll use it to trick guards into disabling a laser grid. It’s a bizarre, brilliant twist straight from the mind of gaming visionary Hideo Kojima.
10. Rubber Ducky Puzzle – The Longest Journey
This odd puzzle unfolds in Venice, where you’re stuck trying to retrieve a metro key. Your only help? A seagull, a punctured ducky, and some clever setup. It’s weird, but it works, and fans still argue whether it’s brilliant or bonkers.
11. Selenitic Age – Myst
Accessing this Age starts with powering a cabin and decoding a sound pattern from a book. Inside, you’ll match audio tones and travel through a maze guided by sound. Designed in 1993, it cleverly showed off what CD-ROM audio could do.
12. Naga Sadow’s Tomb – Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic
Deep in Korriban’s wastelands, this tomb pulls you through logic puzzles, combat trials, and a deadly acid pool crossed using a freeze grenade. No matter your alignment, you’ll have to survive it. The whole sequence nods to classic Sith lore.
13. Impossible Geometry Puzzles – Antichamber
You’ll quickly realize normal logic doesn’t apply here. Paths shift behind you, while rooms loop strangely, and puzzles rely on changing perspectives. Built around non-Euclidean space, the game rewires how you think, and it stunned indie festival crowds even before launch.
14. World 6: Hesitance Puzzles – Braid
In this world, time doesn’t just rewind—it bends to your frustration. Slowing effects and precise rewinds are the only way to grab each elusive piece. The difficulty isn’t a bug—it’s the whole point, designed to make you rethink everything.
15. Energy Pillar Puzzle – Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic
Inside Naga Sadow’s tomb, a computer puzzle dares you to move energy disks without breaking stacking rules. Mess it up, and your party could die. It’s a brutal take on the Towers of Hanoi, with consequences that really sting.
16. Chemical Mixing Puzzle – Resident Evil 0
To get past locked doors in the Umbrella Training Facility, you’ll need to create a chemical called Stripping Agent. Only Rebecca can do it using her exclusive Mixing Set, making this puzzle a smart showcase of the game’s partner-switching mechanic.
17. Advanced Test Chambers – Portal 2
After Wheatley takes control, these new chambers feel wildly offbeat. Expect light bridges, excursion funnels, and gel-based chaos that demand perfect timing. They’re unpredictable and even feature walls that spell out “TEST,” just to mess with you harder.
18. The Golden Path – Stephen’s Sausage Roll
Finishing the game means conquering this brutal final stretch. Spread across multiple islands, the sausage puzzles push your skills to the limit. Mastering movement and placement isn’t optional—without full control, the end will cook your brain more than the sausages.
19. Nomai Quantum Moon Puzzle – Outer Wilds
This moon won’t sit still, which means solving its mystery means understanding quantum mechanics. As it jumps across the solar system, you’ll uncover the Nomai’s secrets but only if you grasp the strange rules guiding its behavior. It’s science fiction done right.
Alex Beachum, creator of Outer Wilds on Wikimedia
20. Glyph & Riddle Chains – La-Mulana
Exploring these ruins means staring down riddles that don’t just stand alone—they stack. One glyph unlocks another, leading you deeper into the mystery. Most players kept notes by hand, just to survive puzzles that feel ripped straight from the '80s.
