mondo84: Thank you for the giveaway, BillyMaysFan. I'd like to enter for Hitman 2: Silent Assassin.
Last year I played through Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver - good game with a great story! I felt embarrassed at how long it took for me to realize certain things, like being able to switch between the two planes in order to solve certain puzzles or even advance to the next area. I got stuck in one part where you need to switch to the spiritual plane in order to pass through a gate. I was looking all over for levers, blocks, or other hints of a puzzle for probably 30 min. I backtracked and went through the level again. I got a little frustrated until I realized the issue wasn't the game design, but rather me forgetting that my character had a certain ability.
Thanks again, BillyMaysFan, and good luck to all. :)
Heck, I know what you mean, very few games got me overthinking puzzles and environmental platforming quite as Soul Reaver! And it always turned out to be my own fault, for failing to see the obvious solution. I was in my mid teens when I first played it, coming from a background of action RPGs, in which the puzzles were pretty much self-explanatory, and point-and-click adventures, in which even the most illogical of puzzles could always be solved by the old trial and error 'try everything on every thing' formula, and neither of those had me prepared for what I found in Soul Reaver. Whenever I found out the (obvious) solution to a puzzle it always felt rewarding, though it also made me want to facepalm really hard. Against a brick wall. Some of the secondary puzzles, namely the ones you had to solve to get the power glyphs, were downright devious, but the one that scarred me the most was that (now) simple one in the Sound Cathedral, in which you pulled a lever to open a secret door in a wall, but it didn't give you enough time to reach it. I spent whole hours trying everything I could think of, going as far as backtracking to come to that area with a spear, pulling the lever and sticking the spear to the wall to hold the lever in place. Eventually, my corporeal energy drained and I learnt time stands still when in the ethereal plane. Probably my biggest 'DOH!' moment in gaming, ever.