Bard's Tale 2 has timed puzzles at the end of each dungeon, where you have a real time limit to solve a puzzle or your party gets wiped out. Do you like the idea? Do you think it was well implemented? Or do you consider such snares to be something that does not belong in a cRPG?

By the way, a couple facts about certain Death Snares:

The second one can be trivialized by the save anywhere feature. You can't save in a Death Snare, but can save right before it, and if you guess wrong in the snare, you can just reload.

In the DOS version, clearing the final snare does not properly end the timer. The game still won't let you pause or save until you go to the Adventurer's Guild. (Fortunately, since you aren't actually in the snare, you can cast a spell to teleport to the in.) (Do any other versions have this bug?)

They were a serious challenge that was kind of out-of-line with the difficulty of rest of the game. There were also some clueing problems that meant most many would never solve them without help.

They were higher-stress game components than I'd prefer, but if you combine considering all the clues in the game with a willingness to retry them and do random stuff, they are moderately solvable.

The main problem with them, IMO, is the solutions didn't make any sense. That is, if i give you a puzzle wehere the answer is clearly 6 characters long, and you work on the puzzle for a while and come up with "56WZY7" that's kind of unsatisfying, even if it is correct. It smells like a mistake. A better puzzle should have an answer like "ARTFUL". Similarly, some of the snare answers are highly arbitrary.

I also don't feel like the realtime nature of them adds a lot.