The most ridiculous "puzzle" I've ever seen I encountered recently in Ubisoft's M&MX...in order to get promoted to Archmage it required a test of stepping on the correct floorplates laid out in a 3x3 grid. Get this: no less than *21* plates had to be stepped on *in the correct sequence* before the door would open. Miss one grid in the sequence and you had to start over. But, since the game never informed you that you had made a mistake you didn't know it...the game didn't inform you of how many correct moves you had to make to open the door, either. I spent two hours on it before looking up the answer and I was really pissed because *nobody* could figure that out on his own--I'm quite sure that *everyone* had to cheat to get that particular promotion--which is rather important in the game, imo--if you have a mage in your party.
*21* moves in sequence--*21* correct steps in perfect unbroken order--with no hints whatever as to what was expected. If the puzzle had been laid out so that 6,8,10, or even 12 correct moves would have opened the door, I would have eventually solved it on my own. But *21* perfect, unbroken, sequential moves??? No way. Not possible. Brains don't figure here--the test was deliberately unsolvable so as to appear "hard." It was not hard at all--just impossible to complete without looking up the answer. That's the sort of "puzzle" which is no puzzle at all--terrible, the developers cheated on that one. Every other puzzle in the game I solved on my own, some more difficult than others--but all of them were solvable by the player--with that exception.
