I was chugging along at a pretty decent pace in Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, but one particular "feature" sapped my little remaining enthusiasm for its mediocrity: those stupid tile puzzles.
The basic idea is arranging a set of two-square (domino-style) tiles along the floor according to a starting pattern. Solid basic notion, idiotically implemented for several reasons:
1) They can be slotted forwards or backwards, but nothing indicates the position they'll take once laid down. There is no rationale behind discerning this by trial and error.
2) Instead of universally recognized ideograms (plus signs, hearts, etc.) they use their own script... which is actually a great idea I'd be glad to support (I've even requested an alienese keyboard) if the resulting characters weren't so similar as to blend together, making them an unwieldy chore to memorize.
3) The tiles are too small to see in your inventory, and for some insane unreason were drawn with a pointless reflection effect in the middle further obscuring details.
4) Even if you understand the basic idea and know how to start, you're left with at least four paths to suss out by mindless trial and error (due to the second symbol on each tile) requiring several clicks to open a slot, select a tile, confirm your selection, then when it turns out it was the wrong one, select the slot, pick up the tile, confirm your de-selection, backtrack thus a few tiles, etceteree, etceterah
5) According to online chatter, in order to get even the slightest hint as to their meaning you supposedly have to drag along one of the most annoying companions in a very annoying roster, meaning you're arbitrarily punished for unrelated roleplaying choices.
I would've been willing to put up with all that nonsense. I did the first, simple, introductory puzzle and returned three acts later for the second, only to be completely stumped... only to be told by an online cheat-sheet that the instructions were in this case a red herring.
... yeeaaah. Fuck it.
At this point even the infamous "rubber ducky" puzzle from The Longest Journey made for better gameplay, and I finally realized they're doing it on purpose. It's meant to waste your time squinting and randomly ignoring one instruction or another. This is not a puzzle at all. It's an interface timesink. Instead of intellectually challenging and rewarding problem-solving, this is yet another pure playtime padder like the fights requiring 1/400 odds opening dice rolls. Skip it. Despite having more than enough content for epic-length run-throughs, Wrath's developers still patheticaly, insecurely padded out the campaign's length by mindless repetition every chance they got.
Come on, Owlcat. You're far from the pinnacle of your creative field... but you're better than this.
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edit 2021/11/23
What really singes my tail hairs is that just a lope and poke later I ran across a truly entertaining puzzle in Wrath of the Righteous:
Pulura's Fall took me about five tries and ten minutes to solve and aside from being a reading test instead of visual pattern matching, gets right every single error in execution the other got wrong.
1) No uncertainty as to which symbols light up when you click something.
2) No unnecessary overlap or similarity between symbols (i.e. no "daughter" "doubter" and "draughter")
3) No graphic fuckery.
4) No multiple clicks to execute a single action.
5) No depriving you of information for having better taste in companions.
(Kestoglyr did groan at one point, but that may have been more related to the unremitting horror of his tortured existence than a puzzle-solving hint to his halfling overlord.)
It even includes a possible red herring depending on how you interpret the hints, but this can be eliminated methodically.
So... yeah, Owlcat. You really are better than that!
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