Nintendo Hard/Adventure Games

• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy adventure game is the text-based puzzle equivalent of Platform Hell. The mere mention of the phrase "Babel fish" can be enough to make grown men cry.
• Shadowgate. Dear God, Shadowgate. Have fun with a first-person point-and-click adventure-type game with even more random instant deaths ("you take a look at the scroll, only to find out it's a scroll of explode and kill whoever tries to read it, nyah nyah") than Nethack, and sometimes the right answer is fairly obscure.
  • There is one room of the game with three mirrors. The only way to proceed is by smashing one of them with a sledgehammer to reveal a door that you open and go through. However, another one apparently has a magical black hole or something behind it as smashing it reveals a vortex that sucks you in to your death, and the third just has a wall, but trying to smash it somehow leads you to breaking it in such a way that the flying shards kill you. Hope you saved before having to take a complete unaided wild guess as to which one's which.... And that's one of the easier puzzles.
  • One room has a pit with an obvious ladder affixed to one side. I hope you're not dumb enough to think that means you can climb down and that they won't just reveal afterwards that the ladder only goes down about an inch past what you can see from the top and then suddenly stops, leading you to fall to your death. Obviously the answer is to only come back much, much later, when you have a spell that can make ropes levitate.
  • Did we mention your character will sometimes gleefully commit suicide if you so much as look at certain items in your inventory the wrong way?
    • Not only that, but for every window, well, bridge, and basically every piece of the environment for which your character can interpret the "look at" command as "kill yourself using," he does.
    • Seriously. He really does. It's like deciding that you want to look at a butter knife in your kitchen and your brain interpreting that idea as "let's jam it in my eye and see what happens."
    • They lampshade this a little bit because you actually CAN deliberately kill yourself. Just select the sword from your inventory, and "use" on "self." Your guy guts himself and dies, with the onscreen text pointing out that "suicide will not help you on your quest."
    • Strangely, the same thing happens when you use the sledgehammer on yourself as well. Literally the same thing, down to the same method and description. As in, "you plunge the hammer into your chest. Blood flows from the wound...."
    • And of course, the torches. Using a torch on yourself causes you to progressively burn yourself worse until on the third try, you light your hair on fire, drop the torch, and run screaming until you burn to death.
  • And the game doesn't care how brightly lit a room you're in or even if you're outside in the middle of the day with the sun visibly shining, woe unto you if your torch ever goes out.
  • The Swedish translation of the game (a rare occurrence in those days) makes things worse by mistranslating one of the objects needed to kill the final boss. The only way to figure it out is by trial and error.
• The Uninvited was MUCH worse than Shadowgate. In the start of the game, there's a hallway where a mysterious woman appears that is actually a ghost and will kill you. The only way to beat her is to enter one specific upstairs room first and find something called "No Ghost" to use on her. Oh, and you have to OPEN the No Ghost before using it or it won't work; your character will just approach the ghost, shake a capped bottle at it, and get the hell killed out of himself. It just gets worse from there.
  • In a game like this, a huge ruby sounds like a totally awesome thing that you will need later, so of course you take it. Several minutes later, more than long enough to forget about it in the midst of avoiding all the OTHER death lurking about the place, you get a few cryptic messages about slowly having your consciousness encroached upon by a strange force. Then you die. The game never explains that the ruby in your inventory is the source of the possession, and if you choose to restart after dying of it, you will still have it.
    • This only applies to the NES version. In all other versions, this happens whether you have the ruby or not (although it takes much longer for the game to kill you in all other versions).
  • Oh and how about the literal Ghost Butler upstairs? To defeat him, you need to use spray adhesive on an outdoor railing and trap a spider that walks by. Then, you use something called "Spider Cider" to knock out the tiny arachnid and take it with you. Then, you throw that little spider at the butler, scaring him and making him disappear. Some players may have figured out how to catch the spider without looking it up, but it's impossible to guess where to use it because there's no indication anywhere in the game that the butler is afraid of spiders. None.
  • At the very least, Shadowgate gave clues stating that the Staff of Ages, Golden Blade, Silver Orb, Bladed Sun Talisman and Platinum Horn were they keys to beating the Big Bad. No such clues were given as to how to finish Uninvited. So of course you would just figure out that you're supposed to turn on a bathtub to flood a bathroom and float up to the hatch above (disguised as a light fixture, natch), then hit your sister to release the demon inside her, THEN kill the demon with holy water from a goblet that you took from a church much earlier in the game!!!
• And Deja Vu is no better, simply put. Improper usage of any item in ICOM's adventure games is a game over.
  • In fact, it adds its own little twist. Some of the items you get are needed to prove your innocence. Others are the planted evidence against you. You'll need to figure out which is which, and discard the latter in the sewer. Miss one of the plants, and you'll get a nice shiny set of silver bracelets.
• Star Wars: Bounty Hunter becomes this starting from chapter 3 (Oovo IV) onwards, pitting Jango Fett against hordes of well-armed opponents, snipers, Demonic Spiders and expecially bottomless chasms difficult to navigate without a master control of the jetpack. Furthermore the checkpoints are very far from each other, you have limited lives (which can't be restored) and more than once you'll have to check any enemy you meet to make sure that he hasn't a bounty on his head.
• Double Switch. Think of the game as Night Trap, but with the difficulty cranked Up to Eleven. For starters, this game has no timer, so you will have a hard time knowing just when an enemy shows up so you can trap him. You have to be careful not to let too many enemies escape, or it's Game Over. Some of them are top priority, because they will attempt to cut off your connection to the security system, and if they do that, it's Game Over. Some of them will try to kill the tenants of the apartment building, so you will have to trap them, or it's Game Over. As the game goes on, you will have to quickly switch between screens, and timing becomes vital. There is one point in the game where you will be given a trap, and you actually have to be at that screen to be told about it - while simultaneously saving a tenant's live in another screen. You need that trap, or it will be Game Over later on. There are points where have to keep traps disarmed and then quickly arm them again. Failure to do so results in Game Over. Yes, timing becomes increasingly important as the game goes on, and you will have to activate traps at some rather precise moments. Welcome to Nintendo Hard!
• Deadly Towers.