Thinking about giving up. Here are my reasons.

[ZeSjob]

How do you make a game that gets really boring after a while? Make it have lots of trial and error puzzles in it. This is not fun.

Why are there so many trial and error puzzles? Most of the puzzles in the game work like this:

You come across a puzzle and have no idea how to solve it because there doesn't seem to be any logical way to do it. Then what do you do? You start trying out everything you can possibly think of and oftentimes after exhausting every single possibility you finally solve it... only to enounter another puzzle just like that. Most frustrating.

The Maze of Madness is a prime example of this. All the teleporters look exactly the same and the only way to solve it is to try out every single move combination one by one.

The combat also gets boring very quickly. Especially after seeing the same enemies over and over again that all look exactly the same. The game should have a bigger variety of enemies. It's not fun seeing the same skeleton warrior for the 100th time.


About the "Pillared Hallway" puzzle:

Why would give someone the hint to a puzzle so far ahead that they almost forget about it? What if they have dropped the scroll in the meantime (because they thought that it was meant for some sort of a secret area that they missed and NOT for the main part of the game)?

And the worst of all was the part where you had to stand where the shadows of the torches cross and then throw rocks... except that you have no way of solving it if you are running the game on a low-end machine like I am. Turning on shadows makes the game run at 3 frames per second. So, it means that people with low-end computers aren't invited to solve that puzzle.

All things considered, there were fun moments as well, but it just gets tedious and I don't want to look up things from a walkthrough... neither do I want to just sit there and exhaust every single possibility. This concept is very similar to an old internet game called "notpron". I'm guessing that the developers got their inspiration from that game, no?

[Komag]

It's an old-school game, that's somewhat just part of the territory. Grimrock is actually far more lenient and forgiving than the original dungeon crawlers, but it retains much of their obtuse puzzle logic, which many of us enjoy. The pillared hallway is one of the very few places in the game with puzzle elements far apart, usually everything is pretty close by.

[Ixnatifual]

One thing I really liked about LoG compared to older games was actually how well-crafted the vast majority of puzzles were made in terms of both clues and designs.

The pillared hallway puzzle I think was the only one I had to look up to progress. And it wasn't because of the puzzle itself, but because I didn't know you could cut off tapestries by attacking them, so I didn't find the clue (and I had tried manipulating tapestries, so it wasn't for lack of trying).

I believe a couple of the optional puzzles were rather obscure, but that's less of a problem when they're optional.

[eLPuSHeR]

For the "maze of madness" style puzzles the automap is a handy tool. It seems you bought this game without trying a demo first. And it seems it's not your style of game. I found some puzzles more difficult than others but to call them "ilogical" seems inappropiate.

PS - If you think the original LoG is devious, you should lay your eyes upon some modifications made by fans.

[Ryeath_Greystalk]

It seems you bought this game without trying a demo first.

PS - If you think the original LoG is devious, you should lay your eyes upon some modifications made by fans.

To be fair I don't believe there is a demo available. I know there wasn't when I purchased through Steam.

I was going to suggest the OP try a few of the mods. I still have not completed the original game, not getting any lower than level 10, but have completed about 5 mods so far.

[karadoc]

I wasn't really bothered by the trial-and-error puzzles. I found all of the puzzles to be fairly short and somewhat thought provoking. It's true that some (eg. the maze of madness) are solved by just trying everything, but there are only a handful of different things to try in those puzzles. It isn't a timesink, but rather a test of memory. It only takes a couple of minutes to solve the puzzles.

The challenge in these puzzles is to first work out what it is you are meant to be solving, and then how to solve it, and then - if it happens to be one of the few trial-and-error puzzles then it is just becomes a test of short-term memory.

For the shadow puzzle you mentioned, I don't think its fair to blame the game for you not being able to solve that. Certainly you were at a disadvantage if you have to play with shadows turned off - but that doesn't stop you from solving the puzzle. In my case, I wasn't carrying any torches when I got to that puzzle and so I had to solve it by mentally drawing a line from where the torch-holders are to where the pillars are... You don't actually need the shadows to be drawn to know where the shadows would be.

It probably would be nice if the game had a few more types of enemies - but I think it had enough enemies for the length of the game — it isn't a very long game.

In any case, I guess it's fair to say that this style of game does suit everybody's tastes. In my case, I thought the puzzles were fine and the game was fun and engaging. A couple of the puzzles were challenging for awhile but I didn't get stuck on any of them. (For me, the hardest one I can remember was finding where the dragons were gazing in one of the early levels... I played through in "old school mode", and so it took me awhile to work that one out.)