Skyrim players debate the hardest in-game puzzles

When they’re not mucking around or creating hilariously broken potions, Skyrim players love a good dungeon-clearing run.

After all, how are you supposed to take your combat skills to the next level if you’re not murdering hordes of bandits, mages or draugr with your weaponry of choice on a regular basis?

That said, sometimes you can find your bloodthirsty onslaught being interrupted by a conundrum designed to prevent you from progressing to the heart of whatever ruin you’ve delved into. While such puzzles rarely trouble the game’s veterans anymore, they can be more challenging for newbies, as players on Reddit are discussing.

Has your Dragonborn ever been left scratching their head mid-dungeon run?

The thread on this topic in the Skyrim subreddit began with a post from user floxasfornia, who shared a screenshot of a brain-teaser in an ancient Nordic ruin that had caused them a bit of trouble and asking: “Any puzzles that stumped you the first time?”

Their fellow players came up with a few ideas, with user Lunarcyanide recalling: “Personally, the Bloodskaal blade was the hardest for me (on the) first try. I didn’t realise it had a ranged attack, so for about five minutes I searched the room, then loaded into a previous save (and) searched the whole dungeon for 15 minutes.”

User Psychobite_74 nominated the riddle included in the destruction master spell quest, saying: “I always have to look up the answer because it's just too cryptic if you don't already know the locations.”

On the other hand, user CamzyKong cited a glitch as responsible for making the puzzle in the Dragonborn DLC’s Nchardak more difficult than it should have been, saying: “One of the cubes lost its arrow above it and I was stuck looking for over an hour for a cube I already had.”

Meanwhile, user ant_man1411 didn’t seem to have had any trouble, suggesting: “I hope (the) next Elder Scrolls adds some actually tougher types of puzzles and more varied puzzles in general. Something like a Legend of Zelda (inspired) puzzle every once in a while wouldn’t be too bad.”

Regardless of whether you want to be flummoxed more regularly by The Elder Scrolls 6’s conundrums, make sure to follow us for more updates on the wacky world of Skyrim modding.