The Trick Shot Puzzle is a puzzle where the player has to shoot a projectile from an exactingly specific position and angle to detonate or trip something that is well out of manual reach. This kind of puzzle often involves ricochet physics, such as a Reflecting Laser.
Also see Pinball Projectile.
Examples:
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Action Adventure
- Several Riddler challenges in Batman: Arkham City involve using the Remote Controlled Batarang to this end.
- Every single use of the grapnel gun in Batman: Vengeance is an example of this.
- Escape From St. Mary's has a variation with a stack of books and a chain.
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1984) text adventure game has (at least) one of these.
- This will show up at least once per game in The Legend of Zelda — one common version involves firing an arrow through a flame/lantern/candle to melt and activate an ice-covered switch.
- The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time: One room in Jabu-Jabu's Belly has you using the Boomerang to hit a switch behind a pane of transparent material. You have to stand at an exact distance from the barrier for the boomerang to hit. The Forest Temple has the classic "shoot arrow through fire onto switch" variety.
- The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages: You get a seed gun that bounces different varieties of magical seeds off walls. It's used for the obligatory "hit the switch around the corner" puzzles. However one boss can only be harmed by seeds while she blinks around an arena full of pillars, making trick shots ideal for taking her down quickly. (This is also a notable subversion of Playing Tennis with the Boss for the series).
- The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass and The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks both have puzzles involving shooting arrows through a series of devices that alter their trajectory and send them elsewhere (ideally, into a switch). One such puzzle requires the player to string his grappling hook rope across a gap and then bounce an arrow off of the rope to hit a switch.
- The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword: As Link explores the Sandship, he has to shoot at the Timeshift Stone from the main external area to regress the whole dungeon into its past form, and at first he can shoot from any angle as long as nothing obstructs. Later on, however, he needs to shoot at it from one of the inner areas of the ship, for which he has to position himself right below the ceiling's rack and aim carefully so the arrow reaches its target.
- The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has two variants of this. Either the projectile is spherical and you have to hit a button at the right time/make ice pillars in the right place/move the platform just right to bounce it, or the projectile is one you have to use Stasis on and hit with delayed momentum to send it flying the right way.
- Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom has a number of these using catapults.
- The Flash game series Ricochet Kills is entirely dedicated to this. As the title might suggest, you try to kill people by reflecting bullets off surfaces.
Adventure Game
- In the Sierra Point and Click Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist, Freddy returns to his gunslinger roots towards the end of the game, and when he confronts a cheating gambler who takes cover in the saloon, has to make an impressive shot that ricochets across the saloon and hits the chandelier
Edutainment Game
- In Geometry Blaster, the Pit of Despair features a puzzle where angle measurements are used to fire a Reflecting Laser around the room until it hits a crystal powering a force field that protects the Pit's Dimension Machine piece. Depending on the difficulty, you have three to five of these force fields to take down with a limited number of shots before the guard wakes up.
First Person Shooter
- Duke Nukem 3D has puzzles that are not quite so tricky, but they do involve bullet-sensitive switches across chasms and such.
- A minor version of this appears in Half-Life 1. To avoid being turned into swiss cheese by a tripod turret placed around a corner, bounce a grenade or two off the wall to knock it down. Tripmines are often set off from a safe distance in a similar manner. Half-Life 2 has you doing this with the Gravity Gun and Energy Orbs.
- Sigil (2019):
- A recurring feature of the levels in the first wad is the Evil Eye, a switch you need to shoot to activate mechanisms in the levels. Due to being found through small hidden-away holes in the wall, alongside Doom disallowing vertical aim adjustment in its original form, part of the challenge is typically lining yourself up to properly shoot it.
- The sequel wad brings back the Evil Eye puzzles, and also uses Fireblu textures to the same effect: if you see that garish bright-red-and-blue graphic in the level, shoot it to open a secret. E6M2 has an especially evil instance of this where the Fireblu is in a tiny crack way outside the level's normal play area and cordoned off by damaging floors; knowing it's there at all is a challenge in of itself, let alone making the shot.
Platform
- In Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble!, some clever planning and carefully timed steel-keg throws will be needed to separate Koin from a DK Coin. note ; Koindozer, by contrast, is not so shy. Sometimes it's necessary to throw the keg and then sucker Koin into facing away from the advancing weapon. Barrel Cannons and walls will occasionally play parts in the solutions to these puzzles. (Bananas will mark a few of the correct positions.)
- A few Kirby games have a few of these that require projectile-firing abilities. Kirby's Adventure, for example, has a few secret areas that open up by using the Laser ability to reflect lasers off of several diagonal walls to destroy an otherwise tricky-to-reach bomb block.
- La-Mulana has two puzzles involving tossing bombs through tiny openings: a thankfully optional secret shop in the Temple of Moonlight, and an infuriatingly complicated one in Hell Temple. To add injury to insult, most of your attempts will literally blow up in your face.
- The Portal games do lots of these, though they mainly involve redirecting projectiles or objects (or yourself) onto trick-shot trajectories rather than firing them directly, since the player doesn't have any actual weapons.
- The Spyro the Dragon franchise loves this trope. In several of the games, you cannot kill certain enemies, solve certain puzzles or obtain certain collectibles such as gems without climbing onto an oddly designed cannon and shooting at something that is sometimes not even visible from where the cannon is. In A Hero's Tail, an entire set of minigames revolves around Spyro shooting enemies from a cannon while they spread out all over the place - so you might be doing great shooting them on the left, but you lose because others snuck in from the right.
- You have to do this with yourself several times in Super Mario 64, using the cannons. In the Rainbow Cruise level, aiming at the middle of a rainbow will get you to a floating island with a Star.
Puzzle Game
- Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask: There's a puzzle where a young Professor Layton has to hit a bell next to a window to call his friend Randall and enter his house from said window (trying to enter from the main door won't work because Layton isn't allowed to enter due to Randall's father). The puzzle consists of figuring out from which angle he has to shoot a rock so it hits the bell, and due to the latter being placed very high Layton relies on the rock ricocheting with objects along the way, such as a can and a pot.
RPG
- CrossCode: A lot of puzzles and boss fights evolve around trick shots that require projectiles to ricochet in specific angles. The most complex ones appear near the end of a dungeon, where you need to activate a switch by hitting all the triangle shaped blocks with the same projectile while clearing multiple timed obstacles in the projectile's path.
- Part of the final Thieves' Guild quest in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Oblivion is to shoot an arrow at a switch. You have to unlock the keyhole first, though, and fire through a statue.
- There's one in Fable I where you have to shoot an arrow through a hole to activate a secret.
- All the Wild ARMs games do this a lot, with using various of your tools with terrain features to trip switches or move things.
Third Person Shooter
- One area in MDK2 can be crossed only by shooting two blue orbs that lift the drawbridge when activated, except these orbs are not visible from places where you can stand to activate Scope Perspective. The trick is to shoot at purple targets painted on the opposite wall with your pinball projectiles, which should ricochet toward the orbs and hit them (at least with their explosions).
Non-Game Examples
- Parodied in Red Dwarf, where in order to save the ship, Holly sets up a trick shot involving several planets, a tactical nuclear warhead, and a black hole. The warhead has to be detonated just so, to drive a planetoid out of its orbit, which then hits a larger planet, which in turn is knocked out of its orbit and seals the black hole. Dave Lister looks at the computer simulation and insists Holly's strategy is all wrong and, based on experience playing pool at the Aigburth Arms in Liverpool, he can do it better.