The Puzzle from Hell

So I've been playing Myst IV: Revelation for the past few days. It seemed quite good at first; really gorgeous graphics, dramatic music, intriguing story, all that good stuff. But the game is flawed, in ways that are becoming more and more obvious to me. Worse, the flaws are centered around puzzle design, which is the heart and soul of the adventure genre.

For starters, quite a few of the puzzles have no feedback whatsoever when solved. There's no way to tell when or if you've done something right. This is a sharp contrast to all the previous games in the series, when a completed puzzle would usually lock itself down to prevent further changes. It makes it essentially impossible to take a level in stages, which is IMO a bad move.

Worse, the solutions to some of the puzzles has crossed the line from careful observation and deduction to pure mathematics and, in some cases, pure madness. The game offers a three-tiered help system: small hint, pointed nudge, and outright solution with explanation. It should tell you something that in several cases, even after reading the full, step-by-step solution including how you were intended to find it, I still can't figure out what the hell they're talking about. I'm no genius but I'm no fool either. If you thought the animal noises from Riven were obscure, you ain't seen nothing yet.

All of which brings me to the puzzle from hell, which has stopped me cold at a relatively early point in the game. The following is spoilerrific, but I don't really care much anymore:

The puzzle consists of three vertical sliders, each of which can be set from 0-12. A correct setting on all three sliders causes a lock to release; there are a total of four locks to release with four different combinations to complete the puzzle.

The sliders, of course, are not numbered in any way. The only way to determine their setting is to move them up and down and observe a row of lights above turning on and off. Moreover, they don't "snap" to the nearest setting like, say, a Windows slider; rather, you must nudge it past the next higher setting before it will stick.

The hotspot to control each of these sliders is only a few pixels square; when you find it, you must wait for the usual hand cursor to change to a grasping mode, which takes a noticeable second or so. If you click too soon, or are off by only a little, you'll simply wave at empty air.

Next to the sliders, left and right, are the four locks that you're attempting to open. These are "details"; they can be zoomed in upon. This serves no useful purpose except to give you a close-up view of the lock's current state, but that state can be seen while zoomed out as well. The hotspots to zoom in on the locks are only a few pixels over from the slider hotspots.

Now, all of this would make the puzzle poorly designed and tedious, but not a major challenge if you have the correct combinations. However, there's one final point I should mention: the entire thing is TIMED. Each lock stays open only for a limited amount of time, and each shorter than the last. All told, you have about thirty seconds from the time you finish entering the first combination to finish the puzzle. Me, the best I can do is to be entering the third combination at the time that the first one times out. And that's after hours of practice and trying over and over again.

There are plenty of games out there that test your manual dexterity, your ability to move your mouse around quickly and precisely. I don't care for them, and wasn't intending to buy one. Anyone want a slightly used copy of Myst IV: Revelation?