Why fight smarter when you can fight… Wait, it’s the other way. Why fight harder when you can fight, this sounds like I’m doing it on purpose. I assure you I just have a low IQ, which is the opposite of the types of moves we want to talk about today. Hi, folks, it’s Zaid, and today on Aura Riot, 10 1,000 IQ moves in video games that are genius.
10. Free Arrows in Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
Nothing comes easy in this game. Every scrap of food and peasant frock costs valuable money, and arrows are no exception. You’re gonna need so many arrows if you don’t want low-level bandits to carve you up like a Christmas ham too, so there’s never enough no matter where you go, whether that’s stores or other stores, and who wants to pay for all that anyways? No, we’re skipping straight to the source, folks. We’re getting free-range arrows from wild archers.
By traveling to a fortified castle, your pathetic medieval serf can collect an infinite supply of free arrows by transforming yourself into a pin cushion. At one particular fortress, firing a gun will alert all of the very angry guards in the vicinity, and they all turn their arrows on you. So we are going to turn on them, giving the archers the cold shoulder while wearing a hefty shield. You’ll absorb hundreds of arrows just by standing still and doing nothing. Standing around collecting arrows in your back is a great way to stock up, and the arrows don’t damage you at all because of course they don’t. Unequip the shield and an entire mass of free arrows just falls to your feet. This is what the ancient scholars call a big brain move.
9. Pickpocketing Gerringothe in Baldur’s Gate 3
One of the shiniest fights in Baldur’s Gate 3 is against the evil tax collector Gerringothe Thorm, one of several nightmare monsters that live in the act two Shadow Cursed Lands. All these Thorms terrorize you wherever you explore their corner of the haunted town, and Gerringothe is one of the worst. She becomes stronger the more gold she has, so you’ll need to slowly remove all of her gold while defeating ghostly aspects of her personality that haunt the Toll House.
It’s a long fight against the whole swarm of skulls, but you can skip it, all of it if you’re a big smartie. That’s right, I’m gonna get it right this time too, instead of fighting harder, try fighting smarter. While talking to this big golden goon, your thief can sneak behind the distracted mini boss and lift all of her gold. A successful pickpocket gets you plenty of gold, but the boss wants more. In fact, it wants all the gold you’re carrying. Simple solution, carry one gold piece, one to throw to Gerringothe, swap to a rogue pickpocketer, than fight her. She’s much, much easier to fight when she’s poor. She rarely even does any damage actually. It’s a breeze of a fight. Drop all your gold outside, this fight’s easy.
8. Just Shooting the Bell in the Resident Evil IV Remake
The first big encounter against the mutant villagers of Resident Evil IV is also one of the most tense. You’re surrounded and swarmed by angry, ax-wielding, old-timey folks armed with pitchforks, and eventually, a very intimidating chainsaw.
The only way to win against the endless hoard is to survive as long as possible. You’ll never beat them all. Once enough possessed people are defeated, a church bell rings and its signals them all to leave. That’s the genesis of that whole infamous, “Where they going, bingo” line from Leon. It’s such a weird line. It’s hard to even say. It’s so strange.
And the thing is, you can trigger the bingo bell a lot faster if you’re super smart. In the remake, the bell is actually visible in the far distance. If you can see it, that means you can probably shoot, it right? Well, on New Game Plus runs, you start the game with a sniper rifle already unlocked. Using that sniper rifle, run up to the rooftops, look through the scope, spot the bell in the far distance, even with the scope, to be fair, it’s a tricky shot. Landing a hit triggers the bell though, and that ends the big confrontation early. It’s an ingenious skip, even though it kind of sounds simple, but it’s not the only one. Rocket launchers can blast through a barrier in the mines area. Leon can use grenades in the last act to break down a wall much faster. They’re all genius moves in a remake that might actually surpass the original. At least it surpasses the original in high-IQ skips.
7. The Miraculous Mimic Tear in Elden Ring
We all know the Mimic Tear is completely broken in Elden Ring, but the Elden Ring community collectively says, “What if we made it even more broken?” So let us explain.
In Elden Ring, there’s NPCs you can summon to help you explore or beat bosses. One of those unlockable summons is the Mimic Tear, a goopy creature that perfectly copies whatever the player character has equipped. If you’re wearing big armor and a giant sword, it spawns with the same big armor and giant sword.
Little did simple players like us know at the time, but the Mimic Tears also spawn with the same talismans and consumable items equipped, and you can use that to your advantage. The Shabiri’s Woe talisman constantly draws maximum aggression from enemies. If your tarnished equips the talisman, summons the Mimic Tear, and equips it quickly, you’ll be able to fight bosses while your Mimic Tear draws 100% aggro.
To make things even better, equip raw meat dumplings as a healing item in your consumable slots, Mimic Tears won’t take poison damage from this bad item. They also have infinite consumables, so give them plenty of powerful hefty pots they can throw, and they’ll never stop throwing. Maybe we understand now why From Soft nerfed these guys.
6. Cappy Co-op in Mario Odyssey
One of the most obnoxious mini games in Mario Odyssey are the volleyball courts. You’ll need to bounce the volleyball back 100 times to earn a moon at these mini games, and it starts to get punishingly difficult the longer you endure these ironman marathon matches. Even if you throw your Cappy hat to gain a little extra reach, it isn’t enough to overcome the nonstop volleyball volleys.
It’s a mini game that’s aggravating beyond all reason, but smart players have figured out a way to make things much easier. Instead of playing volleyball with Mario, play with Cappy instead. In two-player mode, the second player controls Cappy independently of our favorite plumbing platforming guy. He does both those things, all right?
This makes the volleyball challenge literally 1,000 times easier. Cappy is much, much faster than Mario. He’s always spinning with a bigger hit box. Makes bouncing that volleyball back super easy. It’s so smart, it kind of feels like cheating. If you want to keep desperately chasing volleyballs for 100 bounces, be our guest, but we’re sticking with this 1,000 IQ option right here.
5. Two for One in Hitman 2
Hitman plops your bald assassin into a massive sandbox, tells you to figure it out yourself, and one of our favorite inadvertently target takedowns comes from the Miami racetrack map in the second, where you can kill two birds with one stone, but one very, very big stone.
Instead of chasing down your targets individually, it’s possible to get them both at the same time by timing your pushing skills to their absolute limit. One of the assassination targets is standing on the sidelines, while one is participating in the race. If you wait for just the right moment, you can push one of the targets onto the racetrack, initiating a chain reaction. The racing target spins out, crashes, kills the driver on impact, makes everything look like one big, unfortunate accident.
Both targets down. Head for an exit and we speak again soon. Figuring out the cleverest kills is a big part of the Hitman experience, but this one made us feel a lot smarter than usual.
4. Leave the Light Behind in Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye
A game that’s built entirely on big brain moves pretty much all the time, and the expansion has one of the biggest, most mind-bending secrets we have encountered in a video game, and that discovery has completely changed how we approach Echoes of the Eye.
In this open-galaxy puzzle game expansion, you’re mostly exploring a giant ring-shaped station that changes and crumbles as you explore it. Early, you’ll discover a method to enter a virtual dream world that’s populated with terrifying stalkers that chase you into the darkness.
These areas are some of the scariest parts of any video game, and we can effectively ignore all of the frights with one simple trick, this one simple trick. In these virtual worlds, your character is carrying a lantern that you can close to snuff out the light and sneak past enemies, like a classic FPS horror game, that makes sneaking even scarier because you can’t see anything either.
So instead of closing up the lantern, why not just leave it behind? Drop that lantern on the floor. You can do that, and leaving the light on and just leaving it over there just de-resses the whole dream world, turns the whole dark and spooky zone into an easy-to-see polygonal mat. The enemies are now represented with simpler shapes and they can’t interact with the player and it makes exploration a lot easier. This one trick turns one of the scariest parts in a game into a horror-like cake walk. Only a very big brain will figure this one out. Well, I mean you don’t have to ’cause we told you, but yeah.
3. Melting the Freezer in Blueprints
This has too many high-IQ moves to mention in one single list, but one of our favorites is this deceptively simple solution. It’s also super meta. Blueprints is about drafting, get this, blueprints. Get it, Blueprints, blueprints, clever, right? It’s a high-IQ title.
Anyway, you draft them randomly like a puzzle Rogue-like, and it creates a snaking path through a house that resets at the end of every day. These rooms can affect each other, like a pump room can drain the water from a pool room, a boiler can restore power to other rooms that need it. It’s a mess of interesting functions, but our favorites are the ones you wouldn’t think would work, but do.
Take, for instance, the furnace. The furnace is a red-hot, negative-status-effect room that is both a dead end, bad, and makes a red room appear more often in your current run, also very bad, so why would you place it? Why would anyone place it?
Well, there’s a specific use we actually stumbled into. By placing a furnace next to a freezer room, the ice covered items will melt. You can get them now. So there’s a whole bunch of rewards you get. It also melts the frozen doorway, which gives you access to a hidden room. It’s a fun little secret. Even the furnace doesn’t melt the items inside the actually closed refrigerator. That requires a completely different big brain solution.
2. A Skip and a Hop in Age of Mythology: Retold
Mission 14 of Age of Mythology: Retold is normally a long, grueling slog. You’re dropped into a powerful stronghold with a small army of monsters and a heroic Egyptian unit named Amon-Ra. Your goal is to destroy an enemy base and free a whole bunch of captives on a prison island, which normally takes about 30 minutes of solid real-time strategy tactics.
Sure, you can play the normal way or you can use Amon-Ra to win in a matter of minutes. In the Retold version of Age of Mythology you’re given the option to manually activate special abilities that were previously in the original version, auto fire specials that only activated intermittently in the middle of a battle.
By manually activating Amon-Ra’s leap ability, you can hop directly over walls and run straight into the harbor, where you’ll build a fleet and raid the prison. Yes, one of the goals is to destroy the enemy base. No, you don’t need to actually do it. Skipping to the end and saving the heroes, this mission, it just ends as soon as it began. No need to construct all those mythological monsters to help you. It’s a rare RTS mission that’s a one-woman job.
1. Smoking Skull Face in MGS V
Smoke grenades are the true ultimate weapon of Metal Gear Solid V. Smokes make you effectively invisible in plain sight, allowing Snake to pull all sorts of dirty nonsense, like kidnapping VIPs directly out of heavy armored escorts and soldiers. Smoke grenades are the solution to every problem, but there’s one drawback: you can’t get past when using smoke grenades. They don’t have wheels. Smoke grenades are stuck on the ground like a chump, hey, like a chump, hey, like a chump.
So we’re putting our brains to good use, we’re going to create a mobile smoke grenade, eh, eh? One of the biggest missions in the game is Skull Fade. It’s a giant sneaking operation through a massive, heavily guarded Soviet facility. On your first play through, this mission can take an hour or longer to beat, but not with our patented mobile smoke grenade.
Start the mission with a Jeep and toss one of those smokes in the trunk. Now you can smoothly scoot through the mission. Sure, guards might be briefly alerted by the strange moving cloud of smoke that’s entered their base making engine noises, but there’s no cause for alarm. They’ll watch curiously. “Hmm, what’s that?” Well, as long as they don’t see a venom-shaped shadow inside that cloud of smoke, it’s not their problem.
This insane trick is so simple, so ingenious, so effective, it’s almost unbelievable. It makes earning S rank child’s play. It’s truly a weapon to rival the Metal Gear. One of the best 1,000 IQ moves you could pull in video games for sure.
And for all the brain geniuses out there, if there’s some high-performing tricks we didn’t talk about, and let’s be clear, there are, maybe meet us down in the comments. Let’s talk about it. And as always, we thank you very much for watching this blog.