When folks encounter a video game challenge that requires a high degree of mechanical skills, like a boss fight in a Devil May Cry or Bayonetta, I find that they are generally more willing to try and try again or even maybe admit they are not skilled enough to do it. When it comes to puzzles though... I've observed that many players do not like the idea they couldn't solve them. They will call them bullshit. "How was I supposed to figure this out?" Puzzles test your logic reasoning skill. In our society we have a tendency to associate that particular skill with the completely fake concept of intelligence. So when you can't solve something, it's like being told to your face that you're not very smart. Just go on the comments of a solution video for any of the trickier Baba is You puzzles. You'll find plenty of people complaining it was unintuitive or the game made them feel stupid.
But here's the thing. I firmly believe puzzle solving has nothing to do with "intelligence". It's a skill, and like any other skills, it can be learned and honed with a lot of practice. No one expects a player new to fighting games to be able to win a tournament without first learning and practicing the fundamentals. Why should it be any different for logic puzzles?
Here are a few things that personally helped my puzzle solving skills:
all of this, but i desperately need to add that you are absolutely just allowed to trial and error things to feel out the me mechanics and develop an intuitive sense of an unknown system, then refine that to an understanding
this is a drum i will bang on all day
we're conditioned against doing this so hard almost from day one! i need you to understand that all of our education and formative experiences and job training run counter to this!
if you think about how we're taught to learn things from literally before we are able to read or write or reason about numbers, someone sits us down and tells us how to do a thing. we're told to maybe repeat it an annoying number of times in isolation with different words or numbers (nobody likes this) and no feedback, then we're tested on it
if you get something wrong, you get your answer marked by the big shameful red pen and a bad grade. at no point is there ever a feedback step where you're shown how you made a mistake and are given the opportunity to understand your error and correct it, in a context where this is seen as a positive and rewarding step
this is critical! it's a fundamental building block of human knowledge! people our culture typically portrays as "smart" are doing this all the time! so much of our collective knowledge and understanding is not built on the perfect synthesis of new ideas in a vacuum and "Eureka!" moments, but by the willingness to be repeatedly incredibly wrong until we understand enough that we start being somewhat less wrong1
and that's kind of the energy i hope people can bring to puzzle games, or any other game with a challenge they can overcome by understanding, or many other non-game fields you might encounter
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obviously like how puzzles often have a common history and design language that you can learn to better understand them, im not suggesting that it makes sense to trial and error everything from the ground up. there's usually some kind of common reference you can use as building blocks to get started!
