okay so i'm thinking back on completing void stranger and aside from, y'know, the Layers, the thing that was really personally surprising to me on my playthrough was how unreasonably effective it always was to just close the game and come back to a puzzle later. Especially once they got properly hard, every couple of levels I'd get to a puzzle where I'd push boxes around for a couple minutes, think, "okay, this one might actually be impossible, fuck it, I can do this later", close the game, return the next day or a few hours later without having thought about the puzzle at all in the meantime, and solve it almost immediately.

I don't fully understand how that works. My guess is that taking a break would "unstick" me from an incorrect line of reasoning or a bad assumption, or give me the opportunity to notice something that I'd overlooked the first time, while still maintaining the experimental knowledge I'd built up about how the puzzle actually worked. Like, when you're attempting a puzzle you might iterate through a lot of similar (wrong) ideas, but taking a break will lead you to forget what exactly it was you were doing and thus try something truly different.

Or maybe it's more to do with being given a chance to cool off any frustration and think more clearly, or maybe just that I really was quite close to solving those puzzles if I hadn't taken the break and the whole thing is just an illusion. I don't know. "Just come back to the puzzle later" sounds like bad stock advice but it really did work almost every single time. I know it's not just a me thing either because it's on the Steam store page!

• The game autosaves between each room, so take it easy
• If a puzzle seems impossible, get some rest

Will this be applicable to puzzles that aren't of the block-pushing variety or maybe even broader problems in life? Maybe. Experiments are pending on that one.