Pet peeve of the day: Games with “puzzles” that can only be solved by trying a bunch of different plausible answers.
If you know the right answer (but not that it is the right answer), and the reasoning behind the right answer, but you still can’t tell that it’s the right answer without engaging the games mechanic to check if it’s the right answer, it’s not a puzzle. It’s just a game a brute forcing answers.
Yep. Hence why I have no issues googling most puzzle solutions. Occasionally I’ll run into a decent one that isn’t just legwork, and then I might engage if it looks cool. But most puzzle content has no actual mental challenge to it. There’s only one “right way” to proceed efficiently to the answer, and that method is obvious if you’ve run into that style of puzzle before.