What puzzles in games have you given up on? I don't mean "I'll sleep on it" or "maybe I don't have the right ability/idea yet" but deciding you just aren't going to figure it out (or looking up a solution). I've heard a lot of reactions like this to TIS-100 as a concept, and some of Fez's secrets, and it's almost a genre-defining trope for adventure games, but I'm curious to hear more examples.
By contrast, I found the way The Witness treated critical-path puzzles as lessons to be a nice way to alleviate this; I felt like I was looking for a new concept while solving, rather than just "the answer." I did look up one of the panels in the lowest level of the ruins, though.
For context, I'm a (very) amateur game developer working on a game that teaches you a (fictitious) language through puzzles. Hearing people refer to the cryptograms/substitution ciphers in Fez and Hyper Light Drifter as "languages" made me wary of coming off as too arcane and involved.
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