Do you look up solutions in puzzle games?

I have looked up solutions when it comes to puzzles where I flat out can't understand any part of what they want me to do. If I can at least understand the basic idea or concept around it, I usually try until I solve it myself.

Can't remember anything recent, but there was one room in the original Portal which I just couldn't figure out despite trying for hours, and eventually had to look it up. Probably happened once or twice in some adventure games too, but can't actually remember any specific examples of that despite the genre being infamous for moon logic puzzles.

I am both far from a genius and extremely stubborn, so I tend to stick to a puzzle for much longer than reasonable. If I get to the point of wanting to rip my hair out in frustration, then I consider looking up hints. BTW, for adventure games, UHS can be a very helpful website.

If I've been stuck on a puzzle for to the point where I'm not enjoying myself anymore, then I'll turn to the internet for help. At that point, I just want to move on to the next puzzle and start having fun again. It's pretty rare, though.

If things get to the point where I want to throw my PC/console into the street and run it over because I'm so frustrated, I'll look something up, but I only do that if I have no other option. I'm one of those people who feel personally defeated and dumb if I can't solve something in a reasonable amount of time, like I'll literally lose sleep over it.

Oh, absolutely, particularly if the game’s narrative is compelling. Look, I just don’t have the time anymore to figure out I need Part A from seventy rooms ago to slot into Thing B which I can’t find because my vision sucks. I am also a huge fan of in-game hints and would be an advocate for games like Next Big Thing to have actual skippable puzzles because of visual or colorblind issues.

Absolutely, no shame.

I'm more willing to spend time on a puzzle if it seems like its clear about what it wants and how to get there but I haven't got the time or patience for a game that just opens a big room full of bullshit and says Hey Figure It Out.

Most recently I was playing CrossCode which was especially bad about this, at least for its first few dungeons. It feels like a lot of people yelled at them about during early access because the latter half is way better in this regard.

I'll look things up all day...but I'm also just as likely to uninstall the game because I feel like it's taunting me, especially when other people are able to get through the entire thing without a guide. Games like Fez, Braid and The Witness immediately come to mind.

Adventure games are the ones I tend to stick with just because the story is really what I'm there for; there wasn't a single adventure game I beat as a kid without a guide, but then I also used to be the one to buy the guide with the game for the art and inevitably start playing along to the guide just to have the most efficient/best experience I could, then I'd play the game over to test my memory and see if I could do it on my own.

I hate puzzles, i get no satisfaction from solving puzzles just a sense of relief that it's over.
I will look for a solution if i can't figure it out within a minute.

I finished Snakebird without solution like a madman, it was both infuriating and extremely satisfying. It really depends on the game though, in this one I never felt like I missed something.

On the other hand a game like the Witness there’s a few perception puzzles where I understood the theory of it, but couldn’t execute on them (the sound stuff mostly). I didn’t like how the game sometimes was just trying to make puzzles harder by obfuscating your perception of them, which I think is not real difficulty and is cheap. I still loved the game mind you, and managed to find out the secret ending by myself (a bit of luck was involved in the process) which felt great.

Currently going through Baba is You. I get frustrated a lot, to the point where I’m thinking about looking solutions up, but at that point I have managed so far to just walk away from the game and doing something else. Normally I make progress when I get back to it. We’ll see if I manage to finish it.

I will use hints system profusely though. If it was designed that way it’s fair game in my mind.

I'll absolutely look up puzzle solutions without reservations or guilt. I just don't have the patience to bang my head against something that I can't figure out after 15 minutes or so. I always start out with the best intentions, telling myself that this time I'll play it honest and won't look up any answers, but I always reach that breaking point where I'm not having fun and I know that if I turn the game off without moving past the puzzle I'm stuck on, I'll never turn it back on. The second it's no longer fun I'm off to Google.

All that said, I tend to avoid puzzle games these days. I know that either I'm entirely too stupid for them or they just aren't my cup of tea. Probably a bit of both. Even though I loved Portal and Portal 2 - and didn't look up solutions for either of those - I only enjoyed, at best, the first half to third of Braid and Fez. So I'm not even going to bother downloading The Witness. Even though I recognize puzzle games can be good exercise for my brain, I mostly want to play games to have fun and unwind, not mentally dickpunch myself for hours on end.

I try not to, but I will if I have to. And I grew up on 90s adventure games, so I don't always trust the solutions to even make sense. There's no satisfaction to having to open a door by putting a baseball cap on a potato so I can sell it to a tiny Frenchman in a casino that has the key or something.

To some old school adventure games, yeah. If I’m playing Silent Hill though I like to figure out the solution myself.

I try not to, but am not averse to getting hints from the internet if I get really stuck. In Baba is You, I've had to set it down a few times and come back later but have yet to straight up google a solution. Try playing Alundra without any guides for a real nightmare headache, I did a playthrough entirely without help and it was kinda miserable but also felt really good once I finished it.

I voted for the third option, but I'll also add that I'll do it if something is just tedious to experiment with too. An example of that being, in a JRPG with random encounters, a dungeon wants you to run all over the place hitting buttons in a trial-and-error sort of fashion, while being constantly interrupted by combat. Hell, FFX even knew to remove the random encounters from their puzzle sections, but the amount of time it takes to carry orbs from one place to the other made experimentation miserable anyway.

It's tempting, as it's free and very easy to find solutions now. Way back you either had to buy a strategy guide, or call a premium rate hotline to get help... But I usually figure it out myself.

Unless it's The Witness. Had no patience for some of these puzzles. I just rushed my way through that game with a guide open.

I also used a walkthrough on my second playthrough of L.A. Noire - as I wanted a 100% success rate and wanted to see how it played out then.

Nah, I adore puzzle games / problem solving and relish everything I can get my hands on. The way I see it I only get the satisfaction of solving them once so I'm very strict about not spoiling them. On the occasions where I get stuck I just take a day off and come back to it and it usually falls into place.

EDIT: I wasn't aware of this Baba Is You, genuinely excited to play it now so thanks a lot!

I used to never used guides or walk-thrus but that's when I had nothing but time. As I've gotten older, I only have a certain amount of time to game so I will struggle for a bit but then ill just look up the solution so I can move on.

In proper puzzle games, I’ll have to have spent hours on a puzzle without progress to go to a guide. The puzzle is the point.

With non-puzzle games that insert half-assed puzzles, I’ll eventually look it up as I’m not there for the puzzles.

My feelings exactly. When it comes to non-puzzle games I am very willing to look up help if I get annoyed. Usually not here for it.

With puzzle games; now I'm not adamant about not looking at a guide, but I haven't done it in awhile. At this point I'm confident that any puzzle game I play– I can beat. When I played La-Mulana and vowed never to use a guide, the vow I made to myself that if I truly got stuck and could not figure out how to solve a puzzle, then I just wouldn't beat that game. I think that's the general rule I'm living by. Ultimately I did eventually finish La-Mulana (and its sequel) without a guide.

Same thing goes for The Witness and Stephen's Sausage Roll, although I didn't struggle as much with those games. In fact, when I played SSR I pushed through surprisingly quickly. Yeah, I did get stuck occasionally but I pulled through. That's where my confidence comes from. That when it comes to puzzle games (especially puzzle games that deal in nodes/tiles like Stephen's Sausage Roll, Cosmic Express, Snakebird) I will eventually finish them. It's all a matter of time.

I remember looking up a lot of late game stuff in Candy Box 2. Specifically, there was some bullshit cyclops lighthouse puzzle where it seemed absurdly complicated and the rules of it aren’t made clear to you, and even looking it up, I recall thinking that the solution was needlessly complicated. Overall I think that game was overhyped. It gets too complicated for its own good.

Also, the end of most Layton games has an elaborate block sliding puzzle with a bunch of irregular blocks as an optional pretty hard puzzle, and typically I look at it for about 10 minutes then just look up a solution. I have better things to do than brute force a large block sliding puzzle until I stumble upon something resembling the right sequence.

Most other puzzle games I don’t use hints or walkthroughs, though I like the gradual hint system in Layton for getting a nudge in the right direction and rarely had to get the full hint from that system.

Depends on the game. If it's strictly a puzzle game, I won't do it outside of extremely rare instances. Looking up the answer could easily screw you over on the next set of puzzles, as the developers would be making the subsequent challenges assuming that the player has successfully completed the ones before it. You don't end up learning what you were supposed to learn and struggle even more with the ones after it, leading you to looking up answers online more and more.

If it's not a puzzle game that has some puzzle in it (the odd sliding block puzzle or what have you), I don't have any qualms about looking it up, but I'll always spend some time trying to figure it out on my own first.

Third option. I would weigh my decision based on if I find the puzzle design to be intuitive and clear. Some are just obscure puzzles that are beyond my comprehension. But that is the rub, because I can never know for sure if I just need to rejiggle my brain or plain dumb. It's either I'm happy to have looked into a guide because there's no way I'm figuring the puzzle up on my own or I'll smack my forehead realizing how close I am to solving it and thus losing satisfaction over solving it myself.

I will always think of The Swapper as my triumph and Antichamber as my failure.

I don't get satisfaction when I look at hints.

Some people prefer the challenge of solving puzzles without any help, while others might turn to the internet for solutions. When it comes to jigsaw puzzles australia https://journeyofsomething.com/products/1000-piece-puzzle-australia-edition , the satisfaction of piecing together each part and finally completing the puzzle can be quite rewarding. Whether you prefer to solve them on your own or with a little bit of assistance, the important thing is to enjoy the process and appreciate the satisfaction of the end result.

Mostly I just bounce off the game until I get the urge to go at it again. 'The Witness' and 'Baba is You' are examples of this. Too hard for me to figure out at the time but I may come back to them after some time has passed and hopefully a different perspective on the puzzles will come to me.

I suck at Rubik's cubes, Lights Out and Sliding Tile puzzles. I'll look up how to solve these instead of banging my head against it for hours. I will usually try, because some times I luck into it.

Otherwise, if I'm stuck, I'll look it up.

I just wait until the head on my belt tells me what to do

I will often look them up, but sometimes I just don't care enough (The Witness).

i have never been a 'puzzle' guy, so usually when i encounter them they tend to be in the context of a specific room in an adventure games or a section of a point and click in which case i don't feel a seconds hesitation looking it up if i don't immediatly get it. i don't get much catharis from solving a difficult puzzle, so why spend a lot of time working it out when i could move on to an activity that will deliver that satisfaction?