Did an escape room a couple years ago with friends, guy observing commented he only heard the roulette wheel spin once, wondered if we needed help. "Nah, that was just math, we're good."
Cleverly set up so that whatever the roulette wheel came up the winner would win the same amount.
Zelda Phantom Hourglass. "Pressing" the the map on the top screen with the one on the bottom. I tried all sorts of things before finding out by accident that the solution is to just close the damn DS.
I did an Escape Room last weekend, and one of the puzzles was a color-coding of the Arrival and Destinations of airline flights. I commented on that to the guy overseeing the room afterward, and he said "a lot of people don't catch that." I hope he was just padding my ego because I'm just... HOW?!
... ended with an overly long final level with an overly steep difficulty Spike and no further story to soften it up. By the time I reached the final cut scene I had to look up the previous story to get the context.
Another one of those: "We must do more" syndrome and "Players like not to finish games."
Recore was a nice example of this. Great game, but putting in too many robot companions weakened the emotional attachment to the first and burdened the game with backtracking to switch them, and the game...
Not sure if this is a feature in all Silent Hill games but in some the puzzles also get harder with the general difficult setting you pick, not only the monsters and resources.
I had that feeling once. When I've stumbled by chance on a puzzle hidden in plain view. It was in library in Torment: Tides of Numenera that required you to MAP and RESOLVE a graph based on your general knowledge of spectography formed as poem in language you could only read if you had certain perk.
