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.
Yeah a puzzle where the majority of players resort to trial and error is not a well designed one.