Point and click games (and puzzle-based interactive fiction games while we're at it) tend to lose me right around the halfway point. The puzzles start to get mo

Point and click games (and puzzle-based interactive fiction games while we're at it) tend to lose me right around the halfway point. The puzzles start to get more difficult and I just can't figure out how to solve them. Could just be a matter of patience, I tend to give up after 1-2 hours at most if I just find myself rotating between locations not knowing what to do next. But I think the genre's reputation for being obtuse is pretty well-deserved. Broken Age was actually interesting for me, because it's the game I got closest to finishing without a walkthrough. I only needed to consult one once, for the last puzzle that you encounter in the game. Consulting a walkthrough generally ruins the game for me so once I use one once, my patience threshold for using it again drops significantly. At that point how much I enjoy a game depends on how much I like the characters, story, etc. Grim Fandango is one of those I still look back fondly for that reason, even though it lost me WAY earlier than halfway. ----- Somewhat of a tangent, but I've always wondered if this genre of games is good for development of mathematical thinking. Like, in an adventure game you usually know the broad strokes of what you need to do, but you need to solve lots of puzzles to get there. Something I've always struggled with in math is the ability to think laterally, think of analogues, lemmas, auxiliary problems, etc. that can help prove a theorem. It's always felt to me like the two struggles are different forms of the same issue with my cognition.