[cyxxon]

Is it cheating, though? I find it is more like bringing the games difficulty down to an acceptable level. I enjoy puzzle games, but often the puzzles boil down to combining everything in your inventory with everything in the game world (in LucasArts terms). That can simply be unfun for some of us in a game we otherwise enjoy. A variant of this is that I would e.g. enjoy open world-ish action combat fantasy games, but I really do not find the Souls like loop of git gud compelling at all, so I... basically don't play these games. But AA or AAA fantasy action games with this kind of presentation are (at the moment) basically only Souls like, so... yeah, great. At least for puzzle games I can "cheat" if one of the puzzles is simply illogical for my way of thinking, so I can skip over that part and go back to enjoying the rest of the game...

[xnorswap]

I don't think I've encountered that style of inventory-combining problem since the frustrations of Discworld, are there many modern games in that style?

When I think of puzzle games I think mostly of geometric reasoning problems like The Talos Principle and The Witness.

[account42]

> I enjoy puzzle games, but often the puzzles boil down to combining everything in your inventory with everything in the game world (in LucasArts terms).

Except they usually don't require you to do that. The so-called "moon logic" in those games might not follow the rules of our world but it is still a kind of logic that you can master nonetheless.

[krige]

> Is it cheating, though?

Yes?

> I find it is more like bringing the games difficulty down to an acceptable level.

Yes, that's what cheating usually does? Apart from the extinct sub-genre of cheats like big head mode.

[account42]

> Apart from the extinct sub-genre of cheats like big head mode.

Those are just easter eggs, which are not extinct.