What good puzzle difficulty actually feels like

A puzzle game lives or dies on its difficulty curve. Too gentle and you're bored; too steep and you rage-quit. Getting it right is harder than it looks, and most games get it wrong in at least one stretch.

Playing through Tilewright made me think about this. Its early levels teach you the rules without a wall of text, and by level thirty it's demanding real forethought. Crucially, when I got stuck, the solution always turned out to be logical, not obscure.

That's the difference between fair and frustrating. A fair puzzle has a clue somewhere in front of you. A frustrating one hides the answer behind trial and error. The good ones make you feel clever; the bad ones make you feel cheated.

My tip for tough levels: walk away. Half the puzzles I got stuck on solved themselves after a break. Staring harder rarely helps, but a fresh look almost always does.