You want my opinion on guides in puzzles?
Let me tell you about a little puzzle called the The Pilgrim from Xafi puzzle, a horrible blemish on one of my favorite games, Legend of Grimrock 2
So you have to open a gate to get into the cemetery. This is not a necessary thing to do if you want to get the normal ending because there are only 3 power gems behind it, and you only need 16 power gems out of 20 to get the normal ending, but if you want to get the true ending, you have to get all 20. Plus, finding 16 when you can only miss one is a LOT harder than if you can find all 20. There are also a few VERY important pieces of equipment in the cemetery and crypt, including the Ethereal Dagger, which is LITERALLY THE ONLY WAY to damage those bastard Air Elementals unless you happen to have Disrupt Elementals, which requires Water Magic (your mage is almost certainly a Fire+Air mage, so you won't have that). So yeah, you want to get into this place. The gate is locked, and you only have two hints on how to open it: the pushable block in front of it, which can be pushed in any of the four cardinal directions (like a D-Pad, kind of), and a Stone Guardian (talking statue) that tells you that "the answers were sealed in the archives". So you go to the archives, solve some more puzzles there which actually DO make sense, and in the end, you find a chamber containing 4 scrolls. Here is what they say:
Scroll 1:
>Dear Visitor,
>Made it this far already? Splendid!
>Sealed in this vault are the fragments of a tale that tells of a pilgrim from Xafi.
>My father passed the story to me and now it is my time to pass it forward.
>The Island Master
Scroll 2:
>~ He began traveling towards the frozen tundras ~
>~ The sun was setting ~
Scroll 3:
>~ Then he looked at the path leading to the burning hot desert he called home ~
Scroll 4:
>~ Finally, the star of the north came to lead the way ~
>~And he continued walking along the path ~
Confused? OK, so the first thing to understand (which is a reasonable leap of logic to make) is that each line of the story correlates to a direction you need to push that block to open the gate. This is kind of annoying because there's no sign that each LINE correlates to a direction; for all you know multiple hints could be on each line, or some hints could take multiple lines. But whatever, that's not too bad. So, the first line, about tundras… well, that's not really helpful, so we'll get back to that. Second line, sun setting. That's easy, the sun sets in the west, so that means west. Third line, burning deserts… no idea. Maybe the hint has to do with home? Or "the path"? Anyway, fourth line, star of the north. Obviously north. And lastly, continued along the path. OK, new complaint, how are you supposed to know that "continued along the path" means "do the same thing again", which means north? How do you know it doesn't mean "the direction you want to go", which is the gate, which is to the east? Or "the direction you came from", the west? Oh wait, the line about the Desert also mentions a path, so I guess that could mean south too! Wonderful! Now let's go back to tundras and deserts. How… the fuck… are you supposed to figure out that "tundra" means north, and "desert" means south? Not only is that not really entirely accurate in the real world, why would you even apply real world logic in a fantasy game? What makes all this EXPONENTIALLY worse is that there is actually a desert area in the game… AND IT'S IN THE FUCKING NORTH!!!!
So yeah, when a game presents you with a massive developer fuckup like that, the only sane option is to use a guide.