What makes you throw in the towel and look up the answer to a video game puzzle or quest?

Solving puzzles is one of those features that’s nearly always been at the core of video games. Whether it’s finding a hidden key, following a set of clues to the right destination, or collecting worms to feed a baby eagle, we’ve been sleuthing at least since Warren Robinett programmed his secret room easter egg into Adventure in 1980.

We’ve come a long way since intellectual challenges consisted of things like navigating a rudimentary map with your single-pixel avatar in order to find hidden rooms. Puzzle-heavy games like the Legend of Zelda series have always stretched the player’s mental faculties, but even World of Warcraft has its fair share of hidden places, complex achievements, or even vague quest instructions. It can be a great deal of fun to pick apart and solve a mystery on your own, but everyone has their limits. When the thrill of the hunt turns into frustration, it’s far better to wave the white flag and move on the the next challenge than end up with a smashed controller (or worse).

I’m old enough that I can remember pulling issues of Nintendo Power off of my shelf to reveal the solution to being stuck in a dungeon without a way forward. I can’t say that I ever actually called the hotline for help, but I was certainly tempted for a few games that weren’t covered in any issue that I owned. For the last few decades, the internet has been a tantalizing repository of lightning-fast answers to every gaming riddle that has ever been programmed. It is incredibly tempting, when stalled out on a quest step, to bring up a quick video walkthrough.

But when do you cross the line from challenged to annoyed? What makes you completely give up on solving a puzzle on your own? For me it’s a variety of factors, with the main one being the game I’m playing. WoW is so enormous that spending too much time on any given quest is just not practical. I’ve got two hours to play tonight, I’m not going to spend 30 minutes finding the entrance to a cave on my own just because the interim guard captain gave me poor directions.

However, if I know the game is short but sweet, I’m willing to spend a lot more time banging my head against the wall. Trying to get through an entire game like Portal or Untitled Goose Game without admitting defeat was so much more fulfilling than looking up the answer every time I stalled out for a few minutes.

It also depends on the nature of the puzzle. The Secrets of Azeroth events, including the most recent Felcycle hunt, were designed to be challenging for an entire community of players working together and sharing information. I was happy to simply make a guess at the next step in the chain before looking up the answer, because I knew that hundreds of players hyper-focused on just this step took days to come up with the answer.

So how much do you value solving riddles without assistance? What factors in to your decision to stop searching for the solution and simply look it up?