Empress of China

It's come to my attention that this game in its current state is... shall we put it... way too hard and frustrating to be enjoyable for anyone who isn't both a hardcore puzzle fan and a masochist.

Though difficulty is something I was definitely going for, and not something I want to remove from the game, some of the puzzles (in particular the Path of Light ones) suffer from a lack of visibility and direction. I definitely want to fix those issues by adding a few easy Path of Light puzzles before the first one, and adding a map into each room where you can't see the entirety of the puzzle in one go. That should already help a lot.

But those aren't the only thing my puzzles suffer from. They are also just generally difficult to such a level that they are too frustrating to appeal.

I've been toying with several ideas on how to make the game less frustrating, without making it much more easy.

One possibility I thought up (and Liberty also came up with the same idea in her stream), is to add an optional hint system that will propose to help you solve the current puzzle after failing it five times. (breaking a boulder in the boulder pushing puzzles, ruling out certain entry paths in the path of light puzzles, adding another word in the word puzzles, allowing you to get hit once or twice without failing in the spike puzzles)

Another possibility would be moving the switches that advance the plot one or two puzzles forwards, leaving the 4th (and maybe the 3rd) puzzles as optional, really difficult puzzles that net some sort of reward but aren't required to beat the game.

I feel doing both might be handholding too much, but I'm not sure which of the two I want to go with.

Any suggestions or other ideas would be awesome!