Yes, your prior on the puzzle being actually unsolvable should be very low, but in almost all such situations, 70% seems way too high a probability to assign to your first guess at what you’ve misunderstood.
When I prove to myself that a puzzle is impossible (given my beliefs about the rules), that normally leads to a period of desperate scrambling where I try lots of random unlikely crap just-in-case, and it’s rare (<10%) that anything I try during that desperate scramble actually works, let alone the first thing.
In the “final” level of Baba Is You, I was stuck for a long time with a precise detailed plan that solved everything in the level except that there was one step in the middle of the form “and then I magically get past this obstacle, somehow, even though it looks impossible.” I spent hours trying to solve that one obstacle. When I eventually beat the level, of course, it was not by solving that obstacle—it was by switching to a radically different approach that solved several other key problems in entirely different ways. In hindsight, I feel like I should have abandoned that earlier plan much sooner than I did.
In mitigation: I feel that solutions in Baba Is You are significantly harder to intuit than in most puzzle games.
Yes, your prior on the puzzle being actually unsolvable should be very low, but in almost all such situations, 70% seems way too high a probability to assign to your first guess at what you’ve misunderstood.
When I prove to myself that a puzzle is impossible (given my beliefs about the rules), that normally leads to a period of desperate scrambling where I try lots of random unlikely crap just-in-case, and it’s rare (<10%) that anything I try during that desperate scramble actually works, let alone the first thing.
In the “final” level of Baba Is You, I was stuck for a long time with a precise detailed plan that solved everything in the level except that there was one step in the middle of the form “and then I magically get past this obstacle, somehow, even though it looks impossible.” I spent hours trying to solve that one obstacle. When I eventually beat the level, of course, it was not by solving that obstacle—it was by switching to a radically different approach that solved several other key problems in entirely different ways. In hindsight, I feel like I should have abandoned that earlier plan much sooner than I did.
In mitigation: I feel that solutions in Baba Is You are significantly harder to intuit than in most puzzle games.