"Natural Difficulty Sliders" in Games

Many have taken my previous article, "Make Your Puzzle Games Unbelievably Easy"Make Your Puzzle Games Unbelievably EasyMy article analyzing ways players can get stuck shockingly early in gamesicely.neocities.org to be about difficult puzzles in games, even though I've now added an appendix about how it's about new players, but even sometimes experienced players tripping over much smaller rocks than difficult puzzles.

This does naturally lead to another topic though, which is how to 'naturally' have these difficult puzzles in the game, or even difficult sections, since I'm not advocating for never having the hard content in your game, but it should imply that these are hidden in some kind of optional layer.

Hints

Despite that hint buttons are better than not having them, it feels like a poor experience for the user to press the hint button repeatedly, they would likely prefer not to.
Even the practice of the hint button showing up if you spent long enough in the level probably is an eyeroll. It's like in platformers where the New Super Mario Bros. Wii "Super Guide" block showed up if you died enough times on the same level.
There are games like Resident Evil or Half-Life secretly adjusting future pickups or health to avoid the sort of bad feeling of that, but it's not as applicable in a puzzle game.

Hints in games also can have the problem of revealing something too fast or revealing something you already knew. I also like having partial hint reveals (I've only implemented that for 1 of my games so far), but this is a small thing. EDIT: Now two games so far!

Opt-In Difficulty

Some RPGs have equipment that makes the game harder on purpose. Shovel Knight had destructible checkpoints etc.
These are cool thematically but not directly 1:1 portable to puzzle games probably.

Challenge Levels and Side Paths

The other option is that, for some hypothetical game with hint levels, you could turn them into normal short levels and so the player could leave the level, play the side level, and subconsciously be able to make easier progress or get more experience at the game. I think this is a good idea overall.
The extreme version of that idea would be to kick out the player for spending too long in a level, which I don't think I've seen but would be fun for some game to do eventually.

The UI friction of leaving a puzzle plays a minor role, in games like The Talos Principle or Pipe Push Paradise you simply leave by walking out of the puzzle, no pressing Escape to leave it.

It can be a little too 'trivial' sometimes though, as The Talos Principle would have easy and hard puzzles where if you beat the hard puzzle first, the easy puzzle is trivial or just a smaller version of that harder puzzle.

Now in platformers or adventure games without designated side paths, there is often a really cursed problem where you have no idea what path is the main path or side path, and some of them are one-way paths, very annoying.

Also I feel like having the challenge or optional levels in the same level select is horrible, stop doing it. It's why in Baba Is You I always 100%'d a world, you're clearly leaving it visually incomplete for the player. This tension is also similar to why games have fake 100% percentages sometimes or 'early endings'.

As another example: Poke ALL Toads hard levels were sometimes long enough that they were like a whole 2nd world, they had to be a whole 2nd video in my series often. You could even make it a very slightly hidden secret to find the hard level secret side.

Secrets, Optimization Targets, and Collectibles

Any Mario player knows about Dragon Coins, Star Coins, secret paths, and speedruns, these are obvious optional collectibles, and similarly in a puzzle game you can also have similar versions of those - collectibles in the level that are visible but hard to get to, and move count optimization goals (except in particular often slapping a move counter in your game just makes it get more cursed as people make constant unoptimal pathing choices all the time).

However there are other games with distinct optimization choices, most commonly in programming puzzle games, and I think it's really important to frameFramingI think I must have had an article planned like this, like back in 2019-ish when I also wanted to write a lot of articles but wasn't as skilled. 8-15-2026 winning a level with a less-optimal solution rather neutrally, the histograms in Zachtronics games are a good idea and better than developer-optimization targets. Again the look of having an 'incomplete' level in your level select, such that it's not the "player's idea" to focus on its incompleteness, I think causes tension.
Not sure how much to focus on this one because many games are not designed to have 'optimizable levels' and that's okay too.

In the Postgame

Even the term 'challenge level' is a bit cursed, because some players will find your tutorial levels are challenges (this happened during a youtube comment response of my previous article ), and some people will find your challenge levels are easy. This is what happened to me with Patrick's Parabox as I did all the 'challenge' levels when I came across them, and it turns out the more challenging challenge levels are hidden in the postgame.

The flipside of this is, of course, you might find that an experienced player is overly bored by the first hour of gameplay or is unimpressed by your trailers because they did not find anything to suggest the developers knew how to make difficult content. In that case you can try:

Really Deep in the Postgame / ARG-like Qualities

A very popular genre is the "child mascot/character show but secretly it's horror/going wrong". I honestly would not have expected it to have such appeal, but if you think about such a thing, it would make sense to have it early in the game, to make an experienced or genre-savvy player get a preview of the developer's ability to make such contrasting work. That doesn't literally mean horror, it can just be some ominous unresolved level with a complex looking object or beta teaser.

There have been a few games coming out that have this 'unfinishable' to 100% game quality, where their postgame are ARG's. At this point all the 'regular' players should have finished your game so I don't have much specific advice that's somehow inapplicable to regular content as well.