I think your list of conditions is very restrictive; to the point at which it’s really difficult to find something matching it. Most (all?) modern difficult strategy games rely on some version of “game knowledge” as part of it’s difficulty, expecting you to experiment with different approaches to find out what works best—this is a core part of the game loop, something specifically designed into the game to make it more fun. This is baked into the design on a fundamental level and is extremely difficult to separate out. Combine that with the one-shot nature and a strict time limit (so strict that in a large amount of cases this isn’t even enough to start making meaningful strategic decisions: either because learning all the systems takes longer or because you need to progress through the game enough to be aware of the later payoffs) and you are basically rolling a die on whenever you can land on a solution or not via some combination of prior gaming knowledge and luck—I don’t think you can meaningfully “try harder” to guess the decisions the game designers have made about the systems and obstacles you’ve not seen yet (besides playing more games beforehand of course, collecting game design principles trivia along the way). Yes, you can bias the roll in your favor with genre savviness and experience; one of my friends has an absolutely uncanny ability of picking excellent builds in games with no prior information. He has also played games for some inordinate amount of time in order to build this intuition up.
I think your list of conditions is very restrictive; to the point at which it’s really difficult to find something matching it.
Most (all?) modern
difficultstrategy games rely on some version of “game knowledge” as part of it’s difficulty, expecting you to experiment with different approaches to find out what works best—this is a core part of the game loop, something specifically designed into the game to make it more fun. This is baked into the design on a fundamental level and is extremely difficult to separate out.Combine that with the one-shot nature and a strict time limit (so strict that in a large amount of cases this isn’t even enough to start making meaningful strategic decisions: either because learning all the systems takes longer or because you need to progress through the game enough to be aware of the later payoffs) and you are basically rolling a die on whenever you can land on a solution or not via some combination of prior gaming knowledge and luck—I don’t think you can meaningfully “try harder” to guess the decisions the game designers have made about the systems and obstacles you’ve not seen yet (besides playing more games beforehand of course, collecting game design principles trivia along the way).
Yes, you can bias the roll in your favor with genre savviness and experience; one of my friends has an absolutely uncanny ability of picking excellent builds in games with no prior information. He has also played games for some inordinate amount of time in order to build this intuition up.