I’m sorry to hear about the bad year you had in your personal life. It’s even more impressive that you finished the game despite all of that. I hope there’s some light on the horizon.
I did find the puzzles too hard for me. (That’s just one data point, of course, I suspect every puzzle will strike some players as too easy and others as too hard.) In my review I gave some specifics about my frustration points and what kind of clues might have helped me.
After a bit more ruminating I did have two higher level thoughts about how difficulty is perceived by the player (OK, perceieved by me, but I suspect it generalizes), that I think maybe relate to why this game felt notably frustrating among the several games where I spent a decent amount of time in the walkthrough.
(1) Sequencing / flow of game: it feels worse to get stuck at the very beginning of the game. I really like the way @lpsmith put the relationship between getting stuck and the player’s trust in the author:
So I think that makes the very opening parts of the game especially important, because that imaginary bank account where I credit and debit trust with the author is likely at a low initial balance.
When the game starts with something I can accomplish (maybe solve a puzzle, but also just explore an area, talk to an NPC, or learn backstory from clues in the environment) that fills that imaginary bank account a bit, and if a tricky puzzle shows up later I’m going to try harder at without giving up.
Applying that here, TSiaS sticks out a me a bit as maybe the only game in the comp where I felt like I didn’t accomplish anything on my own without the walkthrough / hints. And that is a bad feeling.
So I think the feeling of difficulty could be changed just by adjusting the opening parts of the game to give the player something even easier to do, even if all of the puzzles were kept the same after that. (Iirc, you had to open by putting water on the gun, which doesn’t seem that hard, but you’re in a boat full of possible things to mess with, and as I recall the text that suggests focusing on disarming the captain comes AFTER you try to mess with the captain’s pockets, which I was, errr, pretty far from thinking of doing.)
(2) Size of game / ability to work on multiple puzzles in parallel: it feels worse to get stuck on task A when task A is the only task you can possibly work on. My brain processes things in the background, so often in a slightly bigger game I’ll find myself trying to, say, decode the knots in a macrame wall hanging in the salon when I suddenly realize, “aha! I should see what happens if I use the shoe polish on the projector in the observatory!" So that (fictitious) game made both puzzles feel easier by giving me the chance to work on them both at the same time.
In TSiaS, it felt like there was one correct path through the puzzles because they often gave an item I would need for the next one. That’s a perfectly fine structure of course but I think it does make it more frustrating when a player hits a bottleneck and can’t do anything else.