Jragon has given a couple of my peeves about Myst. I know that for at least a couple of puzzles, I tried every damned thing that I could think of, then asked my daughter for help, and then finally I looked up the answer in the book.
One of the things that I liked about Zork: Grand Inquisitor was that most of the puzzles (possibly all of them) were actually logical, and the game occasionally gave hints. One monster even said something like “Sure, dig into the old inventory. Something’s bound to work!” when you tried to use inventory items on it.