It would be interesting to discuss why an adventure game is difficult.
A former Sierra employer has admitted that some Sierra games were made intentionally obtuse and illogical to sell more hint books.
You put there dead ends, a lot of sudden deaths, random puzzles, other artificial ways to increase the difficulty and the game becomes, technically, more difficult. But at what price?
It seems to me that many people who don’t know adventure games very well still think that PnC adventure games are illogical. Do PnC adventure games have a bad reputation?
Finally in 1989 a smart guy wrote This and things changed a bit, but you still can experience the aftermath of the “old way” to design games.