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Colour, symmetry, and the rule of three. How designers signal solutions without a single line of text.
Good puzzle games do not hide their solutions; they encode them. Learning the encoding is the difference between a two-minute puzzle and a forty-minute walkthrough.
The first signal is colour. In most games, a colour that appears exactly twice is a pair, and a colour that appears once is either a key or a decoy. Designers rely on this so heavily that a single anomalous colour is usually the whole puzzle.
The second is symmetry. Rooms are built on grids, and grids invite the player to look for the break. If eight objects are arranged symmetrically and one is not, the asymmetric object is the interactive one — or the trap, which is the same thing until you test it.
The third is the rule of three. Designers introduce a mechanic, vary it, then combine it. If you have seen a mechanic twice, the third appearance is the exam. Solving the first two carefully is how you pass.
The fourth is lighting. Light is the cheapest way to say "look here" without a marker. If a surface is lit more than its neighbours, the designer wants your attention there; if it is lit differently, the designer wants you to notice that it is different.
None of this replaces thinking. It replaces wandering. The next time a puzzle stalls you, stop interacting and describe the room out loud: what repeats, what breaks the pattern, what is lit. The answer is almost always in that description.