Sierra: You need this sandwich to move through the game but that need is inobvious and you can eat that sandwich too.

That’s why the Three Clue Rule is so important in game design.

To their credit, most of the quests in their games don't really matter. You get some story details or armor that's not mechanically that different from anything else. You can just stumble ahead murdering everything that you can target lock and have a great time. I have hundreds of hours in these games and I think there are some "quests" I don't even know I didn't do.

The hint will be wrong. And then mistranslated.

I've never understood the love for adventure games tbh

Not all adventure games are made by sadistic moon-logicians like the ones at Sierra.

LucasArts, for example, had a long-standing policy of designing their adventure games such that both death and soft-locks were impossible.

I think playing too much King's Quest at an early age completely warped my sense of what makes a game enjoyable. I actually love this stuff, especially if the scene where you game over from not having the sandwich is funny.

Or there is another earlier puzzle that can be solved with the sandwich or the balloon. If you solve it with the sandwich to bad you can't finish the game.