My two:
Very cliché, I played Ocarina of Time a ton as a child, have memories of playing it both on N64 as a wee child and on game cube as a less small child. Never got past water temple even with the game guide.
Yu-Gi-Oh forbidden memories. Played the crap out of that game on play station, constantly playing on free play praying for the cards I would need to get further. I was never able to beat more than 1-2 of the high mages. Watching speed runs on the game it turns out I was never ever going to beat that game as a kid. The final 6 are just disgustingly brutal.
Games were much harder when they only had a few kilobytes of space, the processing power of a cash register and you couldn’t just casually search for a video walkthrough to tell you why you were terrible.
That’s where the printed hint books came into place. Also, print magazines would attract tons of readers with walkthroughs. Also, many came with CDs full of demos. God, that was good!
Some of us hand-drew maps and wrote all that stuff down because the official hint books and magazines were all from another continent! And we liked it like that…
Or, at least, it was the norm and we had no other choice but to accept games were hard 😅