Trumgottist has it exactly right. This is a problem of trust.
Designers win my trust by writing puzzles that always make sense in hindsight. When I'm sure that a reasonable answer must exist, I'll keep trying. If I'm stuck, it's because there's a gap in my thinking, not in which pixel I happened to notice. In these cases, answers may come to me on the bus or the train or overnight in a flash of beautiful clarity.
That "aha!" moment, when I'm walking down the street and an answer hits me, is one of the great pleasures of adventure gaming. My favorite 'aha' moment was finding the last ending of the text adventure Slouching towards Bedlam, and a walkthrough would have completely ruined it.
But if a game loses my trust even once, with just one really bad puzzle, I'm more likely to get hints later on. When it comes to puzzles, an early stinker can be disastrous. Gabriel Knight 3 will never live down that One Stupid Puzzle early on.
This logic goes TRIPLE if it's possible to be locked out of victory by missing a pixel early in the game.
Reading a walkthrough for an adventure game is like skipping to the last page of an old-school mystery novel. The game can still be entertaining on many levels, but it's not a battle of wits anymore.
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