Loom, I think, was like that sometimes, but Monkey Island wasn't too bad. Sierra's King's Quest series, however, was notorious in this respect, where the thing to do was something arbitrary you could not reason to in a million years.
That's the kind of thing that sucks in adventure games. In real life, I can be creative to a very large degree because reality has content, specifically, to the degree that I grasp that reality. A ball of clay is a ball of clay, and because I understand what clay is, I know what I can do with it. But in a game, a ball of clay is just a symbol. There is no ball of clay. It is a nominal entity, an image or word plus some code that simulates maybe some aspects of it in very constrained ways (in adventure games, this is truly very narrow, as in, if user clicks these two things with this action, then show picture and display text, the end). And this might be okay if the author has arranged things sensibly, but sometimes you end up with truly bizarre ideas. You wonder how these things passed QA.
Then I got the full color walk through book.
As I followed the guide, it was mind boggling not only how little progress I had made, but just how many different ways and paths to different endings I had missed! You didn't necessarily soft lock yourself as easily as others, but you could very easily screw yourself out of other options surprisingly quick.
Then I played The Dig. By comparison, The Dig felt like an accessible masterpiece. I didn't feel like I was straining for the right hidden pixel either across environments. The story wasn't unforgiving. There were only two real endings, and relatively easy to backtrack to.