Thanks for playing my game! I agree that mazes with single input solutions are pretty unfair and a big random spike in difficulty. It would've been nice to find some algorithm to generate mazes where they wouldn't be needed, but unfortunately time got in the way.
I'm always super excited when players find out strategies that I didn't plan for, but knew about during development! I would also start every materials minigame by grabbing the hammer and just swinging until every object was labelled. Maybe wouldn't fly in a real laboratory, but worked all too well in my game lol.
Thank you for the kind words, and thanks again for playing!