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[Danc]

What I generally do is have a staged approach to giving the player information when doing a play test.

1. Don't tell the player anything.
2. If the player becomes blocked for several attempts, record what they were thinking and dig in further if there are any subtle issues that were throwing them off (happens about 30% of the time for me even when I think I immediately spot problem...deeper questioning is good!)
3. Restart the test with the phrase "Okay, we are going to play again and this time I'm going to tell you a couple things about the game."  Try to tell them the minimum necessary to get them over the block. 
4. Repeat as needed.

With this process, you get both the benefits of understanding how intuitive the game might be and you get to see how the player reacts to the gameplay deeper into the title.

Works great.

take care,
Danc.

[vinheim3]

What would be beneficial about hiding controls from the player? As a gamer, I wouldn't find it fun to guess controls, I would like to get right into the game and play. If it's used as a puzzle element, it wouldn't be fun having to press every key to see which has an effect¹. And you shouldn't assume players should know common key controls since you're limiting your audience to players who've played games with similar controls to yours/people who have played games, and even if that is a small audience lost, there's still no reason to leave them guessing. In no way does this sound appealing.

¹Unless you do it La Mulana style where hints are scattered around as to what key to press and where to press it.

Other exceptions include key combos using keys that already have some effect.

[Kinaetron]

Sorry Vinheim, should of mentioned this earlier but the control scheme is based around the xbox 360 pad so it shouldn't be too much issue for the player to figure it out.

Danc, thats the approach we're going to take with the playtesting, it allow us to find out exactly how intutive the controls are to the player 

[vinheim3]

Oh ok, that does lessen the hassle, though I still don't know why you'd want to test how intuitive the controls are, unless the controls do something complex and different each time, then I guess that could be used as part of a puzzle (e.g. pressing Y on cyan spotlights switches on your flashlight, pressing RB on red spotlights puts batteries in that flashlight first, experimentation leads to a puzzle solved, it could be fun if the effects were funny/cool, or like I said before, clues about effects are scattered around like in La Mulana)

[Kinaetron]

The wall jumping system is somewhat complex as the distance jump is based on how long you stay on the wall, we want to know if people will be able to notice it or not.

[vinheim3]

Ok, so like Nikujin, you're hiding certain game mechanics? That's ok, I thought it was controls as in input.

[Kinaetron]

Well we didn't mention the controls either, waited till people asked (finally did the playtest) but overall went well, still loads to improve on though in the game.

Thanks guys for all the input, really appreciate it !