thanatos388 said:
I haven't seen the whole game but the interaction it has with the hub world didn't seem really in depth to me. Sure you solve puzzles that move boats and platforms but those aren't really puzzles as much as they just slightly more complicated buttons. Then there's the puzzles that require you to walk on specific parts of the world based on the puzzle solution. But that's not a puzzle that's just memorization. You either remember or you don't or you're smart and just take a picture and know where to go. Oh and some puzzles I guess have hints in the environment but that's so abstract it seemed like padding to me. Like, it wasn't solved because you're smart but because you brute forced your way until you solve it and see what the specific solution was. And the puzzles themselves are only hard because you don't know what problem you're solving half of the time. You can complete tutorials without really learning all the rules so you get stuck and that just seems like bad game design to me.
Personally I found that most tutorials went over the mechanics very well and usually build in enough different puzzles to force you to actually understand what your doing instead of guessing. And the environmental puzzles were you have to look for clues didn't feel very arbitrary to me. The first puzzle is usually positioned in a way that it gets immediatly apparent what your looking for in the puzzle if you pay a little attention and the puzzles thereafter usually just play with that idea.
The most arbitrary and least apparent environmental puzzle was the sand temple in my opinion. That was kind of bs, since it required you to stand at a certain spot for you to get it.
And of course there are always the extra environmental puzzles were you draw the lines in the environment.