I started playing through again because Jon Blow is an idiot who doesn’t understand metadata and thinks it’s impossible for cloud saves to go Mac ←→ PC (in case the Mac version gets a version bump w/o a corresponding PC bump).
It’s been long enough that I’ve forgotten the solutions for the hard puzzles so there’s some challenge + trying harder to get the obilisks.
The mountain is a trash fire. The floor puzzles are novel but tedious (the ground floor is fun at least), and I was pissed off by how unfair the difficulty ramping by glitching was since it’s not teaching you a new mechanic. One area could have been omitted from the island and the puzzles moved to the mountain… or a new mechanic could have been introduced. From a game-design perspective, it’s neat that the puzzles only use rules that you must have been exposed to; from a game-player POV they sucked because they weren’t any harder than puzzles I’d already solved (once I’d eliminated the glitching with screenshots/videos). Plus! They’re super inaccessible to anyone with some types of visual processing disabilities!
I get that the glitching in the environment and puzzles is suppose to elicit a feeling of breaking the construction of games-as-a-stimulative-experience, but that emotional shot missed pretty bad (just like all the quotes)