It was so unique! I found myself getting extremely excited whenever I would see that glowing page because it was always a treat to see what new knowledge they would give me next!
The worst thing I did to myself was watching a playthrough of The Witness on youtube instead of playing it myself. It's right up my alley and it's such a beautiful and clever game that I would have loved to experience myself. Good news though, if you love The Witness check out Taiji on steam! It's extremely similar in concept and gameplay, just in 2D instead!
I experienced Lingo through my friend discord streaming their playthrough of it. It's an awesome game but my goodness did we have to have a thesaurus open for some of the puzzles! I definitely would recommend anyone reading this check it out though, it's incredibly unique! I'd say the closest game in terms of vibes is Antichamber, but with word puzzles.
Outer Wilds is a game you can beat in 20 minutes, but you spend 15 hours figuring out how to actually do that. Along the way you unravel a lovely story of curiosity and discovery and loss, while trying to solve one of the greatest mysteries in the universe. It's a beautiful game and a true once-in-a-lifetime experience in the most literal sense, since you can only experience it once. Like the other person said, if this sounds appealing to you, give it a try! You will absolutely know whether the game is for you well within the refund period.
Tunic absolutely does have tons of knowledge based progression. You can skip through massive chunks of the game simply because you have knowledge the game withheld from you. As you collect manual pages throughout the game you learn new mechanics that have always been there from the start, you simply didn't know how to access them. A big example of this is accessing the hub, which is a massive game changing discovery halfway through the game that you can access in the first 60 seconds.
yeah I definitely enjoyed the translation gameplay in heaven's vault more, but otherwise chants of senaar way outclasses it for the reasons you mentioned.
I don't know, if I had to guess it's probably the return to world campaign.
With the announcement of the next monster hunter game, which is being made by the same team as world (so likely it's going to be very similar to world) Capcom started advertising world again and that shot it up to daily peaks of ~160K concurrent players for a while.
I know the first game wasn't everyone's cup of tea but I loved it to bits! Seeing the little snippet of actual gameplay when the bridge was destroyed makes me think this will be just the first game but better, which is my favourite type of sequel, and I can't wait! With MH Wilds and this 2025 is looking stacked already!
It really sucks that you bounced so hard. Some tips in case you ever do want to go back to it:
Enemies are puzzles too. Nearly every single enemy in the game has a specific trick to them that, once you get it down you can beat them much more easily. This includes bosses. Usually this is indicated by breaking the enemy.
Don't worry about the races. I think I only ever won a single race in the entire game, and it has literally zero consequence other than a couple lines of dialog. It's purely a feel good thing, and to connect you more with Emily through a friendly competition.
The story can feel a bit confusing and disconnected because there's 2 stories happening at once: the crossworlds story and the actual story. The actual story only really starts to get serious towards the end, so until then just focus on enjoying the fake-mmo world!
If it's not for you, it's not for you and there's nothing I can do about that, but I really want others to enjoy this game as much as I did because I do believe it's something special.
Good luck, and remember: always read the manual!