COCOON

I'm not sure that it doesn't say anything of value (see a related rambling below), but, to be fair, how often is it a requirement for puzzle games to say anything of value? Hell, wasn't one of the best-received titles of last year just about glazing donuts in increasingly baroque ways? Even classics like Myst didn't really have a lot to say, no? Not everything has to be The Outer Wilds or even Portal. I take your point, but I feel like some of the criticisms of this title just don't match up with what the developers were and weren't aiming to accomplish.

Maybe interesting characters is the missing hook for me, they all look too robotic for me to get endeared from what I’ve seen

I can agree with this, but I don't think the developers were going for endearing or identifiable characters. The world feels purposely alien and incomprehensible in a way that I found philosophically interesting, but it is ahuman. It's a definite contrast with, say, Inside (where I think the player develops some confusing emotional connections with extremely inhuman matter, or with other cinematic platformers like FAR, where extremely the extremely basic features of the protagonist arguably allow for more identification with the character, like the schematic art used in some comic books--I'm thinking of Scott McCloud's graphic text Understanding Comics).)

Last comment--I've said too much here, and I should have just written a review. I broadly agree with those saying that the puzzles aren't especially challenging, but I'd complicate that claim a bit. Wrapping your brain around the world and what's going on it, logically and metaphysically, is much more of a stretch than just checking the boxes the puzzles require. The game seems interested in never letting the player feel lost--the world can feel vast, but you're usually confined to quite a small area with only a couple of instruments at hand at any given point in the game. This reduces the mechanical difficulty, but I'd still suggest there's more conceptual depth to be chewed over than the puzzles themselves offer.

one of the reviews called this a 2 hour game lol, like you did not beat this game in 2 hours on your first playthrough you clown.

@dealwittadevil you're obviously talking about my review, I said it can be beaten in 2-3 hours not that I did, and howlongtobeat averaged 4 hours when I wrote that. It took me a little under 4 hours to beat and I took time to appreciate the scenery and think about some puzzles. I also retried a couple boss fights. speedruns average around 1hr 30minutes, but I think my point is more that this game is the length of a Scorsese movie.