In my first session, I was pretty impressed by the game.  I'm not sure how much of that had to do with abstract merits of the game, and how much of that had to do with its being at just the right difficulty level for me that evening: I barely managed to muster both the puzzle-solving ability and the manual dexterity to make it through all of the sections.

In contrast, today I ended up looking at a walkthrough three times.  One was where I stopped at the end of the previous session; one was in the bit where one of your enemies hits a door switch while you're pointing a gun at him, and one was at the end where I just didn't want to go through more trial and error to figure out exactly what to do.

I guess that second time when I resorted to a walkthrough got to me a little bit.  I was proud of myself for noticing after a few attempts that I wasn't supposed to shoot one enemy, because he would erect a barrier I needed.  That was neat, I always like it when a puzzle requires me to figure out something new about how a game world might behave.

But, as it turns out, I actually needed to figure out two new ideas: I not only had to notice that, I had to think about grenades and behave differently with another enemy.  And having to figure out two different ideas in the same section was, perhaps, a bit much.

The combat also started to get to me at around this point: there are a bunch of battles where people are shooting at you a lot, and it took me a fair amount of trial and error and error and luck and error to make it through those.  Now, having said that, there is some amount of skill in the battles, and at the very end of the game I actually ended up being reasonably good at fighting the battles.  But it was still a bit much for me; I would perhaps have preferred for the game to have broken out a session where I would have honed my fighting skills without having to worry about puzzles as well.  (And then, once I'd honed those skills, for the game not to have forced me to use them over and over again...)

Still, having said that, there are so many ways in which the game chose to not belabor mechanics (especially in comparison to recent games) that I end up being pretty favorably inclined to it.  And the change-up of mechanics (except for one shooting bit) in the last two areas was nice.  I think I rather like the world, though I have to think about that, too; I certainly like the art style.

Great choice for re-inaugurating the VGC.

Yeah.  It's a great example of the puzzle-box nature of the game: take something pretty minimalist, isolate its component parts, and see how far you can take the combinations.