Anybody else play through both of them?  If so, are you reacting the same way as I am or differently?

I have some tentative thoughts as to why, but I really should go to bed, so I'll sleep on it...

But, while I'm here: to me, the main reason why I'm reacting differently to the two games is the difference in tone.  Both games are made up of set piece chunks between relatively close checkpoints, and both games are fair enough that I can generally make it to the next checkpoint before I rage quit.  But Abe's starts off with a tone of casual mocking cruelty; maybe that's in-game, except that it gives me the feeling that the game is being mean to me and laughing at me.

While Another World, in contrast, has a more spare and lonely feel (I argued against the term 'minimalist' in another thread, but I agree with loneliness, in that you're on a strange world with one companion that you can't communicate directly with and fork paths quickly on); I was trying to figure out what to do to survive, but there wasn't the same actively antagonistic feel making me resent the difficulty of the puzzles.

The double-layering of the puzzles, with the branches on top of the micropuzzles, may have helped here, too: that may have activated more of the puzzle-solving parts of my brain, helping distract me away from getting mad at the game.  Hard to say...