I share that curiosity, but more than anything, what interests me is to see the puzzles and how people react to them. In my opinion, puzzle design has been basically godawful since the mid-90s (and was also often not very good prior to the early 90s). Very few adventure games* since then have had any puzzles beyond, "Give Item A to Person 1," "Combine Item A with Item B," and "Use Item A on Hotspot X" -- which, indeed, are all really the same puzzle structure -- and then UI-based logic puzzles (i.e., Tower of Hanoi type puzzles that can be well-integrated or absurd). (* I mean P&C adventures, not Myst-likes.) What is largely missing are puzzles like "study the environment and figure out the conditions under which to use Item A on Hotspot X" -- the more elaborate intersectional puzzles that are common in Monkey Island 2 and even Zack McCracken but basically entirely absent from every indie adventure game I've played in the past decade. Even commercial adventure games I've liked a lot (such as Broken Sword and The Longest Journey) only have A on B type puzzles.
My curiosities are:
(1) Can (and will) Ron Gilbert still design that kind of harder, more complicated puzzle? Signs point to yes, but Broken Age instills doubt.
(2) Can players engage with such puzzles at all? Even the A on B puzzle type seems to stump many players now, even players who seek out retro games. Hell, will
I still enjoy them?
(3) If TP has real puzzles of the quality of classic adventure games, and people
do respond well to them, what will that do to the indie adventure game market? See, many people think that adventure games lack hard puzzles because adventure designers are pandering to dumb players. That's not really true. To be sure, there are things you can do to make your game easier to traverse (limit the number of puzzles, limit the number of items, make hotspots large and obtrusive, remove fail states, include hints, limit backtracking, have a fast walking speed and/or fast travel, etc.) and there are things you can do to make your game to make your game more obstructed (the opposite of the prior list, more or less). But a more-obstructed game is not necessarily harder in an intelligent sense than a less-unobstructed game.
Intelligent puzzles (which generally also means challenging puzzles) are hard to construct. They require both some creative vision and a great deal of technical skill and experience. As I mentioned way back in my AdventureDex interview, I think puzzle design is where adventure games have suffered most. There are indie adventure games that look as good as the classics (such as The Journey Down or Daedelic's titles), I think there are adventure games with comparable or even better writing, though perhaps none to reach the same level of humor as the best LA games, and there are a few games (like Quest for Infamy) that have the same scope. But I can't think of a one that is remotely close to Monkey Island 2 or DOTT or even ZM in puzzle design. In my humble (and biased) opinion, that is not because adventure designers
won't make such puzzles but because they
can't make such puzzles. Which is unsurprising. In almost every instance, adventure games are driven (and designed) by a story-teller who probably has no experience making puzzles, and has been "sorted" into a lead position not based on his puzzle creativity but on his narrative creativity.
Fortunately for adventure designers, players are more or less ignorant of that kind of puzzle. Thus, in their mind the range of choices lies between extremely obstructive and unobstructive A on B puzzles, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, most players prefer fewer obstructions.** But if players (re)discovered intelligent puzzles, I wonder if their estimation of puzzles in, say, WEG titles would change. Right now, the most people seem to ask for is "fair" and "logical" puzzles that aren't "too hard" and don't involve "pixel hunting" -- that's pretty easy to satisfy. A demand for
good puzzles might be impossible to satisfy.
(** IMO, even mediocre A on B puzzles are enormously important because they help develop the theme, offer room for interesting non-essential interactions (at a minimum, failure quips), and develop the association between the character and the player.)
Anyway, I'm pretty excited about this game.