Man, did not want to write a novel here... Sorry.
Finished Resonance today, wouldn't call it very hard - I'd say probably on the same level as Dream Machine: pleasantly stimulating but not reaching the hair-pulling levels. Though compared to harder game like e.g. VirtuaVerse, it has almost no bullshit sequences (VV is all bullshit sequences) - I can only think of one very badly clued interaction, and one that is a little misleading. That it manages to offer some challenge while staying very fair throughout is a rather impressive feat.
It's fine that I like games which other players don't, but I think calling what puzzle is bullshit or not is very complicated, given the context and all. For example, I stated that more than one time I talked to someone and something new was unlocked, I would not call that very good but each time it was, ultimately, not terrible, for two reasons : first it's just that I did not get something but not that it was retarded, it was not that you need to talk to someone and something not related happens or such, it was just me who did not get something the character got, which can happen, and secondly it's not the kind of things which would get me stuck, talking to people I would try, it's not using some item on some spot, so there would be worse things to talk about before this anyway.
On the contrary if you told me the way to get the jetpack in Space Quest is bullshit, I would agree. I think this kind of things can be fun once in a while for a change, because it's so much satisfying to finally figure out, but it's unfair, that I agree with. Also there's one worse thing in Space Quest, if you get the robot to follow you in the cave before getting told to get the meat of the monster then the monster is not here (or maybe the robot does not follow you, I'm getting confused while typing, but anyway, what you're meant to do you can't, that's terribly stupid), that is absolutely terrible, that I just call very bad design.
Now, to the point, I have got one precise question : did people who think VirtuaVerse is bullshit have completed Deponia 3 (not the first one, not saying I can't be wrong about that but I think 3 is much harder)? From my memory Deponia 3 is harder than VirtuaVerse, and there's no reason why I would call its difficulty particularly fair compared with Virtuaverse (there's no dead end etcetera but that's it, just the same).
I am surprised the game gets so much trashed about its puzzles by people who've no problem with hard puzzles (no problem with hating the game for other reasons like the plot ...), especially since the game even tried to elaborate a bit sometimes (with the full chatting program which is there only to click on the guy's portrait, the sushi thing, in the second chapter you can try to look at barcodes too high like it could be possible, and there's this box in the water you would really want to pick to get and climb to look at the bar codes, I love such kinds of false trail once in a while, two of the best, absolutely brilliant ones, being the car section in Grim Fandango and the moment where you can ask the girl to read poems in Grim Fandango), I know I noticed there are some lines of text for trying logical things which lead nowhere but maybe it's just the exact same example I was talking about in the parenthesises, and the game has big inventory and logical interactions, I think it's a cool way to have not-bullshit difficulty, it's totally not about bruteforcing then.
In a world where Gibbous, Guard Duty, Tsioque, Paradigm and other Inner World series, series which is fine and better than the other games mentioned but still not that ambitious when it comes to puzzles, exist, I'm a bit mad that the game which gets trashtalked for its puzzles is VirtuaVerse.