Pod wrote:
I've never read a review about it -- should I have done before playing it?
That's really up to you of course, but if you don't read anything about the game at all then saying everything about it is some massive secret is going to be a difficult stance to adopt surely? The information that there was more to the game than gimmicky platforming was totally out there, and I think it's fair to say most other people were aware of it, so the fact that you avoided the information doesn't mean you can claim it's a secret. Also, as I said before, the game makes it pretty obvious there are puzzles going on even if you come to it blind and play it for an hour so how you managed to do so and come away thinking 'gimmicky platform game' is pretty hard to understand. That, and all your stuff about hipsters and beards, was the basis of my assumption you were just looking for reasons not to like it.
Pod wrote:
ps: You didn't complete the game, therefore you didn't do NG+, therefore you also aren't in the super secret club?
In as much as I can't be in something that doesn't exist, you're entirely correct. During my time with the game directly I didn't solve all the secrets because, well, I didn't finish the game. Surely that's true of anything you don't play all the way through? Knowing I wouldn't go back to it I just read up on it all so now I know it. The same as if I'd read up on anything else I didn't directly experience. If that makes me a member of a super-secret cabal then also so are all people who know how to make pancakes because they've read a recipe and I haven't bothered.
In all seriousness, it's true that people didn't want to spoil the specifics of the puzzles because part of the fun for those that enjoyed the game was in the discovery and solution of said puzzles. However, you're not just claiming that; you're saying that the very fact that there was more to it than platforming was super-secret--that the entire idea of the game having more depth than that was closely guarded--and that's simply not true. The Eurogamer review, for one example, not only mentions the existence of the puzzles but even spells out that NG+ holds extra secrets and is required to truly finish it.