I've seen a few videos about Islands of Insight, a new game that advertises 10,000 puzzles, and it looks... fine, I guess. more importantly, it got me thinking about types of puzzles you see in games. I don't know if there are widely accepted terms for these (please let me know if there are) but I've narrowed it down to two types that I've been calling mechanical and environmental.

Mechanical puzzles are where you have a set of known mechanics, one or more end states and one or more objects that can be manipulated. The goal is to manipulate the objects into an end state. Lights Out, for example, gives you the mechanics (swapping light states), the end goal (all lights are off) and objects to manipulate (the lights themselves). These are the focus in games like The Witness, The Talos Principle and Baba Is You.

Environmental puzzles have you gather information within some setting that contains clues to a solution. The bulk of environmental puzzles comes from connecting all of the clues and making the necessary leaps in logic to deduce the goal, and/or mechanics and/or end state. e.g. Read messages 1, 2 and 3, to realize that item X has significance in location Y, so using it there unlocks Z. Detective puzzles could be another name for these. La-Mulana, Outer Wilds and Tunic (and Project RyME) use this type a lot.

Islands of Insight seems to lean very heavily into mechanical puzzles. The 10,000 puzzle count does sound impressive, but at the same time selling itself based on quantity makes it feel very hollow. When I solve a puzzle, I want to feel like it had some consequence or was memorable in some way. With so many, I highly doubt it can satisfy either of those. I've found myself more interested in environmental puzzles because they almost inherently hit my criteria much harder. They need to be fairly unique, since they just don't work if you reuse the clues and logic, and the puzzles themselves usually contribute directly to the story/characters/world, giving them some meaning.

This is all just some 1 am ramblings. I'm sure with a little bit of abstraction you could find some equivalence between these two types and dissolve my points into nothing. I'm really just saying I want more La-Mulanas and Outer Wilds in the world.