I have a theory - not one that I am willing to submit to much in the way of peer review - that games are often about learning new ways to think. No, not new ways - not quite. It's more that, in the moment-to-moment action of a game, in the individualised swirl of ways it likes to stage things or explain itself, you often get to see another mind in flight: you learn to think in the way that someone else has already been thinking.
This may be why the really big budget games often lose a little of their spark. With no singular mind behind them - not even a handful of singular minds - games sometimes rely on working out the way that you already think instead: they become students of your compulsions, of the ways that we all have the same cognitive biases. Anyway, what this whole thing really explains (to me at least) is why I've been enjoying La-Mulana 2 so much without making much in the way of progress. I am learning what the people who made this intricate, sometimes prankish kind of game value. I am learning to think like them. I am learning very slowly.
I bounced off the reputation of the first game as much as the actual game itself. By the time I came to La-Mulana it was a known quantity, and the thing I seemed to understand about it was that it was a game that is often played with a walkthrough open on a browser somewhere. Its brilliance had long since been explored and its personality had ossified into a list of things you had to look up in order to proceed. I know this shouldn't have put me off, but it did: my loss.