The remake of La Mulana is amazing and the puzzles are probably its best feature. Puzzles are also probably its worst feature. I'll start with what works.
La Mulana's puzzles are awesome mainly for two reasons. First, they integrate themselves directly into the plot, a gameplay decision which painfully few games do. By the end of the second dungeon, players will have a basic understand of who 'Mother' is as well as of the history of La Mulana and some of its past inhabitants. Almost all of this information is gained without any dialogue and instead is found on stone tablets throughout the ruins with the names of places and people being vital to solving puzzles; not knowing why the nine giants divided into two factions and exactly which one is which can prove both costly and outright deadly. This 'puzzle-based storytelling' takes advantage of the interactive strength of video games as a medium and, like flavor text, streamlines the experience by fleshing out the world and characters without relying heavily upon awkward exposition; Fez uses this same method of storytelling with its puzzles to the point that players learn an entirely new alphabet by the end and this is hopefully a trend which will catch on in the future.
The second reason La Mulana's puzzles are awesome is they tend to function like actual puzzles. In many games, 'solving' a puzzle usually requires simply finding the right item to use. At best, this approach creates puzzles which require a few seconds or a minute of thinking to arrive at a solution and then a significantly larger amount of time executing the plan. At worst, this leads to the problem many adventure games suffer from of the player blindly flailing around trying to combine every item and use every item everywhere. This is not to say that La Mulana does not have its share of (usually clever) block pushing puzzles and item fiddling, but the majority of puzzles in the game simply ask players to use skills they already possess in order to forge a path with most puzzles consisting of hunting down and mentally combining the dozens of vague clues scattered throughout the game. As a result, puzzles require a large amount of thinking outside the box and players can get stuck on a puzzle for hours, but it is astoundingly satisfying when a mysterious clue from much earlier in the game suddenly becomes relevant and everything clicks into place.
Unfortunately, La Mulana also has some major issues with its puzzles. Probably the biggest issue is simply that very few of the puzzles are optional and, very much unlike Fez, there are many moments where, despite the seemingly open appearance, one or two puzzles absolutely must be solved in order to make any sort of progress. This wouldn't be horrible on its own, but La Mulana gives no indication as to if a room still has 'important stuff' in it and, since two vague clues in two entirely different areas are relatively frequently expected to be used together in order to find a puzzle solution somewhere else in order to unlock something in yet another area, there are several moments, especially near the end, where it becomes a matter of either resorting to a guide or asking a friend for help or wandering around for several hours looking for a clue or just the proper room for solving a puzzle, let alone actually figuring out exactly what to do.
As an example, one of the later puzzles in the game involves getting to a closed off part in one region in order to modify a different region, but in order to get to this closed off area players must interact with a pot in a third area which looks like every other pot in the area in which it is found; there is a clue for this, but what the clue doesn't say is that this is the only pot in the entire game which must be used like a pipe from a Mario game by standing on top of it and pressing down. So, in this case, even if a person understands the clue, breaking the pot causes nothing to happen and a player may think that he or she was simply wrong and go look for a solution elsewhere. This is just one example, but there are many such puzzles where a player can understand a clue, but simply interact with the indicated object or room incorrectly and, since there is no indication that they are 'on the right track', it is all too easy to get the impression that an interpretation of a clue is completely wrong.
It is important to stress that this is not a problem with obtuse and/or multi-step puzzles, it is a problem with conveying basic information. Fez, the Metroid series, and many other open exploration games have various ways of informing players of if a room is 'completed' and/or if something important is still present, La Mulana plays a noise after the player solves 'something' and any time saved by not relying upon messy exposition and dialogue is more than made up for by the sheer amount of time players will inevitably spend endlessly backtracking just looking for what they need to do. Clues also frequently refer to room names or to the names of statues found in specific rooms, but again there is a lack of information as players can only ever see the name of the room they are currently in (and even then must interrupt play by pressing the pause button and bringing up the map); the lack of a way to look at the names of previously-visiting rooms, let alone after acquiring area maps, is simply a sloppy and tedium-inducing decision as it leads to either pausing in every single room to write the name down for future use or systematic backtracking through every unlocked area in the game, which still leads to constantly pausing to see room names. Vague clues and clues which don't pay off until significantly later in a game are great, a complete lack of basic information-related features like being able to scroll through room names and a simple binary system for if a room is 'completed' or not is not so great, especially in a game as expansive and backtrack-heavy as La Mulana.
In the end, La Mulana is generally a great game with engaging and clever puzzles which successfully link plot and gameplay, but its frustrating moments serve as indications of how important it is for any non-linear game to convey general, overarching information.
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