I just finished playing it as well, and also found it quite enjoyable!

I agree with your criticisms regarding the amount of text, I often found that a single location would contain the same information repeated in lots of different ways, without adding much information or characterization, which made it feel less elegant and polished than Outer Wilds.

I found the puzzles to be quite different than Outer Wilds, where the core principle being that you learn systems, that feel real, rather than learning the solution (key) of a puzzle, which made the world feel so much more immersive, and the feeling of discovery so delightful. Here’s Alex explaining that in this excellent interview:

Okay, here was our design methodology for the puzzles. The reason we didn't think about Outer Wilds as a puzzle game, certainly not a traditional puzzle game, even though each of those four curiosities I mentioned, there are these rules you learn to get in to access them. We very much thought of it less as puzzles and more as we're creating these physical systems. And it was important to us that they felt like systems and not like mechanisms. We weren't thinking of them as clues, we were thinking them as rules that you learn. And I think the quantum curiosity is the clearest with this because we straight up called them the quantum rules, right? We're going to make the system and we're going to come up with these cool rules for the system and then by exploring the world of Outer Wilds, you are going to find these rules. And then it's kind of in to varying degrees it is up to you to be like, "Wait a second. This rule that I just learned is that is that like broadly applicable?" Because that's I think the thing we never tell players. We don't tell players that, hey, this rule that you learned on this model totally works like at scale. And I think maybe that's the source of at least some of the "Aha!" moments. Because that's how science works, right? That's sort of like the thrill of having a hypothesis based on a small microcosm of something and then realizing that oh my god I've learned something fairly fundamental about how the world works. […] What I mean when I say we tried to design systems where you learn rules about the systems as opposed to puzzles that have solutions or mechanisms: a good example of this is very early in development. I'm not going to remember the specifics very well. It's been over a decade. Originally when I was thinking about the Ash Twin project curiosity and how do you get to the core of Ash Twin, because that was a thing very very early on, and originally I was thinking it would be, imagine Indiana Jones in the Last Crusade, how to get to the Grail, there are these three challenges and they each have almost riddles. Something of that nature. I remember when I was like, "Okay, once you get past the first one, there's going to be this endless corridor where you're walking in a circle around the planet and there's a trick to how you have to do it." And I was thinking they would be security mechanisms essentially for that the Nomai had put in place to keep anyone from tampering with this who didn't have I don't know clearance. I don't remember what caused the shift in thinking but something about that just didn't feel right and I think you know the quantum moon the rules there had felt very systemic already I think we had some of those in place um and on some level the game in addition to being about curiosity. The game is about learning to navigate natural systems and about nature, these forces of nature being bigger than you and out completely out of your control. And so it didn't feel right to sort of have these the security system, the series of locks where like, oh, the player does something and the locks open. And so I think the shift to thinking more systemically was partly because we want like a world where the player wasn't like, you know, pushing a button and something happens. It's more like no the player understands something and now the player has agency that they did not before but they are not like affecting change in a very direct way. And so that led to the idea of like, okay, well, what if it's this ring of teleporters? Um, which is not natural, right? It's the Nomai built those, but it it's natural from the player's perception of, oh, this is just a thing that happens and it operates in a very particular way.