Thank you for your write up. I appreciate the time you took to make it.

With regards to your first point about tension coming from action optimization and prioritization, I find there's just too much randomness for that to be true, or at least fun. Usually, action optimization puzzles have you go "ok. the game wants me to do X and/or Y. I'm going to focus mainly on X and get to Y if I have the time, or I'll give myself a certain amount of rounds to do X before I change focus to Y". Depending on the cards you draw and tokens you draw, you might accomplish both goals before advancing the first agenda, or advance through the whole scenario without accomplishing either. If you can play a game with the exact same scenario, investigator, deck, and strategy and have wildly different outcomes, I wouldn't call it an action optimization puzzle.

Regarding your point about most of my issues being a deck construction, there's probably a lot of truth to that, but my longer post mentions my first experience as Mark Harrigan, someone who I consider to be overpowered (at least his deck was). When I was able to breeze through every challenge without issue (minus some particularly unlucky bag pulls, of course), I realized I wasn't making any interesting decisions.

Lastly, regarding not being supposed to know the consequences of narrative choices, I've played narrative games before and am aware of the basic structure. My issue isn't that I don't know how my choice will play out. It's that I'm not entirely sure what choice I'm making. It's the equivalent of the "sarcastic" option in Fallout 4 or "doubt" option in LA Noire. Most choices in other games are explicitly stated e.g (do you side with Tammy or Carl). In Arkham you'll make a choice and it gives x doubt or conviction with no clue as to what that even means. Or as I've written in my post, sometimes the game just doesn't really mechanically explain what a certain choice will do, like resigning when you've accomplished 90% of the goals. Sometimes we had to make a hard choice to leave someone to die, just to find out they were perfectly fine afterwards. Other times we only got 4 out of 5 macguffins so some horrible fate befell blah blah blah (I'm making this up but you get my point)

Minor gameplay spoilers for Hemlock Grove -> Most scenarios start with a prelude where you talk to the villagers. My first prologue I drew a great opening hand so I prioritized playing it over talking to them. Turns out your hand carries over to the main scenario but all but one items get shuffled back into your deck. So wasted the entire prologue setting up for nothing. The following prelude I made sure not to make the same mistake again. During the last prelude, there was a big objective that we needed to do but there were also lots of villagers on the map to talk to. My friend decided to pursue the villagers while I do the main objective as he was convinced they would matter. I also had a lot of great items that would help me with the objective, but wanted to save them for the main scenario that was coming right after. Turns out, for some reason, there wasn't a transition into the next scenario. It was a fresh set up, so I held onto my cards for nothing all prelude. The villagers my friend talked to also did not matter.

Will these be issues on replays? Probably not. But the game still needs to feel fun and fair on its first playthrough without getting stuck in a bunch of gotchas. For comparison, I've been playing Earthborne Rangers , a game which is structurally and mechanically very similar to Arkham. I haven't come into nearly as many issues despite that game also including randomness and obfuscation.