It's fairly staggering to see what a decade can do to change one's mentality on life. It's also interesting that a lot of it runs parallel to the evolution of my own thought processes.
It would appear that you won't be continuing /this/ series, but if you make other point-click puzzle games in the future, I have some input as to the puzzles:
1: Some are bastard-hard, but are completely logical and intuitive, such as the "WOOF" puzzle. I liked these and have no issue with them.
2: Others just require fairly specific logic, but remain fairly open for choices. This was nothing short of infuriating for me, until I found out that there was already a full walkthrough for this... For example, I could think of multiple ways around the laser puzzle:
- pouring water on the lasers and shorting out the system
- walking through the lasers with the bucket on Phil's head and hands in his sleeves so that the lasers don't touch human DNA
- throwing the chewing gum at the lasers as a distraction and then hopping through while the gun it shooting the gum...
That last one may not be the best idea, but you could always have a small--I have read that development time for this game was only 2 weeks--cutscene with Phil dancing around dodging bullets or lasers or whatever the gun fires and hiding behind/inside a locker or something.
My point is that if puzzles are "multiple choice" like this, that there should (in my opinion) be consequences to at least most of the possible choices.
That aside, I found the game itself and its contrast to the original Riddle School to be interesting and stimulating.