The analogy makes a lot of sense to me. Once you have an “easy button”, it’s hard to not use it. It’s sort of like when you’re at work and see the “quick workaround” effectively become the standard process.
I remember burning out on games because the cheats made them really fun in the short term, but afterward playing normally felt like agony.
I think knowledge gated games are good, but not when there is no actual in-game method to discover the things you need to progress.
That case I advise you to never, ever play Noita.
the thing about noita is that you think you’ve discovered the entire game and you’re impressed with how much there was to find, then you notice something and find another game to discover, then you watch a video on noita and realize you found roughly a fifth of the actual full game content
I actually played Noita before. I though I was doing pretty good by myself, managed to get quite deep. Then somebody told me about the outside map and all the parallel worlds and wow…