VoG had mechanics. You had to hold three plates at once for a certain amount of time to get in, then you had to protect the confuxes while avoiding getting Marked For Negation or Cleansing yourself if you did, then you had to kill oracles, first one at a time, then all together, then you had to use the relic to take down the boss’s shield, then you had to do some movement puzzles, then you had to hold plates to open time portals to get the relics, then you had to fight a boss that used all of the previous mechanics combined into one encounter, randomly teleporting you into time portals, which had oracles and relics in them, that you had to use the plates to open again, and then use the relic to take down the boss. VoG wasn’t great because it didn’t have mechanics. VoG was great because it used a small number of mechanics in a few different ways, and always gave you enough context to figure the mechanics out yourself. VoG built on a mechanic we learned doing public events, and taught you everything you needed to know along the way so you could put it all together for the final battle. It was a fantastic example of level design done right. In contrast, Leviathin was crap because it was just a pile of random mechanics with no context, that never got used before or since the specific encounter they appear in. You have no choice but to brute force every encounter by trial and error if you’re going in blind, and if you look up the solutions, all you’re left with is boring hoop-jumping instead of an interesting encounter. There’s no building on previous knowledge and applying it to a new context, no challenge once you stumble on the solution, and no use for the knowledge of that solution outside of that one encounter. Now, I haven’t seen any of the dreaming city yet, but if it’s like Leviathan in this way, I’ll be very disappointed.