Obligatory OMM link is ignored.
Let's leave the dark ages behind us. I've found that the recently made TellTale adventure games have had perfectly logical puzzles.
Yes they did. But that has nothing to do with recency (people weren't dumber in the "dark ages"), just with a specific company that works with preexisting franchises which had well-developed lore (Back To The Future and Sam & Max). Someone tread the ugly paths before them, making it easier to create logical paths through the story.
Most companies don't have that luxury and, most likely, neither will this "original" Kickstarter project. Most adventure games are, in fact, exactly like that OMM article, ignore it or not.
Mostly because the engines were never sophisticated enough to account for any degree of non-linearity. There aren't properties, or forces, that are affected by certain other properties or types of items... there's always just very specific triggers that work in very specific circumstances and not in others.
That's what an adventure game is.
It
puzzles me that Bioware games are trashed for being linear and consisting largely of meaningless dialogue options interrupted by an occasional cutscene, yet here's an entire genre, the kindest description for which is "utterly primitive", for which a Codexer will willingly accept these conditions.
Wait, I guess it's that infamous "Monkey Island" sense of humor and the charming/funny storytelling in "Full Throttle".
It's true, it was far better than listening Mass Effect NPC #17 drone on about Faction Delta and their plans for fumigating the airducts, and I guess some people are willing to endure constant backtracking, repetitive cursor hovering and object combining for the story that's actually somewhat coherent and funny.
Without doubt, a heavy dose of nostalgia/emotion is involved.