I'm a big fan of "archeology girl" games; I think Metroid Prime was one of the first games I considered to be truly exceptional. The curve of difficulty in rooms felt smooth, but none of them had left me completely stumped and were usually solvable with trial and error. I found that the more I started to think of the game as a sort of locksmith puzzle, the more the stone barriers began to actually take on the appearance of rising and falling tumblers. The ending of the game has a surprising amount of set-piece levels, which was a welcome change of pace to finish out on.
The game has traded a quantity of Mind gameplay in favor of cementing a Land experience, using the last three levels to escort me out and an extremely simple final level to contrast the atmosphere of the "game" part of the game with a modest jungle ambience. While I was expecting more Land development to appear in the game proper, I appreciate the dedication to the principle against the odds of scoping out a whole new area, which prompts the desire for mechanics unique to that area to contrast the gauntlet; perhaps a stray magic stone from the gauntlet lets you possess monkeys or something. Maybe Steven Universe shows up with a knife. I'm not your boss.
The "clone" is a popular trope in Mind games because of its ability to be immediately grasped by the player, but the breadth of its mechanical capabilities are still often novel in the context of its parallel features. The Talos Principle introduces the recorder machines in the second area, when they have familiarized themselves with a handful of other elements such as barriers and jammers. The small sequence of Portal where your portals are placed for you is doing some work towards the illusion that the facility predates the gun and the buttons and crates within are not necessarily for the gun, even though in a game sense this is clearly the case. Although other elements are introduced prior to the clone mechanic, elements which are introduced afterward are dependent on the casting ability and could have done with more elegant connection between each other. Switches could cause a channel of wind to blow away fog, or some of the barriers could be red herrings, instead requiring you to stack boxes and jump over them. Scope creepers aside, among the "archeology girl" games, Uncharted is one where Nate just needs to ditch the guns and stick to stunts; props to you for sticking to your gauntlet.