The game suffers from the fact that its first hour or two can be solved without looking at the island at all, but there are MANY puzzles that aren't really about the panel: The panel is just where you enter the answer that you got from everything around it.
A couple of good, early examples (although they don't really show the game's real environmental power), are the temple in the desert, the temple in the woods, and the 'pink forest': All solvable without any information from a different part of the game, and absolutely not solvable by just staring at the panel itself: Entire series of 20+ puzzles have the EXACT SAME PANEL, just placed in a different location.
And panel solutions affect the environment. There are elevators operated by panels. a boat operated by panels. bridges built by solving panels that have more than one solution, in ways that match what you want to do physically in the game.
It's just a big pity that the beginning of the game shows so very little of that.
A couple of good, early examples (although they don't really show the game's real environmental power), are the temple in the desert, the temple in the woods, and the 'pink forest': All solvable without any information from a different part of the game, and absolutely not solvable by just staring at the panel itself: Entire series of 20+ puzzles have the EXACT SAME PANEL, just placed in a different location.
And panel solutions affect the environment. There are elevators operated by panels. a boat operated by panels. bridges built by solving panels that have more than one solution, in ways that match what you want to do physically in the game.
It's just a big pity that the beginning of the game shows so very little of that.