The moment you start thinking about "proper game design," "immersion," etc you've already lost because you're on the completely wrong track. It is blindingly obvious that the purpose of the puzzles is not to provide a fun and engaging experience. They reflect that fact that the further one goes into Lessons in Love, the more the world rejects the player (this goes for both the literal player and Sensei). It becomes increasingly hard to progress, increasingly unfun, increasingly grindy - it would be reductive to state there is only one ludonarrative purpose for this, but that is the design. The artistic purpose. It is an experience the developer is attempting to convey through mechanic. It is axiomatic to say that "video games should be fun," "puzzles should test innovative thinking," etc, which is to say that they are not fundamental truths - they are platitudes liable to become thought-terminating cliches. Looking at systems clearly designed to reject the player and make their life difficult then complaining about how they aren't fun enough is so foolish I balk that one so invested in the story and theory-crafting would be so blind to this point. Let us examine once again Moby Dick.
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In chapter 32 there is a lengthy chapter devoted to the physiology of whales. This is a highly dull chapter to read and a well-known roadblock for prospective readers of the work (yet I must explain it in detail here because it is dubious whether any poster in this thread has ready even such a fundamental cornerstone a literature such as Moby Dick). However, in this context of literature removed from "a porn game that should be fun and get my pee pee hard," we see immediately how foolish it would be to critique it from a lens as those critiquing SENSEI QUEST and other resets are. Can you imagine going to Melville and saying, good sir, it is all well and good that you wish your novel to be a testimony to every aspect of whales from the physical aspects of their being to the mythological image they come to represent, but this chapter was quite dull! Could you not make it a bit more fun and exciting? In fact, quite a few of your chapters could be shaved down, let's have more action scenes and whale hunting, you would really get more readers that way! It is rather obnoxious that you should even think to force me to read some boring chapter on whales when I can in fact simply flip the pages! Do you not know I will just flip the pages? You are not listening to me sir, I am telling you to make your novel more fun for me!
It really is just that simple: think, for one moment, the purpose. Now, it is entirely fair if you look at Lessons in Love rejecting the player and making it increasingly hard/unpleasant to make progress as a foolish thing. Some people think whales are dumb. However, this is not what is happening. The angle of attack is so completely off base it's like one is seeing reality on an entirely different level. Like one's mind is so boxed in by platitudes that any time something isn't fun and satisfying their every urge for what they want it to be that the entire world starts to seem wrong. How can one profess themselves to be a deep thinker, a lover of thought and figuring things out, so proud of each theory and confirmed idea, if such basic mental walls blind them so deeply? Such that they look upon a rock and see a mountain, or they look upon a mountain and see a rock? You really think for one fucking second the puzzles are meant to be fun tests of knowledge? You really think they contain anything but spite and hostility? You really think this is supposed to be a good time? You really think that 'all media must be fun' is a God-like axiom that subsumes all other purposes one may have? What? WHAT???????????? The populace is rendered infants before the most basic and blunt artistic purpose which itself is literally stated directly over and over. Shocking! Nothing really is beautiful!
