I definitely preferred LE and ToN to TGO, my favourite, by far, being ToN.
But I can’t really put my finger on why so I thought a little and I wonder whether some of it was how I played the games.
ToN was the first game I discovered, it was fully released by then so I could play it how I wanted, just 10 minutes or a whole hour or more. Also chests and keys were all available for the accessible areas - I’ll come to that later. I then went onto LE and although the graphics weren’t as good I enjoyed being able to play the whole game how I wanted.
With TGO, apart from the initial demo, I played each update as it arrived. This meant waiting two weeks to play a few minutes of gameplay. This meant I had a big build up of anticipation which often was satisfied by the tiny fragment of new gameplay. Also as each update was self contained there was always a known number of keys, chests, extras to find, which detracted from the exploration element of the game. Same goes with video guides, with each update of a few minutes play there would be a dedicated video guide, so it was very easy and quick to get help when you got stuck.
Maybe if I went back and played TGO as a full game I might have a better opinion of it, can’t bring myself to do that yet, maybe in a few months.