>For some reason people "understand" that videogame stories dont need to be "understood" and can be as vague as possible, but not for mechanics that can create friction.
The reason why is simple. You can fail at not understanding a mechanic. You cant fail at not understanding a story. You can project and impose whatever meaning you want onto a story, music, a poem, even novels despite their dense, dense, nature. But the TRULY unique thing about videogames. Not purely some abstraction of "choice" that can be reduced to a couple of inherently disjointed (from the direct experience) dialogue boxes. But the simple fact that, you can get stuck. You can not know how to progress. You can become lost. You can be too weak, you can be too slow, you can be too dumb, or...it can simply, genuinely. Just be unfair.

To turn the page in a videogame, something has to be overcome, that is decided NOT BY you. But by the videogame itself, and the paramaters of progression it allowed.

I genuinely got lost in MiO. Only once. Im not ashamed to say it. It is exceptionally rare that I get lost in a game and it not be some completely trial and error illogical bullshit like La Mulana. But I got lost in tbis game fair and square. Partly because I didnt have a map I could pull up whenever I wanted, wherever I wanted. And partly because, I simply was not familar with the games game. Often in metroidvanias, the way you find the way forward is by randomly hitting a wall you could have never known is interactable, or so obvious that all abilities are effectively colour coded keys. No inbetween. But this game instead plays with perspective and awareness of space.

For example picrel is a shortcut back to an area you already passed, but the shortcut isnt "unlocked". Its simply "realized" by understanding that there was always an opening there, you just didnt know.

Similarly, at the point I got lost, there was an opening (much more obvious in retrospect) that I simply didnt notice.