Yep, and it was one of the greatest platformers of all time IMO. The "story", while at times verbose and overwrought, imbued the character a sense of urgency and personality compared to the classic "Princess is in another castle", which is the point of the article: The artization of video games.
If we can't think of things like Braid, or Infinite Jest, or Downton Abbey without thinking pretentious, then all games should simply be derivatives of The Jersey Shore or just long fart noises and rubber-band physics. But, obviously, that's not what all people want, or else the aforementioned "pretentious" content wouldn't be so popular.
It was nowhere near one of the greatest platformers of all time. Nowhere near Super Mario Bros. 3, not even close. I got bored of its puzzles after about 40 minutes. The mechanics: cute and novel. The story: pretentious. The gameplay: meh.
The story was one of the weaker parts. The puzzles and gameplay were great. I don't see how you could get bored of them unless you genuinely got stuck and weren't able to solve them. They were varied and creative, and forced you to think in different ways.
Puzzle-based gameplay doesn't usually absorb me much. I tend to prefer much more open gameplay where there are many different ways of achieving ends. The "aha!" dopamine rush that puzzle type games are supposed to run on isn't very strong with me; the payoff is so weak that I lose interest whether I'm making progress or not. And it's not just games either, it follows through into programming and debugging.
Closest thing to puzzle games that I enjoy are stealth territory navigation games like Thief series, Deus Ex, Far Cry 1 & 2 (at least the way I play them), etc. But the rush comes from a plan coming together in execution; in much the same way that I best enjoy programming when designing a bunch of data structures that solve a problem nicely.
