Aside from that, the puzzle example you give (the bird thing) is not a puzzle: a puzzle would have clues that would give you as the player some way of figuring out things. What you describe would feel frustrating and random: there is NO WAY a player could guess what the right behavior is there (release the bird), because it’s based entirely on an unintuitive inference drawn from a cultural stereotype. More critically, it doesn’t feel like these puzzles are integrated into the game play. You describe the fun as interacting with the world, finding things and seeing what they do. But, the success metric is entirely divorced from that (I went, I interacted, I worked, I acquired the bird, and now my “score”/”success” is based on one trivial thematic decision). This is exactly what Swink talks about when he says all actions/reactions should be derived from player actions, no seemingly unrelated external reactions. And it’s what we talked about in the design lecture on having win/lose actions only a result of actions the player can perform that they know what they are doing. A random guess that impacts the players success is never a good idea in a game (e.g., open door A or door B, with no information about what’s behind; pick between two choices based on a cultural structure that may or may not make sense to the player).

If you consider games like the Mario games, where the female “protagonists” with goofy personalities (the little stars in Mario Galaxy, Princess Peach, etc) issue quests, the quests are explicit and fun, independent of whether you think of the metaphors and stereotypes. There are lots of people who find the black-and-white stereotypes in the Mario world a bit annoying, but still like the games, because the stereotypes can be completely ignored and buying into them and having to think through puzzles based on them is not part of the game.

Now, as for your claim of the fun. Those two things (interaction, puzzle solving) could indeed give fun. BUT, you haven’t given any examples of what fun interaction would be. Ignoring atmosphere, what are they doing that’s fun? What’s in the environment? What are the goals and the actions that they need to learn and master than would give a sense of fun? As for the pleasure of puzzle solving, or the pleasure of “Experiencing the environment” (the comedy, the sounds, etc) the things you actually describe are mostly environmental (voice actress) and not what we want.

Assuming the game fun was based on puzzle solving, you’d still need to think of some real puzzles. I have been dissuading folks from focusing on puzzle games because you don’t want the success of your game to be based on creating good puzzles: you don’t have time to create/build/test/refine/balance clever puzzles, and that whole activity is tangential to the goal of the class (game architecture and building pleasing in-game interactions).

Finally, your last sentence should have been a red flag for yourself: the assignment explicitly says your game must be one that satisfies Swink’s definition of a “game feel” kind of game. By definition, if the fun of the game does not come from the avatar interacting with the environment, then it’s not that kind of game. You haven’t really given any specifics of what the “fun” would be (except the cultural stereotype jokes embedded in the metaphors).

You need to rework this so the game fun is based on the players actions and play!