But at the same time, it's a game not a novel so you want to just not say too much.
And then there's system text (tutorials, menus, etc) which really should be as few words as possible regardless, which reminds me: Sean, what have you got planned in terms of teaching how to play this time around? I think I remember you being unsatisfied with the amount of words that had to be used in Anodyne's tutorial and I'm wondering what kind of stuff you might have thought up for making that less of a problem in ETO (you might have talked about this in the vids you posted, but I forget things easily oops).
The way we have things the core mechanics are pretty dead simple that we don't do much past say "here's wall jump, here's jump, here's locking shield" just to point out that they exist. Shield we've decided is taking a secondary role to everything, and is only a little bit necessary for normal play, but can help with more advanced play if so desired, and so we don't worry about 'teaching' it past just showing that "hey it blocks things."
The intro level of the game is there to make the player aware of being able to lock shield etc (like forcing you to go up a vertical passage with lasers firing to make you lock etc).
So if you get through the intro level then you're probably fine for the entire game. Each of the new entities when they first pop up in their respective levels - most are safe enough that you don't really need to explain and simple experimentation shows you, for more nuanced stuff (like things that send energy) there are things like dead simple example usages of them tied into stages. (e.g. there are pads that transfer energy to devices)
So yeah, with Anodyne I think I was most unhappy with the dust teaching since it was kind of oddly there. I think I would have just removed it from Street and left it in the first spot in Bedroom. I honestly don't even think the intro stage was necessary, because there is only one dungeon choice in the beginning. Whereas I see it as more necessary with EtO because the game branches out right away after intro stuff.
I think there is a tendency in the community to circle-jerk over stuff like Egoraptor's thing on MMX (I know I did for a while, esp with anodyne - it is a good video that teaches to pay attention to subtle design stuff, but it's not the end-all bible of tutorial design etc). Like who really cares whether or not it was implied to show you how to wall jump vs. telling the player.
You use such a thing so damn much in the game that the player learning it on their own vs being told really doesn't matter - yes, it takes away an element of surprise but, like, MMX isn't a game that's based around that surprise (where as starseed pilgrim would have been totally ruined if it did such a thing where the point IS discovering new things.).
In that sense I'm probably going to have signposts talking briefly about light vs dark energy, in the two rooms in the intro where you are forced to use it (though the game is not designed around forcing you to use an alignment.)
tl;dr intro stage will have a few words, but the rest of the game not really. complicated stuff will have an easy example to illustrate usage, but we avoid a lot of complexity by having a simple core mechanics and never adding to that rule set except through interactions with external entities
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