i'm not...bothered by the game's presentation of non-mechanical humor outside of, y'know, a small number of very specific cases, or trying to imply that the game should be more grim or anything. it's more of a musing on the nature of the emotional cadence of feeling "dumb" in this game, which has weirdly frustrated me more than i feel like it usually does. and that kind of just lands on like, i feel like there's been a particularly high proportion of cases where it's not even really supposed to be a trick, my mind is just operating in a completely wrong realm for what the game wants. doing 20 laps on the wrong track
incredibly, there is actually one specific spot where i experienced both this kind of thing *and* yet probably the moment in the game that comes second closest to feeling like the kind of mechanical humor i'm thinking of on the same screen, albeit over the course of at least half an hour, and that sequence followed by the boss fight was exactly the experience that caused that post in the first place. because it's right at the end of the yiga clan hideout, where i'd already found a ton of the bananas sitting around (including the little high room with like 20 of them), saw a chest in the back room, opened it...and it had fucking bananas inside. i spent a while climbing around the room, then gave up and tried to leave to go a different way and obviously got instantly spotted by the guy at the door, so i did the stealth section a couple more times trying to find something else i'd missed. when i came to the conclusion that the back room was the only place where something could be i went back and tried even harder to reach some odd spot and see if there was something to A-interact with
and of course it was just a magnetic wall the whole time, that i could've found in 60 seconds rather than going through all that, if i'd thought about the tablet a single time since leaving gerudo town instead of spending another half hour redoing the same stealth section i had already beaten once interspersed with trying epically idiotic nonsense like "trying to burn the high wooden rafters by shooting an arrow through the guards' torches"
there have been some good moments. a few actual realizations that felt satisfying even when they weren't very critical, puzzles that felt more like a rewarding process of observing or playing around in the space instead of ending up as a "no, the other other verb" thing, etc. the second half of ruta and most of naboris had that, for example
the absolute best experience i've had in the whole game was in the labyrinth out in one of the ice zones (quite a while ago now....), where i wandered around for a while getting annoyed at how much i was climbing on walls. "why didn't they make these unclimbable like shrines?" i thought. then when i looked up i saw there hadn't been a roof the whole time, the walls just went so high that it never became obvious. and i was laughing at the prospect of just cheating the whole maze via this method, but after i jumped to the middle i learned there was just a chest on a platform covering the part where it exits into the center. but even though it didn't let me skip the whole puzzle it seemed faster and more fun to have been led into discovering the "trick"
tho i don't think this game can get away with that very often, since it's mostly about explicitly applying the various verbs introduced at the beginning, and if i consider this to be a major form of mechanical humor in elden ring it's because that game's catacomb "puzzles" aren't really the same kind of thing as that format. they usually involve the game using some kind of outright misdirection targeted at the player and part of figuring out the trick to reach the end is also realizing exactly what they did to try and get people to fall for it, which always made me feel at least a bit clever and/or "in on it" no matter how stumped i was in the middle
