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I've been playing Call of the Sea on Game Pass - a charming, gorgeous, engrossing mix of Gone Home-style walking sim and Myst-like puzzle game. But there was just one problem: the protagonist never shuts up.
The game uses environmental storytelling and found items, like Gone Home. In that game you must infer the meaning yourself: make connections, understand subtext, realise cause and effect. In this game, the protagonist comments on every item, meaning there's no need to do so.
This had a really negative effect on me in that I quickly switched from engaged agent of the game world to someone merely ferrying the protagonist around. I stopped paying much attention to these narrative clues because the hero would do the work (of inferring meaning) for me.
This extends to the puzzles, too: she makes a note of every clue in her journal. Again it reduced my investment in the world. I didn't need to consider what was worth remembering: I just looked at everything and knew the critical info would be in the journal.
(You might think that this is necessary to avoid having to play with a notepad. But I found a very elegant solution in an old iOS escape room game called Forever Lost: an in-game camera that you can use to take photos of stuff you think might be relevant to puzzle solutions).
Anyway: the point is, talkative, hands-on protagonists can shift the player's level of investment and immersion pretty dramatically - so consider who should really be in control!
