Among the Sleep

[Bridge]

If you make the player care about what he's doing, the experience is going to be much more rewarding than if you just don't let the player do anything.

I agree with the second thing about caring. This is a very common problem especially with games that seem to focus more on immersion and I have to admit that one or two times maximum I saw this in Amnesia as well. Certain puzzles were there just to delay you and in reality they did not have to do with the plot or story. Instead, if they had a meaning and not a delaying purpose then as you said the experience would be much more rewarding. However, I don't know exactly how this can always be done. But I don't think he meant that the player will not do nothing. I think he meant that the player must avoid doing stuff that are irrelevant because that's when he starts to lose immersion.

Thus I believe that such games should focus on the scary environment and care less about puzzles and tricks that will help you to just move on to see what happens in the end. However, you can not make this a rule otherwise the player will get bored eventually because of lack of activity. I conclude that someone, and I mean the developer, must find the sweet sport between feelings and actions, immersion and puzzles.

Indeed, this is a hard topic to discuss.

I think the absolute worst thing about in Amnesia (and most adventure games) is: when you stumble upon a puzzle, you know you must solve it. It's such a transparent game mechanic; you know that if you can interact in some way with the objects and it seems like something positive will result from the right interaction, you must do it. This almost always leads to sequence breaking. Just a quick example:

Spoiler below!

I already had the jar of acid and chisel/hammer before I even found the door out of the prison.

So, sometimes (and in practically every other P&C adventure game) I just had an inventory full of items that I knew had to be used in some meaningful way, otherwise they wouldn't be actual items. Amnesia is one of the better designed ones in this regard, because most of the puzzles are very logical and all of the items serve a logical purpose. I certainly didn't run into this often but it does happen on occasion because the player can choose in what order he gets the items, and it's distracting.