The article author sure is a good storyteller.
I have never played Legend of Grimrock 1 or 2, so can’t comment on it. But generally speaking I understand the appeal of dungeon crawlers.
There are things to be said about playing video games with friends and family as opposed to playing alone, and how doing so changes appreciation of games. Concerning the “nostalgia” points you made, is this case the player may have nostalgia for those moments with friends and/or family as much as nostalgia for the games themselves. Of course there is also nostalgia about memorable lonesome player experiences. In any cases, I guess, on a psychological level, gaming induced a set of emotional experiences in the past, and the player - moved by nostalgia - seeks to recreate those feelings.
I doubt there is such a thing as an absolute “good design”. A given design may resonate in different ways among different players. I would personally prefer to write “adequate design” and “coherent design” rather than “good design”, but even trying formulate it this way I have to acknowledge that not everybody would like the things I like anyway, even when I consider these things adequate and coherent. Let me take a specific example: Hollow Knight, which is a “metroidvania” kind of game.
In Hollow Knight, the player character explores a forgotten underground kingdom full of mysteries, and doing so learn about the world and the player character itself. In short the game has a strong exploration component and a strong combat component. The visual art is made of bold almost monochromatic drawings with greyish tones and often a misty mood that I find appropriate for the setting and various locations, so both adequate and coherent. The music is beautiful, and has a lot of melancholic tracks that, again, I find both adequate and coherent. I am only going to mention one gameplay element: when the player enters and starts exploring a new area, he has no map, he has to find it / buy it, which I find adequate and coherent because initial exploration of an unknown world without map is expected AFAIC and it also creates tension together with both hostile encounters down there and the save system. So the overall game design - through setting, locations, graphics, musics and gameplay, all scream together exploration of an unknown/forgotten world.
Why am I using this example? Well, while I find the Hollow Knight game design both adequate and coherent, and while I personally enjoy the overall package and all separate aspects of the game I mentioned above, at the same time I acknowledge that some people might not share the same enjoyment. Some people may not like the graphics and find them just “dull”. Some people may have preferred different kind of music. Some people may prefer to … uhhh … explore while having a complete map beforehand. And so on.
From the same author :
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/03/02/hollow-knight-review/(be sure to have a look at the comments for a bit of fun or… simply travel back to reality as perceived by those who enjoyed the game)
See?
So my conclusion is that game creators should do what they want to do using adequate solutions artistic-wise, gameplay-wise, story-wise and writing-wise, while ideally maintaining coherency among those things. And hopefully this is going to be perceived as right by the majority of their player base, but realistically it will never be 100% success because some players will consider part (or all) of the design bad anyway. In other words: you can’t please everybody. Oh, and, one should only read opinions with the mandatory grain of salt. Even writings from professional video game journalists, because, after all, they are just human beings like others with tons of subjectivity and bias, acknowledged or not.
In some instance, the game designer may leave choice to the player rather than forcing one game design paradigm (your Old School mode option example). But it’s impossible to do that for everything in a game, the game designer has to make choices, adequate and coherent choices.
(please note, I used the words “adequate” and “coherent” several times, while I meant “subjectively a perfect match” in some instance)