So I was able to play this at PAX East yesterday, and I found it to be a fresh new take on puzzle games. It's not, contrary to popular belief, Portal, and that's precisely where it both shines and lacks:
It shines in setting itself apart from so many puzzle games by being very accessible and perfectly explained to all audiences, but at the cost of reaching the edge Portal had by being very smart. This is easier on kids, but less satisfying to adults long term.
It shines in having great very deep gameplay mechanics that can really create very mild to very difficult puzzles by combining them, without having to resort to punishing timings as the only difficulty curve like so many other puzzle games; but it lacks in control, which ultimately is the death note of any puzzle game long term. With so many items to pick up in the game, you are left wishing you had the gravity gun coupled with the ultimate precision of the portal gun.
Dealing with items in the demo was only fun as long as their recepticle was within reach, but once you had to launch them, you automatically reverted back to trial and error gameplay. In environments so simple that clearly take a page from the Portal book, the fun of the game should be in figuring things out and executing it to perfection the first time around, like in Portal, and it's simply not happening.
Finally, there is a distinctive missing link in both gameplay and story by not having a live commentator (in the game). The narrator in the demo, the owner of the house, the dr you are looking for, simply is not present enough to act as a valid feedback loop on your actions and success (so much so I managed to not notice I had completed a task for two minutes). Non present narrators can work great (Sands of Time's "that's not how it happened" comes to mind) but by being both not distant and live, this system just accomplishes nothing, which may be why they still relied on text pop ups to translate the narration