Well, that’s annoying. To me, selecting characters or “starting” a game is not a game mechanic. Oh well, I guess the game is much too “meta” for me.
I’m sure they did, but here is the problem: Those fresh persons need to complete the game twice!
Personally, if the game doesn’t give me enough affordances to “do the thing the game designers want,” and I mostly get to it by trial and error without really understanding what is going on; I would consider that a design flaw. Which part of “character and narrative driven” is that “meta-puzzle” supporting?
-dZ.
Yes. They are testers. They have to play the game several times. (And even if they invited non-testers, chances are high that one of them would like to play the game again with the other characters. So it is very likely that the repetitive game elements will be recognized.)
Reality disagrees with you because… well, it didn’t happen. 
There is no way that every single attitude and use case can be tested and discovered – especially something as subjective as “replayability”.
Yes, this is another problem in developing software. 
Of course! Games are art and thus more difficult to test. But the repetitive parts in The Cave are obvious: If you play the game again, you are forced to play these parts again (and the game doesn’t tell you that). This should have been annoyed the testers too, especially if they have to play these parts again and again.
Doesn’t The Cave tell you what to do next if you wait a few seconds …?
Aha! I see that there’s a confusion here. My understanding is that the issue was not in detecting the repetitive parts – as you say, these are obvious. The issue was in acknowledging that this was a problem at all.
Mr. Gilbert mentioned above that he didn’t think people would re-play it so soon. If people give it a few weeks between replays (as was expected), then the repetitive parts may not be so much of a problem at that point. However, re-playing the game over and over continuously will cause those repetitive parts to become very tedious.
That last situation of re-playing continuously was not expected, and I don’t think it can be necessarily discovered through testing. Like Mr. Gilbert said, no tester came back and said “you know, the game is so awesome, I want to play it over and over, and other people will too, so we should do something about the repetitive parts.”
-dZ.
Honestly, I don’t recall right now. It’s been a few months and I only played it for a few hours. Like I said, I will give it another chance.
Yes, you now know what to do at the beginning, give it another chance!
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I recommend to play it on the TV, sitting on a couch with a game controller. 
This is the one and only advantage of platform games as opposed to point & click games.
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Yes I prefer to play strategy, rpg and adventure games on the computer while I rather play platform and action games on the console.
Yes it is, but this wasn’t something they brought up. It’s also common for testers to complain about sections of a game being boring or repetitive, but you always have to take it in context. 4 out of 5 times, they are just suffering from tester burnout. As a designer, you have to listen to all feedback, but it’s also important hat you don’t act on all feedback, if you do, you’ll be left with a mess of a game.
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Here is the thing about making a game (and I’ve sure it applies to most art forms). You will get a ton of feedback. A lot of it you will disagree with and won’t act on and you will be right. But 1 out of 100 times, you will be wrong. To people playing the game later, they don’t see the 99 times you rejected bad feedback, only the 1 time you didn’t. It’s not black and white. It seems obvious to you now, but it might not have back then.
Bug testing and play testing will only get you so much. Open beta testing or early access is the best way to get “real world” feedback, but that’s really hard for narrative games. It will kill sales. It works great for some types of games, and not others.
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The Cave is awesome. I finished it the first time about a year ago (and missed the first story thingie for the twins, so I’ll need to replay those anyway… in the next decade). Having to select 3 out of 7 characters to control, with each their own unique stories to discover offers more replayability than Space Invaders, Tetris, Pacman, any LEGO game and all mobile casual games combined. But no one is complaining about repetitivity in those. “Yes, but those aren’t story driven”. If you watch any movie three times in a row, you’ll be bored too. Why should anyone expect more from a “narrative” game? As if it should have AI to detect the player getting bored and adapting to that?
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Agreed that it’s not something to blame the game designer for, but with a movie you just sit there and watch. When you have to point and click to repeatedly solve elaborate puzzles it can start to feel like homework. Even with my favorite TWP.
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Conclusion: masochists are complainers. 
Conclusion: compulsive completist complainers are masochistic
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