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In regards the the bright lights on levers etc that simply looks like visual cues to tell players which lever controls which device (red = trapdoor, blue = electrical fence). And I imagine they pulsate to catch the viewer's eye. It probably made things a lot less confusing for playtesters.
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This is exactly right. They were a fairly recent addition but even if you don't consciously connect the two (lever and trapdoor, for example) we found most people did so without really thinking about it.
Lorne (and JAW's art department) went for a slightly stylised, over-saturated look with New 'n' Tasty - it was never the intention to replicate AO completely as you well know - and we think visually it worked really well.
It's the same with the outdoor areas too - Scrabania's dusty, cloud-filled atmosphere and Paramonia's swaying trees: everything's amped up a little more than normal to give it that stylised aesthetic.
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I'm not saying NnT looks bad by any stretch. Quite the contrary, really, and I fully agree with your point about the Zulags being more distinguishable this time around. Plus, when I went back to Oddysee it felt somewhat lifeless due to the static pre-rendered screens after NnT's ridiculously detailed animated backgrounds.
The visual aids thing is correct (I think yellow = rope lifts as well), yeah. But even so these interactables have been made extremely obvious; I don't think it would necessarily be that hard to work out their functions without blinking or dancing lights all over the place :P but y'know, that's just me. It didn't make one bit of difference to my opinion of the game overall.
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You'd be surprised how much games hand-hold these days. The designers didn't want to go down that route, but there were some concessions to making things flow a little easier. The opening of Zulag 1 for example has switches closer to to electric gates; portals moved to the right hand side of the areas from the left to keep the player moving; big gaps in the geo to force people to learn to do a running jump - that sort of thing. A lot of things changed in that first level towards the end of development after tester/player feedback.
A few other ideas for communicating what to do in the early stages were dropped without too much development time allocated, I'd love to show some of these more contextual things a little down the line, if I can.