I prefer playing on hard, but I 'm glad easy mode exists : perfect for my six year old boy. Indescribable the way he struggles past the same puzzle I played so many years before him. He plays only NnT.
Yeah...I'm glad that Soulstorm is a new game. AO was never meant to not be on a grid, so it ends up ruining some puzzles (especially some favorites of mine), with their fixes to compensate being eye-rolling.
In my experience the QuikSave has always been a self imposed crutch. When I was younger and first played the game I used it a lot. Now I rarely use it. Particularly since it's a story driven game I guess young me appreciated seeing it through to the end at my own pace. And it seems like they deliberately added QuikSave because they wanted more people to reach the end than they had in Oddysee because of its Checkpoint system.