Somehow successful controlled exploration works

Pandora's Tower is already getting hard to put down. It's definitely a great game so far (though there is that glitch looming all the way down the line at tower 13), but I wonder if its format is as much the reason for my deep investment in it as the gameplay and chain combat are.

Here's what I mean:

In a Zelda game (a good Pandora's Tower analogue) you do the same thing you're doing in Pandora's Tower, and Zelda games are, by and large, great games. But, in a Zelda game, your exploration isn't limited by the need to restore a gauge every now and then (except for Majora's Mask). You can explore any time, anywhere - even in situations like Ocarina of Time's endgame where Zelda has been taken by Ganondorf in a moment of lowered guard. After that point in the game you could spend another in-game month or more wrapping up sidequests (or even just fishing) and Ganondorf and Zelda would still be where you'd find them if you rushed off right away to Ganon's Castle. As a result, the exploration in a Zelda game is (at least by game's end) without restriction.

Pandora's Tower on the other hand forces you to explore the towers in temporal chunks. If you knew where everything was, surely you could get through each tower in the time that each one's master flesh buys you, but otherwise there'd be a lot of trekking back and forth. Because of the game's curse mechanic, every minute in the towers counts.

Now, servant beasts aren't wanting as it is, but even so you couldn't grab some basic flesh, delve into a tower until the curse is just minutes away from coming into full effect and reliably get back in time to force Elena to down some beast brawn. So, at least in my current playthrough, in an average session of 30 minutes, I'm spending about 20 actually in the towers, inching through them on each visit.

Nonetheless, it's the control that the game exercises over your exploration that makes it so compelling to me. Exploration is parcelled out in such small pieces that it becomes a reward for a well managed inventory, a well fed Elena, and a well-outfitted Aeron. The curse mechanic itself presents a puzzle, the solution to which offers the reward of an efficiently running Observatory and a maximization of time to spend in the towers.