Thanks for the additional thoughts!

Regarding the kiosk puzzle, and its interaction with the Council Code puzzle, I have a few random thoughts to share.

First, in hindsight, I think there is a significant design flaw in how the Council Code, kiosk, and Primer bypass elements fit together. Generally speaking, where Primordia offers multiple puzzle solutions, they're supposed to be a "cerebral" solution (typically giving a better reward, in the form of an additional robot showing up at the end) and a "brute force" solution (typically leading to a negative reaction from a character). I always thought of the brute force solutions as "bypasses" of legitimate puzzles because something that is resolved through brute force (which in this context would mean, merely walking back and forth several times) is a "puzzle" at all.

There are lots of those bypasses in the game: you can bypass EFL with the glass finger; to some degree you can bypass Gamma by smashing the monitors recklessly; you can bypass Oswald & Cornelius with Clarity's help; you can skip the motor puzzle and shortchange Gimbal; you can use the decryption module on the bridge; you can have Primer crack the Council Code. (I may be forgetting a few others.)

The last one was meant as a bypass because it allows the player not to figure out how to assemble the fragments. The "brute force" required of the player is that he gather all three parts of the Council Code: in other words, a skillful player needn't run down on the parts.

There are a few problems with that, though. The main one is that one of the three parts (the one you get from Memento Moribuilt) actually requires a similar kind of puzzle-solving to the Council Code itself. It's not quite the same, but both of them require patience and both of them are non-inventory puzzles. So players who are unable to solve the Council Code are unlikely to be able to solve the kiosk. Thus, if anything, solving the Council Code becomes a bypass for the kiosk, which seems quite backwards.

In hindsight, what I should have done is enable Primer to crack the code with two fragments, but require quite a bit more "grinding" from the player in order to get him to do so. Of course, then even fewer players would have solved the kiosk. Oh well!

Second, the in-game rationale for the kiosk puzzle is that it's a species of CAPTCHA designed by Memorious to insure that the person who finds Memento is curious and clever, qualities that Memorious believed would cause the finder to be interested in data preservation rather than data corruption. In other words, the puzzle is meant to keep out MetroMind and her ilk, and draw in people Horatio and others like him.

Regarding Laurence's head, I agree that the approach of not letting the player take an item until Horatio has a reason to do so is fairly inelegant, and becomes lame when the player gets ahead of Horatio, as it sounds like you did here. I had thought that no one would want the head until they found out about Laurence, but clearly I was wrong!