I really liked AMFV, probably because I was never great at the puzzles. I don't think it was a super-popular game because a lot of the fam base probably largely played the games for the puzzles. But one of my favorites and actually completed it without help.
In many ways it was a forerunner of the sort of adventure game today that is called (originally as an insult, but the genre has later embraced the term) "walking simulators", in which the player simply explores an environment without solving puzzles or fighting monsters (or at least not very often).