Some Thoughts From Black Rock!

What I Liked Most

I like the setting for the game. There's lots of excitement and fun to be had using the Egyptian theme. (I particularly liked it because when I was 12, the first game that I ever wrote and sent to a publisher was a Raiders of the Lost Ark style game of running through tombs and avoiding traps. My game was terrible though - I'm sure yours won't be!)

Also I liked some of your puzzle ideas. I thought The Path of Death one might be cool, and I liked Stack Them Up and Crazy Floor too.

What I Liked Least

It wasn't clear to me how the tasks would be structured. How do you move between the tasks? and do all the puzzles have to be solved in a linear progression? and what do you have to do to "win" the game? Maybe this is where the background story would come in more? As puzzles are solved different parts of a myth could be revealed.

Also some of the puzzles didn't feel like they'd been completely specified. For example I couldn't see how the player would be able to control all the objects in the Shelves puzzle (but I might just not understand the control mechanisms...) However I thought it was good that you'd had so many initial ideas for puzzles.

Ideas For Improvement

It struck me that the game consists of a lot of different puzzles, and that it might be difficult to add and tune so much content. I'd advise you to limit the number of gameplay ideas initially and find a couple that are really fun. If you can do that you might be able to drive the whole game with just two or three gameplay mechanisms.

I thought that your memory, bridge or stacking puzzles felt like they had the most depth. I also thought that Rhythm Action style puzzles might be appropriate where you press buttons in time to music to trigger events in the game.

Also with the Egyptian theme I hope that you put in great background music.

Thoughts on the Scope of the Design

This proposal felt like it was one of the most challenging to me. There's a lot of work involved:

Good third person cameras are tough to get right in games. How they move makes a real difference to how the game feels, and of course there are the technical challenges associated with moving them around smoothly without clipping the world. This is especially true if you want the player to understand what they have to do next, because the camera should try to keep both player and objective in view.
It sounds like you'll need a number of different character animations to cover all of your puzzles, which will require some time to create. Triggering animations appropriately for all of your scenarios can also involve a lot of tweaking and tuning.
Having lots of different puzzles means having to generate lots of content. My guess is that each puzzle is going to take significant work to get it to be fun. I'd say that depth of gameplay is always better then breadth, and advise focussing on a few key gameplay mechanics.
I couldn't see anything in your design or schedule that described how you'd layout your game world and get it into the game. If you're going to have lots of content in the game, then the pipeline to create the content will be one of your important challenges.

Having said that, from the brief resumes in your proposal it's clear that you're all extremely smart, so maybe you'll handle all these challenges brilliantly!

Thoughts about Where You Should Focus Work

Your Functional Minimum stage captures all the basics that you'll need. Within that stage I'd advise you to get to a position where you can prototype your game ideas really early. Try and avoid the temptation to just focus on the technology before there's a fun game in there. Once you've found the fun gameplay elements then it's much easier and less risky to build up the technology.

Also if you think that your game will have a lot of content or levels, then creating an asset pipeline that helps you put new puzzles or ideas into the game quickly will really pay off later on. Think about the tools that you're going to use to model your world and to create puzzles/animations etc.

Ideas for a Physical Prototype

You should be able to play out some of the less extreme puzzles in person. You probably won't be able to set up rope swings across a canyon! But the Memory and Path of Death puzzles should be playable. Then afterwards you can go out and try the Intoxication puzzle!