Hi! Thanks for your comments. It sounds like you’ve been playing the Bonesweeper prototype from 2021. At this point, the prototype is an historical artefact and doesn’t reflect the current state of Fossil Sweeper’s development. When Fossil Sweeper finally ships, I’m looking forward to doing a proper comparison and talking about how prototyping informs, but fundamentally differs from “production.” There’s a general overview from a couple of years ago in this video, and the last annual recap video gives a more up to date look at most aspects of the game’s current state.
Edit: This turned into more of a wall of text than I’d intended. I’d always rather give too much information than too little, though, so feel free to skip anything after that first paragraph 
When I make a prototype, I’m not really interested in pursuing features or doing work that doesn’t answer specific questions or give specific insights that I’m looking for, so VFX and polish like that sort of thing wasn’t something that made sense for me to spend much time on. For actual production, that sort of thing comes fairly late in my projects, so none of that stuff is present in current development builds of Fossil Sweeper. At this stage of development, some things that currently emphasise visual distinction from a traditional Minesweeper game (aside from being about digging the ground rather than trawling the sea) include non-square dig sites, “establishing shot” camera animation, the post-dig overview camera animation, and the player’s avatar wandering around the perimeter. Mechanically, being able to make mistakes without a game over, having limited-use abilities that can reveal fossils differently, the shift in stakes for “full specimen” dig sites, and a guaranteed safe first dig also make Fossil Sweeper feel a bit different from a traditional Minesweeper game.
Camera tilt serves no purpose beyond helping to position a dig site within its environment and communicate a sense of place, which is an important part of the framing and tone of Fossil Sweeper. Since the prototype doesn’t have any backgrounds, you won’t see any of that there, but you can see examples in the links above. Camera zoom plays a big role in how large or small a dig site can feel, and zooming allows players to constrain or expand their focus. For “large” and “huge” dig sites, it’s an important part of the game feel that I’m going for that you can’t see it all at once. It’s been a little while since I played it, but since I already understood those dynamics, I don’t think I bothered adding zoom controls in the prototype and just automatically zoomed to fit the current dig site regardless of size.
Initial clicks potentially setting off a mine was a part of the experience of a traditional Minesweeper game, but is something I explicitly prevent in Fossil Sweeper. If the first click happens to be on a fossil, I move that fossil to another tile if the game can do so without invalidating already-revealed numbers.
I think that broadly speaking, anybody who doesn’t enjoy playing Minesweeper type puzzles for the sake of playing Minesweeper type puzzles isn’t part of my target audience, and it doesn’t make sense for me to spice things up in a way that moves away from the style of puzzles I’m trying to present. That said, I did experiment with layered puzzles that reveal a 3D shape back when I was doing the prototype, and they are inherently less interesting than they seem at first glance - since the shape flows from what you found on the previous layer, subsequent layers offer less and less “puzzle” to play. If my starting point for the project was to make a palaeontology game rather than answer “What would Minesweeper look like if it were interesting to me?” I probably wouldn’t lean so heavily on this specific type of puzzle, but for this project, it’s the whole purpose, and everything else in the game is in service of providing metaprogression for completing Minesweeper style puzzles.
As I mentioned earlier, I’ve already implemented some limited use abilities. Currently that’s “find fossil,” which safely reveals a single fossil within a 9 tile square, and “reveal highest,” which will reveal all undug empty tiles that have the highest number on them (so if there’s two hidden sixes, those will be revealed, or if there are no sixes, but one five, then that will be revealed). Both of those are placeholders, but my intention is to focus on offering abilities that feel situationally useful rather than abilities like those that feel broadly applicable (though I do appreciate the way that “reveal highest” ends up influencing how a dig site is played).
I’m not sure whether you did any skeleton assembly in the Bonesweeper prototype, but in Fossil Sweeper, once you’ve finished constructing a skeleton, you can go and place it in a customiseable museum. There’s also a research phase where you can spend surplus fossils on unlocking more museum customisation stuff. There’s a 3D globe where you select your dig sites from, and a customiseable avatar that’s present in all of these spaces. The result is a little more cohesive and rewarding in terms of game flow and how rewarding completing dig sites feel - I knowingly left that kind of stuff out of the prototype since I already understood the impact it would have and wouldn’t learn anything by implementing it as part of exploratory work.
Hope that sheds some light on the project’s direction and why your experience of the prototype might not have matched what you’ve seen in the videos here!