It’s a bunch of nice puzzles on a pretty island, and sometimes the island matters, and figuring out when it matters is part of the game.
I hate the blow jacking off bits too but as a puzzle game it’s a nice time.
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im still amazed that anyone thinks the island in the witness is beautiful or pretty. the game really clicked for me when i started to read it as a game about the failure of that type of perfectionism and the grasp for meaning.
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there’s a real time 3d version of myst you can walk around in first person, right? i didn’t imagine that?
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Yep
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yup! realmyst. it was the game that kept cyan afloat during The Lean Years between the shutdown of Uru Live and the Obduction kickstarter/release.
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yeah, surface-level beauty but every person has left or turned to stone or been rendered only through TED talks
partly because it’s too expensive and difficult to make appealing 3D characters but that’s a great analogy to the puzzle designs cutting out everything extraneous for some abstract beauty in logic and the designer’s tower of solitude
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damn he really, really should have just left those ted talk parts out, huh
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I kind of like how directly unappealing and inhuman it makes the experience and how it forces you to incorporate it in your read of what’s going on and what you can like about this
It helps that they’re served as a bonus challenge reward and you get pretty invested to open your gift box because you worked so hard at it, and then you get dunked in Silicon Valley striver-speak
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they are super easy to ignore. my friend was playing it recently and after 10-15 hours i had to tell him about them because i knew how much he would hate them, but hadn’t noticed any of them.
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I thought The Witness was a pretty good time as long as you treat the island as an impossible abstract puzzlebox solely there to teach mechanics.
The Blow stuff didn’t affect my enjoyment and only really creeps in with the insufferably smug audio logs reading quotes as if the actor had finally discovered the meaning of life but chose to promote it on a book-signing tour.
I really like how mechanics come together in the witness just as a matter of breaking down the barrier between pure puzzle and contemplating a scene. It’s a totally different conversation to Myst/Riven but I can see how the author’s apparently massive brain/ego might weigh heavily on some people’s experience with it.
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Also I really like the Brian Moriarty talk on apophenia but quoting it wholesale is tantamount to a first year philosophy student liberally spraying gigantic tracts of quotations rather than developing their own argument.
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realMyst is very good! it is extremely exact spatially, which is so important because Myst itself is a very spatial game. you lose just a little bit in the ways the viewpoint is everything in Myst, but they’ve clearly gone to great care to help you out a bit when possible and the default mode is still point to point and retains most of the framing of the original renders
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i played this game called 3030 deathwar recently and i’m of mixed mind on it
it’s a top-down elite-like married to an adventure game (when on station and in particular scenes) and a sidescroller (ship salvaging), which is kinda cool. the best part is easily motoring around in space, seeing all the fun little sprites that remind me of GTA2, ferrying people from station to station or blasting away junk for a pittance.
but GOD the writing is terrible. it’s trying to do this affectionate sci-fi comedy starring Funny White Man and i’m just sick of this genre of game writing. i was sick of it when i played unepic, another game that’s kinda fun and paced well but has the world’s most insufferable protagonist. the mindset of people who enjoy this kind of writing is totally alien to me. there has to be something there beyond smarmy quips. 3030 deathwar isn’t as frustrating as unepic though so i’ll probably keep at it.
oh and all the character sprite work is really fuzzy, which is a shame. the world sprites are too but it works with the zoomed-out perspective, whereas character sprites you often see super zoomed-in and it just doesn’t work at all
(sorry for double post, deleted the old one cuz i accidentally made it a reply to an unrelated post cuz i clicked the wrong reply button lmao)
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i do agree with this, i appreciate that they single-handedly make the whole game a kind of unique grotesquerie. and i’m fond of the game despite them. but boy, it all could have just gone down a lot easier
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sickoyes.gif
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Today I finished the last of the character trait achievements in Heat Signature, specifically Dying (only 10 minutes to achieve the personal mission) and Pacifist (never kill or harm anyone). Weirdly, one of the earliest ones I completed was Ghost, which is harder than Pacifist, but I got stuck with a couple of very difficult Pacifist missions so couldn’t quite clear that barrier. Ironically, I inherited an item from my last Pacifist (who I had go berserk just to finish her last mission, which I had attempted something like 20 times, then retire so I could pass on her self-charging Stealth Shield) on the character who did finally finish on Pacifist.
Dying was not too hard, I just had to get enough cash for the assassination mission, then go blow up the entire ship in ship-to-ship combat.
All that’s left are the Glory and Daily Challenge missions, and a couple of miscellaneous ones that shouldn’t be too hard. This might be the first game I “Platinum” on Steam.
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i have to say i agree. i kinda like The Witness! i wrote a review of it awhile back that got shared a lot and i think a lot of people concluded i hated the game from the review, but that’s really not true. i like the puzzle design in the game. but whatever narrative that exists is cringe and the place looks like a minigolf course. but if you just look at it as a puzzle game it’s fine imo! might not be to some people’s sensibility but i think if Jon Blow hadn’t set himself up in the way he has people wouldn’t be responding with so much vehement dislike towards the game.
and yeah Myst and The Witness are two different things completely. The Witness is a pure straightforward puzzle mans game that is trying really hard to be deeper than it really is whereas Myst is a lot more whimsical and the vibe/worldbuilding is a much bigger part of the experience. it’s just different sensibilities really. i don’t like how people like Blow slag off the Myst thpe of games as being too arbitrary in their design because that feels reductive, but i sort of see their point when it applies to certain things anyway.
edit: here’s my review i wrote:
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the cool part about myst is you dont have to compromise around a huge piece of shit to enjoy it but perhaps thats truly the witnesses greatest puzzle of all???
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should i play myst if i’m bad at puzzles
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