jonathan slow’s the unfitness is all I got, I’m sorry
in b4 Felix raves about it btw
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to be fair as I get older that’s the kind of videogame I probably want to play but not the way he did it, no
getting back into quake champions
haven’t played since the closed beta but they sent me a steam key for the base game + enough of the currency to buy a bunch of characters (plus you get blazkowicz from owning wolf2 on the same account i think?)
it’s still quake and it has more than two maps now but there’s just something fuckin’ vulgar about quake with the whole modern Premium Content Storefront Experience Lootbox ui stuff on top
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I think the Witness sits poorly in memory because the glimpses of worldview we get sour us on the man, while the game is sparse enough that the methodical enjoyment fades.
I pick at this every once in a while and I’m always surprised to remember how good the air feels when I step inside
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Finding out who the witness WAS was what really sealed the already-hate-filled deal for me
Played Vermintide 2 a half-dozen times after leaving it for a month. No successful runs. Maybe I just suck.
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Play with me, I’ll carry you
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Please spoil this for me (behind spoiler tags).
The witness is you, the player. You are on the island to witness Jonathan Blow’s masturpiece. At the end of the game, all the puzzles you completed are undone, all door reclosed and relocked, and the entire island is reset, awaiting the next witness. The next player to gaze upon Blow’s mighty works and despair.
The entire game is Blow’s love letter to himself, and his assertion that you, the player, are a mere peon. That you could never achieve something akin to what He has wrought.
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Ugh (but thank you).
State of Decay 2 is janky as fuck, but rad. This lady is called Marisol, she used to build battlebots, she likes to drive, and she has purple in her hair for some reason. She’s my favorite survivor.
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I think that’s a very disingenuous and uncharitable way to interpret it. I’m not saying Jon Blow deserves much charity, but I don’t think there’s much (if anything) in the game to support that theory.
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lost my r4 ds today, gotta buy another and an sd card lmao
edit: na i dont need it right now
My interpretation is probably colored a bit by trying to design puzzle games myself, but I’ve found that making puzzles doesn’t feel like creation at all, but rather discovery. Making a puzzle is a whole lot like solving a puzzle. Both the designer and the player are just witnesses to how the rigid rules of a puzzle interact.
He even tries to bring the player closer to this design process: the rules aren’t spelled out so the player is forced to make a mental model, which is constantly challenged and tweaked and updated. The player is discovering the rules that work, much like Blow discovered which rules make interesting puzzles. He’s not trying to lord over you; he’s trying to convey the struggle and joy of discovery.
The Witness is an exploration of mechanical minutia. It searches for profundity and sputters around and seeks conflicting philosophies until it ultimately decides that it doesn’t culminate into anything. The puzzles were and are the draw of the game, and you can try them again if you want!
(The secret ending is another reason the restart exists; it’s right near the beginning and with the advantage of what you’ve witnessed and learned, you’re much more likely to find it the second time through).
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The title seems intended to deliberately draw a paradoxical equivalence between witnessing and participation. I was never quite sure how to interpret it even after seeing all the secret content.
My best theory is that it’s a commentary on single-player videogames in general, and how all the “activity” on the screen and the controller is purely in service of an internal experience in the mind of the player. And in a wider philosophical sense, the same is true of the real universe if we hold to a value system that privileges human consciousness and nothing else.
Towards the later portion of the game there’s a bunch of audio logs about how solving puzzles gives people the ILLUSION of having accomplished something, without having actually done anything at all. It goes on and on about this, how playing games and solving puzzles doesn’t actually do anything, and it’s just meaningless noise, and how only true creators can say they’ve accomplished anything real.
I’m not sure where the part where “true creators can say they’ve accomplished anything real” is implied anywhere. Transitively, if solving puzzles has zero value, then creating the context where thousands of people are solving puzzles also has zero value. I read it as a lean towards nihilism/despair that kind of crosses to the other side and affirms ultimate value to all the seemingly pointless satisfactions in life, for both players and creators.
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Thanks but I will have to see the end of this trilogy through on my own, as grim as that may turn out to be. If it makes you feel any better I have terrible taste so perhaps it’ll work out.
As for the Witness, I think trying to read anything into it thematically is ill-advised. Blow likes to but a lot of philosophical layers into his games but they never seem to actually pan out into anything, I’m not even sure he has any idea what he has to say if anything. His talent is in mechanical design in which he has proven on occasion to be capable of producing legit high level instances, albeit not for the full length of any game.
I enjoyed the Witness a good deal up to and a bit beyond the original ending, there were many clever puzzles on that run that I’m glad to have experienced. I unfortunately did not walk away when I should have and kinda tainted the whole thing as some of those variants and later bits aren’t… good and yet can be time consuming.
That is my biggest piece of advice for the Witness: as soon as it feels like you have seen enough and your interest is starting to wane drop it immediately.
The audio logs literally contradict each other; you could say the game is saying anything you want if you take one or a portion of them in isolation.
That is to say,
And so I don’t think either end is nearer to God’s.
And that to stand at either end,
and to walk out off the end of the pier only,
hoping out in that direction is the complete understanding,
is a mistake.
And to stand with evil and beauty and hope,
or to stand with the fundamental laws,
hoping that way to get a deep understanding of the whole world,
with that aspect alone, is a mistake.
And it is not sensible either,
for the ones who specialize at one end,
and the ones who specialize at the other end,
to have such disregard for each other.
(They don’t actually, but the people say they do. Sorry.)