I wish we could separate it from Blow being a dick. I thought Braid sucked but I had a great time playing The Witness with a complementary partner whose brain worked differently.
Like, I think of Nier Automata as a game that has a lot of bullshit meta “why are you still playing this dummy” time wasting and I would much rather do fun logic puzzles than The Bayonetta Dodge if I’m slogging through 40 hours of video game with special guest philosophy.
I like the Witness, uh, a lot. Judging from his games (especially fmv in the witness) I think J. Blow is more self aware than people imagine. However, J. Blow being a famous person and not a close friend of mine, who am I to say? Unpopular opinion: audio logs (especially movie theater logs) are good. They activate my left brain while my right brain decipheres the puzzle logic.
Eh, I think most imagine Blow to be pretty self-aware, but self-awareness isn’t a pardon for one’s sins (and arguably makes them worse!)
What sins? Really hope I’m not overlooking or forgetting a big scandal.
He’s not as bad as Fish, but he definitely registers somewhere on the Fish-Pelloni scale
whoa what’d BOB do
exploded in a massive fireball of impotent self-worship
Don’t think it’s a singular scandal, more like a number of bad takes on twitter (that he’s seemingly deleted fairly recently).
Also I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that most of his interviews come off as hostile to his peers (other designers/developers).
I can tell you he bounces back and forth; he can barely give a second glance to games in the indie section at a con (I have a hard time fighting this cynicism/social anxiety too) but he’s fine if slightly below average hanging out at indie meetups. I think it’s a combination of too much media power and prepared but not carefully emotionally evaluated statements.
I know the feeling of wanting to indulge in aesthetic Statements! And Declarations! but in my circumstances doing so has never remunerated me
Yeah, I didn’t mean to imply he disliked all of his peers; he mentioned various indie puzzle games as strong influences for The Witness (Corrypt, Starseed Pilgrim, and some puzzlescript games). He didn’t mention it specifically, but I’d bet he’s pretty familiar with English Country Tune too.
I do think he’s a very good designer; I also think he’s a bit of a dick about it sometimes.
He’s also vocally contemptuous of Silicon Valley engineering practices without bothering to ask anyone if there might be any good reasons for the things he can’t see a reason for. In that spirit he’s currently making a new programming language, but he isn’t as good an engineer as he is a game designer so it’s not the masterpiece he thinks it is.
Woah y’all I just hated the puzzled design when I knew that was the whole game.
Oh you don’t know the rules to this puzzle yet. You can’t solve it idiot. Knowing the rules is not a sign of intelligence. Once I knew the rules of a puzzle I didn’t feel good solving it.
—ack finger slipped and hit post—
I just finished The Room and I had a real good time doing puzzles in that.
Solving a line maze in my head is mildly enjoyable. Creating more and more rules for what is “solving” getting from one point to another was making me equal parts mad and tired. I am reminded of Critter’s Crunch which was a nice enough puzzle game that collasped under adding new rules to make it more of a game. Or a match 3 that goes “more colors?”
I can hear in my head someone saying “no the rules get really cool!” Get out of my head Liquid.
All of these thoughts in about 30 minutes of playing. So I will stop and play something else. I never even got to the philosophy stuff.
From my POV the unknown rules and rule tutorials are supposed to act like locks and keys. I liked it because it reminded me of a Metrovania. Just like you remember to go back to that one powerbomb block after you get powerbomb, it’s satisfying to return to a formerly baffling door puzzle after learning how it works.
I mean, fair enough and all that but is this particularly different than say Riven? Granted I would say that Riven island(s) is a more interesting place to wander around but The Witness feels like a game inspired a bit by it and has a similar “you have to observe and learn how things here work” ethos.
The Witness is better than Riven in this narrow regard as you only have to figure out like 7 of the 11 or so areas, so the times when they both stumble in terms of “I can’t figure out the exact way the designer wants me to approach this” instances in The Witness I can go do something else while in Riven I might just be stuck until I break down and google what animal shape I am missing.
I mean, if you played the game a half hour and hated it then abandon ship with a free conscience. The reason just struck me as a bit curious.
I meea~an in a way they are of course similar but as adventure games they have almost opposite philosophies. The Witness is made up of, I dunno, dozens or hundreds of discrete tiny logic puzzles that all follow strict abstract gamey logics devoid of any narrative content. Riven asks you to perform holistic archaeology on a place and the culture of its inhabitants all to solve, like, three actual puzzles.
I was going to go ahead and make this clumsy analogy but it does tie in with Riven.
I was in Seoul for 48 hours once. On the train Just looking at hangul and the english letters underneath I was able to decode about 6 of the characters. It felt incredible.
Riven (and Myst games at their best) is about putting all these pieces together to understand something. You solve a puzzle but also there are maybe pieces you didn’t use but were useful to gain insight into this abstract fake world.
In the witness I am just learning to move a line in the correct way.
Another clumsy analogy from some guy that played the game for 30 minutes but everything I have heard says I have played the game. This game is trying to get a new programming language to return “hello world.”
I am not saying the game needs a plot. That’s not what it wants to do. It wants to give me gradually escalating line puzzles. I don’t like the line puzzles.
Not sure if I can step back into it now, getting I think 2/3rds or so of the island done around release. The discussion tempts me. Tiring as they were I enjoyed having to discover, grapple with, and eventually tackle new line mechanics as they came. But for all that elegant design an undercurrent grew, something faintly ringing “you’ll be annoyed with all this effort in the end”.
So it fell hella to the wayside. I uh, loved Braid though.
I’m playing Final Fantasy 12 Zodiac age which is the most perfect Final Fantasy ever because of the gambit system, fast forward play and sexy rabbit women. The game is better with the Japanese voices.
The Witness perhaps more than any other recent game I can name is one you definitely have to pick your own time to walk away from as while the overall puzzle design is rather good and there is reason to poke around the island if you like it is also not universally good, and the parts that aren’t as good can take a lot of time and end up being bunched together near the end of a player’s run as they likely skipped over all of it initially due to the open design and better available options.
So basically that undercurrent you were feeling would have likely at some point became true. I seemingly like the game more than most here but I’m not sure I would recommend going back unless it is many years later when you’ve forgotten everything and you’d like to start from scratch.
Re: my Riven comparison I can see how it is in rather different in one aspect if somewhat similar in another, and different people will focus on one more than the other. I will note that there is a degree of walking around the Witness island and figuring out non-“lines on a screen” aspects of its design that are a further step towards Riven/Myst, but one likely wouldn’t notice it for hours (much less a half hour) and it wouldn’t be enough if one absolutely gets nothing from the core line puzzle aspect of it.
EDIT: Forgot that I wanted to digress and mention that I ran through Inside over the past couple of days. I think it is neater than Limbo due to having a more consistent mood/atmosphere (thought the first third of Limbo was rather strong and then it trailed off). I also think that while Limbo was a puzzle platformer this was more of a platformer with puzzle elements, if that makes any sense. I’d almost want to describe it as a cinematic platformer with standard controls, but that possibly might only make sense as a description inside of my own head.
Yeah, I did discover The Metapuzzle while playing, and it was both cute and somewhat revelatory. I like The Witness (not nearly as much as Riven but still), I am not setting up this contrast to say one good and one bad. But The Metapuzzle too has nothing to do with anything recognizable as human, it’s just more pictures. You don’t start solving The Metapuzzle because you figure out something about the culture or language or history or desire or fears of the people who made The Island. It’s something purely aesthetic and pictorial that the line puzzles prime you to notice/try.