The witness is so padded with filler puzzles that aren’t interesting, but are the result of including every combination of rules established beforehand.
Rather than curate the experience to just the best puzzles, he decided to include everything which introduces quite a bit of tedium to the game.
[figuratively eating shit] i like my haystacks with extra hay
I found tracing lines satisfying even if I’ve done the same kind of puzzle before so I didn’t mind it.
It’s like how many action/RPG games have a repetitive core loop where you fight the same monsters in different combinations.
yeah, it’s a pacing crutch but I wouldn’t argue it’s an entirely unsuccessful one
Yeah, I dunno if I’m just dumb or something but most of them started making me really chew over stuff by the third or fourth puzzle in a sequence, and since some of the puzzles have information that is vital to understanding other puzzles, I thought it worked pretty well.
It just has blow jacking off in your face which is the real problem.
The first screen of Braid is a nice little mood piece, it’s the only part of the game I really think about anymore. Big ups to David Hellman
someone i met at the zine fair gave me a copy of their videogame, Rainy Day Racer, about doing time attack challenges around a perpetually drizzling scottish city in a van. it’s totally empty and the only sound is rain and the developer occasionally saying how many laps are left right up against the mic in a flat voice. when you complete a course a damp and unenthused looking lady holds a board with your name on it. i liked it, found it weirdly effective both as an actual racing game and a hyperspecific mood piece
looks decent, might have to buy it
Right, it’s like Picross
I need a Her Story posting minute. Just played the whole thing yesterday. Very intriguing, super kind of trashy premise but still not nearly as entertaining or emotionally resonant as Immortality. I saw @doolittle say in the Immortality thread that there is one two-word phrase you can search to validate or falsify the twin hypothesis. What is the phrase?
I really love how much Sam Barlow likes to talk about Nicolas Roeg in interviews because it clarifies a lot of the tawdry vibes he’s going for (and which imo didn’t work great in telling lies)
I expected more from a 40 dollar game given that I can solve nonograms for free on my phone and the average nonogram is simply a more satisfying puzzle than the best the witness had to offer (those tree-branch-shadow puzzles where you had to open and close gates outside the puzzles to see the solution)
mm that’s more specific than what i said but i promise you’ll think of it. what would i type first
the answer to your question is tulpa’s one word spoiler post in that thread but i think you should roll up your sleeves before you click it
alternatively, i think another keyword to get you to tulpa’s clip was one of the first match cuts shown for immortality
agreed. the presentation, instruction, appearance of the panel puzzles are way in excess of how difficult or fun they are to solve. the a-ha moment works once, random Loopy games work forever (if they don’t, bump the difficulty)
Jagged alliance 3 is … very odd now that i got to play more of it. theres not really a stealth system to speak of, the enemies literally can see in 360 around them, and the game uses xcom style enemy activation which means that even when you stealth kill someone if someone else hears it it forces you into combat with a stupid cutscene and all the enemies start running in a straight line at you even though nobody is actually spotted. which lends itself to using overwatch constantly, but it also means there is no effective way to ambush enemies outside of using overwatch. you also cant pause the game while its real time either
lol that this guy i cant see can see my merc prone on the ground thru all this foliage when she cant even fit on the screen because of how far away he is
not even getting into how theres no way to buy guns anymore from bobby rays anymore, you have to get random ones from crates vendors offer you or loot. theres no weapon attachments anymore either, you just craft everything out of “parts”
also the jokes are fucking awful, theres literally skyrim arrow in the knee jokes in this game
i also have thoughts on the witness but i’ll post them later because other stuff i’ve been playing…
WOLFENSTEIN 3D
I went back to episode 4, it wasn’t nearly as mazey as I first thought. I think I was just Wolf fatigued by that point. The first half DOES have some annoying mazey bits, but nothing too egregious, and the episode does a lot of fun surreal and weird stuff with map design
episode 5 i think is the mechanically strongest of all the episodes, definitely the highlight for me. the levels themselves have a really nice flow and feel good to explore, but it’s the way this episode uses enemies (in combination with the level design) that really makes it. it really understands the AI of the enemies and makes the most of it, filling the episode with moments with flanking enemies and lots of fun traps that took me by surprise.
episode 6 is a pile of shit, bland, mazey, boring design. last level was also way too hard until i found the secrets.
gonna give it a month or two before tackling spear of destiny
GONNER
this game is pretty dope! a roguelite run and gun/hop and bop with a really cool sense of style. feels great to control, and it is VERY adrenaline pumping when you get kill combos going and start raking in the cash. i dont know how long it will hold my interest because that’s the way i am with roguelites, but i think this will my “kill time” game for a while. similar to downwell but not as vertical
BUBBLE GHOST
finally a REAL puzzle game! unfortunately it’s the DOS version on steam which is one of the ugliest looking and sounding versions, but it plays well
i like about half of the levels in Episode 6! the problem is some of the worst offenders are right at the beginning. i hate playing level 1 but it is like surgically designed to be horrible in way i sort of admire. but level 2 is by Bobby Prince who had no real business designing a level, and it shows. the episode definitely feels rushed. but then levels 5 and 6 i really like and find quite memorable. so even at the low points (which - ep 6 is def my least favorite episode) i guess that’s what i like about Wolfenstein 3D - a bunch of different approaches and realities are contained within it for whatever reason. people just don’t design games like that anymore, especially not first person shooters.
also i’m glad i could get you to turn around on Episode 4 and Episode 5 though. it probably won’t surprise you to learn that Ep 5 was done by John Romero.
I approve of this kind of design - not protecting the player from breaking the game.
Database-em-up equivalent of the Hitman:BM hotel level where you can openly gun down a target in the first 30 seconds then run for it.
i liked it when the witness did this kind of thing
this is the first thing available to do at one point so i wouldn’t call it a major spoiler, but
there are other instances where the constraints are a result of more complex rules, which is satisfying, though i suspect they’re somewhat arbitrary and could be constructed a bunch of ways.
felt like the closest the game design reached to a kind of elegance and deeper language to the world. everything else kind of feels like meaningless scribbles.
