this run-around-and-find-the-glare temple was boring two days ago when I started and it’s still boring today when I tried to finish.
Any news on this getting a physical release?
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I was stuck on 6 lasers for most of yesterday, and stuck very hard for that matter, so I mostly ran around doing obelisk stuff instead. I actually got spoiled on obelisks by watching one minute of a twitch stream, but it’s just as well since it gave me options for more to do when I needed it. Just got into the mountain.
In terms of plot speculation, the whole thing reminds me of when the astronaut gets captured in 2001 and lives out his life in an environment designed to be pleasant for a human. Except it shows too much awareness of human nuance for aliens, so I’m going to go with posthumans. They probably took inspiration from the works of Jonathan Blow, the greatest artist of all the ancestors.
some of the later mountain puzzles are pretty nuts. I still do not understand obelisks but I think I’ve got to be near the ending. The spatial/environment puzzle with the two bridges appears to be unsolvable though so I feel I must be missing something…
oh, I just thought of how to do it while picking up dinner. god damn this game is good. wouldn’t be surprised if this is the last one.
My fiancée spotted our first obelisk “solution” and it was magical. Panels no longer hold her interest lol
I’m at the penultimate puzzle in the quarry - being fuzzy on decongestants isn’t great for forward progress. On the plus side I’ve started a graph paper notebook and cut polyominos out like @Gate88. I’m trying to catalogue all of the inferred rules from the areas I’ve completed because it sounds like the mountain is a comprehensive exam dungeon.
Yeah, I thought that puzzle in the mountain was really neat. Even when you figure out the process, it still takes a bit of doing.
got the ending! the last full-room puzzle was great, really appreciated having to mentally cut down on potential degrees of freedom.
hell of time, really. And I’ve only finished 352 puzzles!
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I do think it could be a little more forthcoming thematically. it’s certainly less heavy-handed than anything else blow has done, but I was expecting Ibsen or something and it seems like the narrative is mostly artifice. classy as hell, but perhaps not much not than the sum of its parts.
also, not too sure about the very last batch of puzzles. felt like maybe those should’ve been at the beginning of the last area rather than the end. they were fine, but a bit too novel?
Yeah, the last full room puzzle felt a lot more like a “final boss” than what came next, but they still kinda felt right, like basking in the afterglow in that quiet place, even though those puzzles really weren’t easy at all. I really like how the whole final zone takes rules you already know and adds real world obstacles to them. This is no longer happening only in your head!
My current score is 443+123+3 and still in that phase of feeling stuck yet solving a few things once in a while. I guess it’s gonna be that way for a while still. The puzzles I’m facing now really require questioning every assumption I’ve made through the game. I like how much the game plays with blind spots.
I’ve come to realize I like the tetramino area a lot less than the others and am avoiding it, not sure why. Possibly because it’s more cumbersome to navigate and also because that’s one place where my laptop’s framerate drops.
Spoiler talk about what I’m missing, make sure you’ve finished the game and know why I’m spoilering my score. Familiarity with hexagons is probably also a good thing.
[spoiler]I’m still missing one movie, second from the right. Given the places in which I’ve found the others I’m looking for some secluded cell-like place but I’ve run out of panels and have no idea where I could have missed its door. Well, writing this, maybe one place. I’ll go have a look tonight.
I’ve noticed puzzle-less closed doors in every major place, which I’m pretty sure lead to an island-wide network of tunnels. I’m also convinced this is gonna be what’s unlocked by the obelisks so there’s not much to do there apart from solving the obelisks.
I’ve got three obelisks left to solve, the town (5 left), mountain (5 left) and castle(1 left) ones. I get that the way the glyphs are placed is a clue to the puzzle locations though there’s a really problematic one for me because two symbols on the town monolith are very similar and I never wrote down which was which so it gives me double the locations to investigate. Well, i’ll find it eventually. It’s great how the monoliths invert the rules, instead of solving puzzles and finding out what they do you know what they do and are using that to find them.
Still wondering if the tablet of the creator statue in the penultimate room will eventually light up or not. On a lore level, I really have, and like, the feeling that all the panel puzzles seem to be an emulation of the obelisk puzzles. Like the people who made the panels had that huge realization one day about how the world worked and they built all these things so that by going through those mazes other people, too, could see and understand the nature of the world.
This is good reading: http://www.labyrinthos.net/index.html
I love that on that island covered in puzzles, the revelation you eventually find is that the island is covered in puzzles.[/spoiler]
I picked this up last night and finished two lasers (the one in the boat house(?) and the one in the dessert) and am enjoying this thing a lot. I didn’t go back and do the door in the first area, but I knew there had to be some audio logs because i also know Blow can’t actually make a game without words, despite really claiming that he wants to. Also because the options menu has a subtitle option, ha.
But still, pretty neat so far. Way more fun of a puzzle game than the last big one I played (portal 2, ugh).
I’ve had a breakthrough as I once again find all my assumptions have been challenged and were really based on ignoring something essential. Really, I had all the information I needed but didn’t put it together. Score climbs up to 491+128+3. It’s one of the best tricks so far.
OK, I finished the mountain, now the real Witness begins here. Current score is ~330+38.
I solved that one relatively swiftly, the solution naturally emerges from doing “what’s possible at all” and going from there. I actually got stuck for longer on the upper bridge, because I was muddled about the exact space covered by the obstacle in the middle. My experience in general with any puzzle is that I get stuck in two scenarios: 1) I don’t understand the rules, or 2) it’s a global optimization problem that’s hard to break down into discretely solvable pieces.
Speaking of 1), I’m still at square one on the desert temple and the zen garden. I even brute force solved the first puzzle in each of them to get an example of a correct answer that can confirm theories on the rules, but it doesn’t help. I mean, I’m pretty sure the desert is somehow sun/time related given all the sun/sundial stuff and the fact the puzzle grid can be construed as 2-hour-granularity clock with an hour and minute hand (tantalizingly close, or totally overthinking it?), but still I don’t see it.
I think the desert is one of the lamest areas. That might be a hint or not, depending if you have the same taste as me.
Zen garden I got stuck on exactly two puzzles, and in retrospect I got stuck for the exact same reason twice.
I don’t seem to dislike the desert section as much as other people do in this thread, if only because I ran in to it early on and it got me to open up to what kinds of information the game would expect me to observe and use. That said, half of it should have been gutted, since it wears thin pretty quickly!
I am terrible at these types of games and I’m still surprised to see I’m sitting in the mid-200’s.
Pretty sure most people did that desert immediately after the island or not at all; I’m in the latter category.
Having finished the mountain and the village, I’m kind of burning out. I have 10 beacons lit. I assume I have to do all the obelisks to get anything else done? I find a lot of the obelisks really tedious and time consuming. There have been a few neat ones so far, but most have been lame and I’m super tired of manipulating the boat. I’m sitting at 434 +39.
I want to see whatever the last puzzle in this game is, but I don’t know if I have the patience for it.
You need to play less, I think. Puzzle games take time to marinate. I haven’t played in like four days and I’m gleefully rubbing my chubby little hands to get back to it.
Might be some of that, I guess.
I was much more excited before I got to the endgame.