I mean, that was pretty rudely direct. I didn’t mean to talk to you like a child. It’s friendly advice, though. Adventure games are meant to be savored. Grinding away when you get frustrated is even worse in them than in games that have more mechanics (read: basically all of them), because you are hollowing out their primary purpose, which is to allow you to patiently soak in the atmosphere while you let the game work on you.
I’m not really excited about achieving total perfection either, the last 5% of anything is always the sloggiest. I might give up or resort to a guide before then. But you and I are only like1/3 of the way through the obelisks so there should be a lot of low-hanging fruit still.
There can only be so many of those… you might be done already with it.
My favorite obelisks so far are the new spins on existing puzzles At first I was like ha, ha, this is a joke, this couldn’t be more obvious and trivial. Then… turns out it’s hard.
You can definitely take care of all the beacons without even knowing how to tackle the obelisks. You’re probably stuck at the village? Cause everyone usually is. It really is a puzzle medley that requires knowledge of all the other pre-endgame island areas. That being said it’s the only area where i’m not sure if my reasoning about a puzzle I solved was right. EDIT: Actually you’re saying you solved that place so I have no idea where you’re stuck because that seems a bit more out of sequence than usual.
I learned to love the boat a lot more once I understood that it’s a lot more flexible than it seems, ie you can do u-turns and change your destination while you’re riding. though most of its puzzles were kinda formulaic it certainly has some hidden depths
Broco> your problem is that you brute forced the first puzzle of each of those areas! In doing so you’ve concretely missed the very basics of the puzzle mechanism in them, and in both of those areas it’s pretty much impossible to reverse-engineer the puzzles without the trick that would’ve made you solve them in the first place (that’s a pretty neat trick in itself). The solved puzzles get you no more information than the empty ones in that respect.
I really liked the desert temple, and yeah, I did it right after the western island, near the beginning of the game. It did maybe falter a bit in the middle, but I get how they were going for a sort of dramatic arc (stuck in the darkness for a while before reaching the light again). it’s also got a special spot in my heart because that’s where I figured out “the thing”.
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Holy crap the last color puzzles in the village are absolutely vicious
I’m pretty sure I would be equally stuck whether I brute forced the first one or not. I mean, I’m still trying to solve the first one the intended way, I’m not jumping ahead to a more advanced puzzle.
That’s fair enough, though which Zen garden puzzle was it? I think there’s actually one that may be rendered impossible to figure out by the act of solving it. It’s the one that stands alone. In which case I should eat my words and actually advise you to move to another one.
if the desert is the glare temple that thing killed my interest in the game pretty quickly. I got to what I assume is the end of it and couldn’t figure out some shit in a dark room that I couldn’t see shit in and I just stopped giving a fuck. I’ve played once since and I ran around the island aimlessly until I found a boat and like four einstein tapes. I eventually went to the greenhouse. I’ll pick it back up eventually.
I kinda wish you’d put the temple mechanic in a spoiler tag though, you did the same thing in a previous message and while not liking the area is fair game, just giving it away to people who may want to figure it out by themselves isn’t.
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Man, I actually really enjoyed the desert, though the dark room took me awhile. I woke up at 5 in the morning on Monday and got that bad boy taken care of.
I found my first of the tapes. I knew Blow couldn’t resist putting monologues in a game. Also kinda depressed that the one I found was basically hyper-dressed up nerd pro-science, boo liberal arts wankery, especially if it is going to be another case of Blow not realizing how much he is accidentally saying about his own thing (it might not be this, I will be more than happy to be proven wrong).
I have no idea what the “grand design” is, or if there even is one, but all of the tapes I’ve found so far save one have been cited quotes by other authors, and almost all of them have been religious in nature.
There are also some mystical, dismissive-of-science recordings. The recordings offer different perspectives on art-vs-science. Now I think this theme is a little dull but don’t take the first recording you encounter to be representative of Blow’s opinion.
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That’s fair. Like I said, I’ve only found the one, and it just sorta pinged my “oh God, did Blow make another game about an ex-girlfriend that he is going to insist is about something else” alarm. So yeah, I am fine being pleasantly surprised by the others.
Still did find it funny how much he talks about wanting to make a game without text…only to just inject text into his own game.
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Yeah I agree with that. I think Blow sees some kind of distinction between audio and text. Even the credits are audio-based instead of being a traditional scroller. The audio is more problematic than text in some ways though, it feels like an aggressive, intrusive, overly long thing that you can’t control after it’s started, unlike everything else in the game where you control what you pay attention to.
It’s a pretty weird distinction to make, and if he does separate those like that (i.e. thinking audio of words is somehow not text), I don’t even know how to approach that.
Not to mention the subtitles, which just turn the audio into (actually rather large) text on the screen, which is very jarring. I tend to turn subtitles on in games as a default, so I sorta forgot they were on until they were taking up a good quarter of the screen.
wait, are the tapes you’re talking about different from the movie theatre?
I thought the gimmick was as difficult as the gimmick to the final puzzle in the greenhouse. In fact, I solved both in the same way. The symbol placement makes the puzzle itself a little more difficult, I guess, but I didn’t find it significantly different.
I was calling those “tapes”, but if there are others, that’s even more text.
I mean, I am glad that they aren’t the ones about male pattern baldness that were in the preview version of the game a few years back.
I don’t think it’s a big spoiler to reveal that there are also tiny audio tapes littered in the landscape. If you haven’t found any, you really need to pay more attention to things that aren’t panels! When you start playing them and leave, they keep playing at maximum volume like obnoxious hallucinations.
And saving and quitting in an attempt to turn them off doesn’t work. They just resume where they left off!
Yeah, the symbol placement made the difference for me. I couldn’t keep it straight and it’s the first time in the game I needed to resort to pen and paper. Every other puzzle in the game I could hold just fine in my mind (or sometimes using photo reference, which is my go-to tool assist since I always have a phone).