Well, as I said earlier it’s pretty fine trolling and at least to some extent where the roots of the game must lie. At first I had no idea where it was going but after a while it started to make a lot of sense. In some way to me it was the third ending of the game, if you take the “masterclass in puzzle design” angle. I like how the puzzle trigger is timed juuust right. It also helps that I really like things that have to do with Masquerade. Amusingly there’s a hare hidden in the game though people are still debating whether that’s relevant or not.
It’s a really poorly presented, meandering talk full of irritatingly tendentious statements, I couldn’t listen long enough to find the throughline even though I was forced to (I just turned the volume down after a while). And the fact that it’s intolerably tedious and mostly full of nonsense is surely the point, I’m surprised most people seem to be taking it at face value as entirely worthwhile material to absorb. I mean, Braid did the exact same thing with the “really slow cloud” puzzle, this is just a much cleverer version of that.
I do agree it’s somewhat enlightening about the origins of the game – particularly the influence of Loom, a game that I respect (from the little I’ve played of it) and indeed find myself surprised that its creator gave such an awful talk. But also some of the points in the talk are also in direct counterpoint with what the Witness is doing, particularly the bit that a great game should be open, generous, obvious, not hiding anything behind secrets or any other barriers – an attitude that is distinctly 2002-era and that almost nobody would agree with today. (Unless that was meant ironically by the speaker in full context, but I didn’t notice such an undertone.) And the mention of Thomas Kinkade hiding letter Ns in his paintings is hilariously on point and shows Blow retains a bit of a sense of irony about his attempted masterwork.
I just got started, so far the hardest part has been getting the line to move fast enough to solve the puzzles
I think on PS4 at least you can hold one of the triggers to speed the line up?
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(Super late answer)
The most obvious argument for taking Psalm 46 at face value is that Blow does. He’s cited it in conferences as something he aspires to and in the recent reddit AmA he called it “the greatest speech ever given about game design”.
I had my fill of aimless wandering, so I went ahead and watched a 100% speedrun of the game to satiate my curiosity on the remaining obelisk things (I discovered 85 on my own). I don’t really regret spoiling myself, a couple of them were interesting but almost all were simply places I didn’t think to look. I had already found most of the clever/different ones on my own.
That does leave me with absolutely nothing left to do in the game though, and it was a nice enough experience I wouldn’t mind going back to it. And this game is unusually non-replayable (for the same reason that it’s unusually spoilable). I find myself wishing there were more advanced challenges available.
Yeah, I didn’t have any intention of finding all of those; I just stopped after the challenge. It’s neat that they’re there and that some people can enjoy them, but they’re not for me.
It’s not exact that there’s nothing left. There’s a wealth of hidden things that aren’t part of the score, and people are still finding them. For example did you notice that the central lake is a map of the island? Water for ground and ground for water, and each object on it describes the state of an item on the island. Shells are vaults, lanterns are lasers, leaves are triangle puzzles, fountains are obelisks, etc. Or the big tree northeast of the desert that has at least five faces hidden in it, and a variable number of leaves, the mechanism of which is not yet understood
New Challenge speed world record in 1 minute 49 seconds:
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That takes both a lot of practice and pretty good luck! Some of those solutions he saw really fast. I liked his strategy on the second set of 3.
Contains spoilers.
This article is by one of my favorite writers (Ella Guro, she’s made at least a few appearances at old-SB). Haven’t played the game but I’m interested to see what people who have think of it.
I skimmed it at one point and will reread it. I recall it being a reasonably good criticism of blow himself and the place he occupies in the current canon, but, like the piece that gatotsu linked earlier in this thread, vaguely irrelevant to the experience of actually playing the game and how generally satisfying that is.
man that pillar puzzle on the left really jacked me up. i guess i had a lot of trouble with those in general - one of the ones by the elevator at the end was definitely my biggest stumper in the game
I think I agree with most of the points in the article. I do agree with Felix, though, that it spends a disproportionate amount of time talking about the vague “meaning” of the game. Even the author admits she doesn’t know what, if anything, Blow ultimately intended, because so much of it is contradictory. I think it’s a good article exploring who Blow is and what might have intended, but I think it’s a bad representation of the game itself.
The puzzles and challenges in the Witness are satisfying and absorbing in a way that most games aren’t, including the games she uses as comparisons (Corrypt and Starseed Pilgrim). And that’s not to say they’re not good games, but they feel much more like experiments than “well-realized”. I find both of those games really tedious in practice (Starseed was immediately frustrating to me; Corrypt just gets tedious in the second act).
I think the Witness is extremely successful as a puzzle game. There aren’t many other games that explore an idea so completely. Nor are there many other games that thoroughly explore teaching the player through inductive logic. I’ve had more “ah-ha” moments in the Witness than any game in recent memory.
And yes, Blow is kind of up his own ass.
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I’ve found some puzzles I can’t solve on the first try, so have to hunt for the tutorial screens. There’s been a couple of ‘a-ha’ moments, but mostly I think ‘oh ok’. Background: all of Chip’s Challenge & playing Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection on the bus for a year.
The real challenge is to stick with an area and not accidentally wander off to some other place! Also I refuse to take notes.
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It’s cool! We don’t have to have the same frequency of “ah-has”. To be fair, I sort of tore through the game, so some of that might have been due to mental fatigue or pure stubbornness.
I do like Chip’s Challenge and Tatham’s puzzles a lot, though! What puzzles do you end up playing the most? I’ve done a whole lot of Loopy (Slitherlink) and Galaxies.
Ooh, there’s a new train one I haven’t tried yet!
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I started with Net and then Signpost, trying not to connect to a number until the last move. The train game looks awesome.
I keep forgetting which places I looked at and then wandered off from. I’ve done a lot of panels and only have 2 lasers, gotta be more persistent.
[quote=“meauxdal, post:296, topic:761, full:true”]
http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/taming-the-inexplicable/[/quote]
Witness has good puzzles I’m sure but it also has the vanilla visual sensibilities of a modern design magazine, or like a waiting room in a corporate office, not to mention the apparent narrative tone of a ted talk (if you happen to find audio logs). These things are only ugly to the extent that they try to be so hegemonic, so I can see why, when The Witness is pushed by both Blow himself and gaming journalists as the new benchmark of gaming, people might raise a few eyebrows.
Just played Myst for the first time in 2012 and loved it, so personally I wanted a new Myst type game, but what I get out of Myst is in large part owed to the narrative strands of classical fiction like Jules Verne that it pulls from in order to establish its setting. So it was disappointing to me to slowly find out that Witness is more a minimalistic museum of academic principles from various disciplines including game design, graphic design, and architecture, but never contextualizes these methods in order to establish a setting.
The union of the setting, the implicit narrative, and the puzzles which were used as a device to give structure to a mystery. The way these things intermesh is what makes Myst for me. The way Myst pulls from trinkets and technology in order to represent itself is fascinating to me, the way Myst encapsulates certain kinds of environments and settings in a loosely connected dreamlike way is what makes me love it. So that’s where I’m at. The Witness is strictly meta as far as I can tell, but that’s coo.
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