jonathan blows the witness

The early mountain puzzles are easier than the ones in the village. You’re supposed to do them immediately after 7 lasers so the game isn’t sure that you can do any particular category of challenging puzzle, so it just adds annoying obstructions instead of making them harder. The late mountain and postgame are more interesting.

That sounds dumb, why not make extra lasers required to descend further into the mountain?

I guess I’d better do the mountain now :gun:

Haven’t played this thing, because I’m not getting another game console any time soon and Steam can suck it.

But, I’m here to applaud the thread title, and to say that Riven is the best game ever.

From what I gather, The Witness is no Riven. It’s more like “Hyper Myst.” Which doesn’t interest me as much.

What does interest me is Obduction. Weird new world by the Millers, Robyn included. Billed as the spiritual successor to Myst and Riven, whereas it seems like Myst fans always try to ignore that Riven ever existed.

Still… yeah. I mean. Jon is a prickly fellow, and takes way too hard of a line on… any given thing you could name. But generally speaking, if you get past the absolutism and his mode of delivery, he does tend to have roughly the right about things. So, I’m curious about this. I like that he went to so much effort to do a Mystalike, when surely the market for this genre must have looked bleak from the outset.

Nobody in this thread who’s played it has bothered to compare and contrast this with Myst or Riven. The similarity is superficial. I cannot agree with calling this “hyper Myst” because Myst’s puzzles are a disjointed grabbag and The Witness is defined by coherence and unity of puzzle design above all else.

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@Chevluh compared it to Riven a bit like 200 posts up.

Well, the thing is, The Witness is all about puzzles. Myst is all about puzzles. Riven doesn’t really have any puzzles (sorta), and if you play it from the perspective of solving puzzles you’ll probably be pretty frustrated with it.

I can’t speak more to what might or might not compare, but that’s the element that I was reaching for.

I can confirm: this is exactly what happened to me.

Yeah, and for that reason Myst fans kind of hate on Riven as a matter of practice. But that’s not really what it’s about. It’s more of an anthropology adventure sim.

Courtesy of Mr. Jutla:

http://www.wired.com/1997/09/riven

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Incidentally.

Well.

I don’t even like first-person puzzle solving or waking simulators that much, and I think it’s pretty debatable whether or not myst-style game design has held up (I didn’t play talos).

Granted, he hadn’t played it at the point that he started the thread. Just saying. This isn’t coming from nowhere.

Yeah, and conversely, those folks who are approaching The Witness expecting to discover an interesting world anthropology between the lines are getting frustrated. The Witness’s world is close to the exact minimum needed to make its puzzles work (the seeming flourishes generally prove to have a function after all) – its appearance and function are unified much like the modern architecture and industrial design that its look sometimes imitates. We agree The Witness is going for a totally different thing than Riven, I’m just saying that also mostly goes for Myst.

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Right. And what I’m saying is that given that the game seems to be following the Myst model, and refining it down to a puzzle glory, from a distance it’s not interesting me as much as if it were following Riven. In fact, it kind of feels like it’s going backwards.

So, having established that sentiment, I’m sort of interested anyway, despite what looks like a sort of regressive design model, as a result of the sensibilities of the person behind it. Because, hey, maybe what he’s doing here is more than what it looks like.

yeah. there was a recent mini-discussion in the games you played thread about how people seem intent on approaching the witness with the wrong critical lens, and this has a lot to do with it.

In what respect?

lots of and lots of “what is jonathan blow trying to say, grrrr that guy” pieces, when most of what jonathan blow was trying to say was “I spent a long long time on formalism and puzzle design”

[quote=“aderack, post:336, topic:761, full:true”]
Right. And what I’m saying is that given that the game seems to be following the Myst model, and refining it down to a puzzle glory, from a distance it’s not interesting me as much as if it were following Riven. In fact, it kind of feels like it’s going backwards.[/quote]

To continue my analogy, the same sentiment was expressed in reaction to modernist design and abstract art, which threw away variety and baroque detail that many people appreciated. But I don’t want to take that comparison too far – what’s interesting is how The Witness prefers to find function for baroque details as opposed to removing them.

Formal elegance and unity has been an underexplored direction in modern game design – it’s a constricting design principle and by far the easier path is to go for maximalism instead. We all admire Tetris, but how would you sanely turn Tetris into a 40-hour exploration game? It seems impossible, but that’s effectively what The Witness achieves.

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That’s pretty interesting.

Sounds like Blow liked Space Giraffe even more than he let on.

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Has anyone else been bothered that Tetris has seemed to be both a masterpiece but also a kind of dead end in game design, since its color-based successors sacrifice the simplicity that was central to its appeal? I’ve had that thought, and perhaps Blow did as well. It made me sad that in order to produce a game as gemlike as Tetris (or Go), one seemed to have to scale back one’s ambitions and select from a tiny menu of only the simplest and most elegant options. I’m honestly surprised that a game today exists that resolves the contradiction between elegance and variety.

Yeah, even Pajitnov struggled with a decent follow-up. (Welltris is not it.) With Tetris 2, Nintendo caved to the lead of Columns and went with color-matching.

Tetris is sort of the pinnacle of the style of design you see emerging in Asteroids and Centipede. And then… uh. What next?

Yeah, Pajitnov wasn’t so much a design genius, as the lucky discoverer of the perfect game that was hiding in mathematics and the human mind all along. Similarly Go, of which it would be pointless to wonder who was its ancient game designer – it’s often commented of that game that if aliens exist, they have probably independently discovered it.

As for The Witness, it wasn’t a lucky spotting of shiny gold in a stream – its puzzle mechanics had to be laboriously mined until every seam was exhausted.

Who are these hypothetical people? First of all, is there any group of people in 2016 describable as “Myst fans”? And second of all, of the very few people I’ve ever met who’ve had any opinion on the series as a whole, to a person they say Riven is the best.

These aren’t rhetorical questions, I’m actually interested in knowing if there’s some vital Myst fan community out there that I don’t know about. That hates Riven for some godforsaken reason. Or if you’re going off of contemporaneous magazine reviews, which would of course miss the point.