I’m going off of the Myst forums that were around, er, around the time of the original Insert Credit, who were absolutely gaga over the weird third-party fanservice Myst sequels and constantly groaned about how hard and opaque Riven was. Granted I’ve not looked at this stuff in quite a long time, but the consensus was basically that Riven was a misstep, and Exile was the pinnacle of the series.
Details are beyond me right now. I also remember hanging around on Usenet, talking about this stuff.
Got to Endgame, how much do I have to do to get to the Challenge?
The blue-orange puzzle in the mountain stumped me for a bit, everything else was underwhelming.
Not much if you already got 11 lasers. You just need to activate a secret. If you don’t have any ideas on where to look to open up the challenge area, there are some spoilers upthread.
The original version(s) of Tetris are unplayable by today’s standards. It took 16 years for Arika to drop Tetris The Grand Master 2, which has totally distinctive rotation and drop mechanics that finally permit instant gravity. Even then, none of the entries in that series are perfect (the rotation system has an odd asymmetrical L-kick complement called Mihara’s Conspiracy).
Tetris can be refined, evolved, iterated meaningfully while still being the same concept.
I don’t… really think that kind of refinement is in the spirit of the original comment. You can take anything and keep polishing it, but Tetris is the end point of a certain design mentality that you see in games like Asteroids and Centipede, going back to Breakout.
A direct comparison with Breakout might be the most illustrative. Whereas Space Invaders decreases the distance between the game and the player by giving direct control over projectiles and making a visceral sort of story out of the act of destroying them, Tetris sort of turns the game backwards and gets rid of projectiles entirely. There isn’t even an avatar as such; you’re just directly affecting the environment. Everything that you do has both short and long-term consequence, far more so than the asteroids or mushrooms or what-have-you in Loggville.
It’s like a bottled distillation of the abstract, iterative narrative that defines classical American design.
And in that, it’s kind of an end point. What’s the next step? Has there been one? On the Japanese side, we keep going. Space Invaders leads to Pac-Man, which leads to Donkey Kong and (thanks to an infusion of Joust) eventually Super Mario Bros., and so on. There’s individual subjective interpretation upon interpretation until we kinda sort of come to a standstill with the Miyamoto cult, where for some reason everyone concluded that his own little personal experiments were perfect and that everyone should just copy whatever he does. Which is a strange way to live.
But before we start to spin our wheels, we get to a point where there are lots of interesting proposals for where to go with this kind of a design. Where does Tetris lead us – to stuff like Super Hexagon? That’s… cool and all, but there must be a more ambitious portrait of the world than that.
Here I’m being told that The Witness sidles in on that thread. Which is… interesting.
Also, small thing – how far are we going with “original versions”? Or “unplayable” for that matter? Depending on what you’re looking for, Game Boy Tetris may be the idealized version. Everything that comes after Henk Rogers took over strikes me as near unplayable. They introduce so many systems and…
It’s like they Mario Karted Tetris. It’s all Blue Shells.
But… your talk about iterative competitive mechanical whatever, I guess, kind of answers my questions, I guess. You’re going off on a different idea of progress here. You’re talking about hardcore audiences milking an existing system, which is… one way that things can go. But the vector that I think the rest of us are discussing goes outward, not in.
Yeah, I see that kind of Tetris iteration as simply unpacking the consequences of the original design to make Tetris a more true and perfect version of what it was all along. Whereas we’re talking about creating entirely new games (that nonetheless have not sprung into existence without any kind of “evolution” taking place, they exist within a recognizable tradition).
In the Go comparison, imagine there was a more primitive ruleset for Ko that declares the game is a tie if an endless Ko fight arises, analogous to the chess rule for repetitive moves. Modern Go players would likely consider such a version unplayable trash, since any halfway skilled player could maneuver a losing position into a tie, and the richness of Ko threats is lost. Still, if we assess Go by the same criteria as we do typical videogames (that largely don’t have a highly experienced and competitive playerbase), it’s a minor balance tweak that’s near-unnoticeable, and the resulting game is distinctly the same game worthy of the name Go.
Started playing this and… yeah I’m not gonna read through those other 350 or so posts just yet. I’ve got three lasers up and lasering so far, kinda bumping my head against things that I’m not sure I know how to solve or not just yet. I’ve recently come across a few with some markings that look like a tetris L-block that I think I get the rough idea for but that I’m still missing something regarding. I hate walking away from something I might be able to figure out but it may be for the best.
Also there is this weird half-ruined temple thing where I somehow got the first puzzle there solved without having the slightest idea how. I’m leaning towards the answer here being somehow tied in to the shininess of objects in the area, but that’s about it.
Yeah, you definitely don’t want to bang your head against one-off puzzles in this game. Every element has a tutorial area, so if there’s a symbol or mechanic you don’t understand on a lone (maybe complicated looking) puzzle, it’s probably being used as a locked door rather something you’re supposed to solve in isolation.
It’s like Metroid but instead of the Varia Suit and space jump boots you get knowledge and uh more knowledge.
There are very obvious “areas” in the game. If the puzzles in an area start easy and then build, that’s when you can (and and sometimes have to) bang your head against it to figure it out.
In addition to what Gate88 said, it’s worth knowing you can redo puzzles, so if you solve one and don’t get why, it’s worth resetting and trying to figure it out again (especially since figuring out why a solution isn’t valid is in some cases just as useful as figuring out why one is, when you try to work out the rules).
Yeah, I discovered that I solved an entire set of puzzles (the ones with the white and black squares) while using an incorrect understanding of the rules that somehow worked for all the ones in the intro section but proved to be problematic elsewhere.
I got past the one puzzle that was giving me grief that I had to walk away from a few times, but have stumbled upon another one that’s got me a bit stumped. The problem with this one is that it is smack in the middle of one of those “teaching sequences” so while I’ve walked away from now it’s something I’m gonna have to confront eventually.
I have to say that my favorite thing about the game so far is all the wires going everywhere. It’s just such a great touch.
The wires are marvelous, such a great level design tool. They communicate so many things so simply.
The puzzles that you solve using wrong assumptions about the rules are wonderful too, there are cases where it’s used to great effect. There are visceral moments where you want to scream “you bastard!” at puzzles, not because you’re stuck but because you’re not stuck anymore.
I think I’m getting close® to getting enough lasers to open whatever is on the mountain, although the crumbling temple got me so vexed that I had to leave it despite being mostly done as what (I hope) is the final room there has me beyond baffled. I kinda think that there might be some new rule in effect as I raised and lowered from like every angle and the third panel remains unsolved, but knowing me I’m overlooking something much more basic. For now I left to go play in the trees.
I think the thing in the game that throws me off more than anything else is how certain puzzles when solved seem to do nothing. Perhaps they do something subtle or trigger something a distance away, but solving one and then having nothing happen leaves me spinning around for a few minutes trying to find something that changed.
It’s interesting. I think I mentioned it earlier in the topic but the crumbling temple is the second area I tackled (first was the orange island). Different people get suck on different puzzles, which is great. Leaving for another area to clear your mind is definitely good though.
There’s reliable ways to deduce what a solved puzzle should have changed, however if there’s really nothing that comes to mind it may mean the puzzle is meant to teach you something instead.
I still haven’t finished the damn sun temple, I skipped it early on because I was finding it too fiddly and when I was going back through the game to try to unlock the challenge I got stuck in the water room
My brother just reported this experience. I’m about 4 hours in after a month of sporadic playing; the water area was fiddly but I found it a process of changing states and looking for differences; I just had to be more precise in my looking.
I’m mad at the last puzzle in the logging area spoiler[/spoiler]. I haven’t had a lick of trouble with any of the prior puzzles and understand the skew and transposition properties but feel like I’m missing one or two points of data on that path and brute-forcing logical missing routes hasn’t helped.
Besides that it’s been nice and breezy; I wandered into the swamp intro and found that the first puzzle I didn’t feel like I understood when I got to tutorial #6. I haven’t been back.
Back when I went through it I thought it less memorable than other areas because it didn’t require the same kind of logic leaps as some other places but retrospectively, knowing that people are always getting stuck in that same place, I realize they are still there, they just felt natural to me at the time.
Yeah, I briefly checked back in on the temple, had no realizations and continued on elsewhere. I think I now have enough lasers to go to the mountain and start whatever that entails but I’m gonna go check out the other areas I haven’t gone to yet. Heck I might be able to make more progress in that village area by now.
I feel better that at least others got stuck in that same temple room though. Makes me feel less like I’m overlooking something that should be obvious. I think the problem is that since I cannot find any position that lets me get a light reflection on the third panel I’ve been testing further out there ideas. There is one spot that looks like a circle right by it when you first start to lower the water and I keep trying to translate that into some sort of path, and I think that this is likely either a bad idea or one of those environmental tracings that is distracting me from finding a proper solution.
Man I have hit one hell of a wall, in that it is actually several walls. I’ve borderline exhausted ways forward which feels like it’d be hard to do and yet here I am.
Crumbled Temple: Stuck in the exact same place, have not gotten one iota closer to figuring out what do do.
The perspective house: Up to the fourth and perhaps final panel inside and I cannot for the life of me figure out what to do with it. I can line up the first bit which gives you a bit of info but I think it has to be combined with info from a second perspective; I cannot figure this out.
Bamboo forest: I am borderline tone death and they now have like overlapping sounds. Last one I got to was a bird chirping and some like terrible flute bit with the first three notes being very rapid. Could perhaps brute force it, but each failure closes the panel.
Sunken ship: This has to serve some purpose, I am unaware of what it is.
Opening area: Found what I’d describe as an almost super version of one of those environmental puzzles which activates a floor puzzle nearby. I seem to solve it but nothing happens. Feels like I’m missing something
The Village: First off, the village is a swell area. There is this panel that you seemingly have to solve three different ways to activate the next one, I can only figure out two. Also the sound thing in a sound-proof room and some other puzzle I don’t know the rules for. This one seems more approachable, will likely put some more effort here soon.
Black hexagons in a panel maze: I don’t know if these have different rules, don’t recall being introduced to them before. Have a fear that they’ve always been hexagons and I never noticed before.
Mountaintop: Activated the thing here, could not solve the initial puzzle. I think this is merely a result of my brain being fried as I spent the previous 90 minutes walking between various puzzles I failed to solve.
I like to think I am pretty okay at puzzle games but this has been an absolutely demoralizing stretch of time with the game. I think the issue is that these puzzles have stepped away from being typical puzzles and depend more on finding the right way to even look at them and I am forced to ponder if I am not just absolutely terrible at that.
I’m trying to think of which seven I actually finished, because I haven’t been able to solve any of the others when I’ve returned to the game now and then.
first area with the mirrored puzzles / courtyard / treetops / logging area / shadows / swamp / greenhouse? that sounds right.
I know I haven’t gotten the village (the basement of the house has me stumped and I still haven’t opened that damn greenhouse-style door with the different colours after staring at it every time I walk by, though I’ve got at least a couple of the wires on the main building lit up), the sun temple (close on that one though), the buddhist temple, or anything with tones in the forest.