It’s the other way round though. The puzzles are the whole point and there’s really little that isn’t a puzzle (even the endings are essentially informed by the puzzle mechanics). So using a guide will actually rob you of everything that is interesting about the game, while playing according to its rules (including stopping to think instead of trying to brute force puzzles) will get you the most rewarding experience. If you just follow a walkthrough, you’ll get spoiled by the metapuzzle aspects just by reading the table of contents and not get the wonderful feeling of finding them by yourself, will get two seemingly unsatisfactory cutscenes as ending, and will hit a brick wall at the two spots in the game where you have to face sections where a guide can’t help you.
It’s probably debatable whether a game that is unenjoyable unless you’re playing it blind is good design for the internet age, but I personally feel it is.
@stylo yeah, the puzzles that cut off power to previous panels are the rule-teaching ones, basically, the ones that are simple enough to be easily brute-forceable but that are the point where the game would like you to integrate the notion that brute force will lead you nowhere long-term.
See like, I disagree. All the rule-teaching ones I had done previously were actually very generous, showing me exactly what state wasn’t satisfied with red lights.
The first puzzle I encountered that would shut off had to do with looking through some glass to modify the colors, then going back and doing it from memory. The problem is, my memory is very, very bad. So I wasn’t brute forcing it, I was forgetting parts of it and then doing it wrong. I actually think the puzzle was basically impossible to brute force, since there was only one solution (that I could see). The game was punishing me for not being able to perfectly remember the state of a 5x5 grid.
I guess I should just write the solution down though, huh?
Anyway I still find it annoying. I play puzzle games by testing theories and then going backwards to find out why they were wrong. It feels like this game discourages experimentation, viewing it as just another method of “brute forcing” a puzzle.
yeah as far as memory as an aspect of puzzles, i really don’t find much pleasure or strategic depth beyond the level of “game where you flip over tiles”. like, there’s no ‘next level’ for the complexity of remembering stuff.
Use screenshots instead of writing down solutions if you think you may forget!
Also, there is definitely a thing where your memory will be strained. You eventually need to look at a panel and make snap judgments about it and recall specific details about panels elsewhere.
It absolutely does, but it wants you to feel like you’re being creative while playing through a set of mechanics that are about finding (i.e., camera manipulation) and recall. I’m just not sure if the game’s being ironic or intentional in this.
wait is this the bit in the mountain with the six panels that share a solution? coz that’s really cool and really frustrating. i’m stuck on #5, the second b/w squares panel
[quote=“VastleCania, post:408, topic:761, full:true”]The first puzzle I encountered that would shut off had to do with looking through some glass to modify the colors, then going back and doing it from memory. The problem is, my memory is very, very bad. So I wasn’t brute forcing it, I was forgetting parts of it and then doing it wrong.
[/quote]
Unless I’m mistaken about the puzzle you’re talking about, you don’t need to do it from memory. you can do it right through the glass, keeping with something that’s also taught in the symmetry section and some other class of puzzle I dare not spoil, that as long as you can see a puzzle you can interact with it. So to me it wasn’t so much punishing you as brutally hinting that you were taking the wrong approach. I’ve said as much last year, but henever you’re brute forcing something in this game you’re doing it wrong. One of the super hard achievement parts of the game uses memory but even then you only need a very partial recall and can compensate in other ways.
On the other hand, like @21012 said, I had plenty of paper, though not for memory purposes but for being able to look at puzzles from new angles. I like it when a game requires me to take notes and it doesn’t happen very often (in recent years, Fez, The Witness,La-Mulana and Sethian).
I tried this and it didn’t work - it was actually very frustrating to me because I had learned that lesson, and then basically told “no you can’t” simply because it would trivialize the puzzle.
I’m coming off as quite pissy here but maybe I’m just bad at puzzles? Everyone says this is an amazing game so let’s just assume that I missed something here, or that I’m not the target audience.
I do think it’s a game that only caters to a specific kind of player. I also mentioned it last year, but the closest thing I have going is that I’m doing La-Mulana blind and not minding one bit that I’m progressing very slowly, and most people would not consider playing it that way.
Or that he loves to slag on Portal when he very conspicuously follows strict rules of teaching by steps, reiteration, complication. He holds back on the guidance but it’s a quantitative difference. He’s still following modern design (and it’s not a bad thing).
The difference with Portal, or rather Portal 2 which is the really problematic one, is that Portal 2 never really lets me figure out stuff for myself. The commented run reinforced that they constantly had had more interesting versions of puzzles and filed all the edges away because people got stuck for more than a few minutes. It constantly reminded me of an interview of one of the Telltale guys about tales of Monkey Island who was saying if a tester ever got stuck on a puzzle it was a failure for them as designers. The result is it took me 2 hours to finish Portal 2 and one more for a very slow commented run, and have promptly forgotten about it since, while I enjoyed The Witness for 60 hours and the feelings of realization for each new puzzle trick figured out were much more intense than anything the totality of Portal 2 ever threw at me. Portal 1 was better in that regard, though it still feels like it ends when it should have really begun.
It was also much more rewarding than another puzzle compilation game I love, Layton, because of the metapuzzle aspect which Layton felt like it should have as a gameplay element but didn’t. Figuring out the wider principles of the island, beyond the panel puzzles, was one of the most interesting things I’ve had to do in a game.
It also comes closest to what I’d seek in an Icebergvania, pretending to be a specific kind of game when there’s in fact a completely different layer staring you in the face. Frog Fractions kinda does it but the base game is inane so you’ll suspect something is afoot after a while (edit: looking at the noclip documentary about FF, the jokes in the first segment were indeed added to increase the chance the player would realize they were being played, and Crawford does think that was a mistake in retrospect), and immediately drops any pretense once you find the “entrance”; Fez pretends it is one but is actually designed so you’ll necessarily find anticubes long before you collect all cubes.
So hey, The Witness is the one early/unveiled game for the Humble Monthly deal next month. What that means is you pay $12 and can play it now, and next month get five or six other mystery games. I’d say that is a rather good deal.
I lost my momentum in The Witness after kind of getting stuck on a puzzle in the mountain. I happened to mention to a friend the other day that I never figured out how to get up into the tree houses, and he told me that it was simply one of the boat stops. I have no idea why I never discovered that.
I resumed my game, exploring that area and finishing the town (using a guide for hints in places because I didn’t remember all the mechanics). I then made a little more progress in the mountain until I kind of got stuck again.
The same friend I mentioned above also explained to me that I had misinterpreted those obelisks that show patterns as you solve environmental puzzles. I had assumed that they were hints for further puzzles rather than just records of ones you had already solved.
They’re both. If you wanna know, the hints are that they give you the general shape of the unsolved puzzles you should should be looking for since the path to trace is shown, and that can be a huge help, but a subtler aspect is they also give you the direction, as each sigil on the obelisk is on a side that’s facing the general area where the puzzle will be found.
@username: it just takes one boat ride to find out though. And on the boat map it’s the only part of the island that doesn’t have a land connection but does have a boat stop, and the closest thing you find to an access to the tree houses from the island has a drawbridge that shows every sign of being activated from the other side.