Unfortunately I don’t recall clearly what confused me about that stop. It may simply be that every other location is reachable from the main island and I rarely used the boat, but it is likely that I’m pretty sure the boat path branches before that point and I just took the other branch.
Hmm, I wouldn’t have expected folks to get stuck in the mountain — I got stuck in some really silly places in my playthrough but not there. Especially if you finished the village which is an order of magnitude harder.
The mountain seems designed to allow steady progress because it’s careful not to use any mechanic you would’ve had to complete any one of the lasers to know. To me the only interesting and hard puzzles in there were the floor-based ones which are the only ones in there that don’t just repackage a basic rule with some glitch visual effects or whatever.
I’m guessing those floors are precisely the puzzles that gave you trouble, right? They are really satisfying when you do solve them though. And I think the second one took me something like a solid hour but I found it so compelling I didn’t stop playing until I had it licked.
This makes me feel like replaying the Witness. But without a mind-erasing machine, that’s in some sense never really possible.
I was just thinking of retaking this game just yesterday!
I’m stuck in one of the mountain puzzles. It’s one of the glitched out star and dot puzzles and I can’t see where I’m failing. My solution seems logical but the panel isn’t having it
Well, not stuck in the same way that I have found myself stuck in other places. The town puzzles are definitely the ones that I spent the most time trying to figure out. (I like that you can access them early on when their mechanics are entirely opaque.) And I did use hints in a guide in a few places there.
Specifically, I was attempting some of the puzzles on the walls that were too far away to see well, and I didn’t immediately think to try “re-drawing” the floor in a different way. When I did think of that, I decided to stop for the night anyway. I think I will be able to make progress the next time I try.
I’ve made some more progress in the final area, and I am impressed at the number and variety of the puzzles there.
I like the part where a puzzle is suspiciously easy, but then you have to solve that one and the next one with the same solution, and so on.
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I’m waiting until I get a new projector to finally do the challenge, I got stuck somewhere after 8 areas cleared
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Nice! That is like a commitment to attend a cult initiation ceremony
At this distance I mostly remember how extremely salty the Challenge made me after a few hours of failing. But you also beat Orphan of Kos so I’m sure you’ll carry it through
some say kosm
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In a way, aren’t all videogame masterpieces like fishbabies bursting screaming out of the skulls of their genius creators when their insight became just too strong
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I returned to this after like a year and now only have two or three (I think) lasers left.
It took me long enough, but I finally discovered what the black monoliths are about (thank you bamboo forest) and completed a few of the environmental puzzles and Wow, consider my brain fully bent.
I just love the shit out of this game. It’s so relaxing, and the feeling of discovery when you find a secret, or solve a panel after staring at it for two hours, is pretty unparalleled.
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I started playing through again because Jon Blow is an idiot who doesn’t understand metadata and thinks it’s impossible for cloud saves to go Mac ←→ PC (in case the Mac version gets a version bump w/o a corresponding PC bump).
It’s been long enough that I’ve forgotten the solutions for the hard puzzles so there’s some challenge + trying harder to get the obilisks.
The mountain is a trash fire. The floor puzzles are novel but tedious (the ground floor is fun at least), and I was pissed off by how unfair the difficulty ramping by glitching was since it’s not teaching you a new mechanic. One area could have been omitted from the island and the puzzles moved to the mountain… or a new mechanic could have been introduced. From a game-design perspective, it’s neat that the puzzles only use rules that you must have been exposed to; from a game-player POV they sucked because they weren’t any harder than puzzles I’d already solved (once I’d eliminated the glitching with screenshots/videos). Plus! They’re super inaccessible to anyone with some types of visual processing disabilities!
I get that the glitching in the environment and puzzles is suppose to elicit a feeling of breaking the construction of games-as-a-stimulative-experience, but that emotional shot missed pretty bad (just like all the quotes)
The Witness is overall super inaccessible to people with disabilities
The game is explicitly unfriendly to people with color blindness, people with hearing disabilities, people with visual processing disabilities, etc. All in ways more profoundly unfair than the rest of the Adventure Game genre.
The witness sucks and Jonathan Blows.
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The new mechanic is that all the puzzles there have some kind of out-of-maze constraint that makes them harder to solve.
Regarding accessibility, as a color blind player myself I have to mention the game’s a lot friendlier to color-blind people than most non-color-blind people seem to assume. But yeah, on the hearing disability side it’s hopeless. However, the game will only be unfriendly to that extent if you’re a completist. The game is built so that you can safely ignore entire areas if you’re not compatible with their particular mechanics and still reach the end. You only need all regions if you want to experience the real trauma-inducing part of the game that’s locked behind them.
Unrelated to that particular debate, if you’ve completely finished the game, here’s a spoileriffic presentation from Brian Moriarty about how his relationship to both The Witness and Braid is a bit different from every other player’s:
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I suppose it depends on the variety of color blindness, I know quite a few people that hit a wall with the first extensive section of color puzzles.
That feels like a theme; I can’t learn it like I did with the rules from the other puzzle types. If you gave me a new swamp-type puzzle, I could probably solve it with what I learned already. If you instead offered a new mountain-type puzzle, I’d know that it would be a fairly simple retread of a previous puzzle annoyingly altered to be harder to make out.
I was searching around the island for stuff and I found a secret developer vacation house. I put up some video. Do not watch this if you haven’t played the game. Unless you don’t care. I think this is really cool:
Summary
I know its long but thats how long it took to have a look through the whole thing. And something happens at the end too.
Nice! Most people play for much longer before they find that secret.
Yeah I just decided to really grind on looking for the circle/line motif
*i’ve also basically played all night, two nights in a row.