I’d been looking forward to this enough that today I watched some people on PS4 streaming this, which was mostly fine. It did underscore that, as much as I love watching people play games, The Witness is particularly bad for that purpose because most of the game happens in the head of the player; all I an do is silently insist on the correct course of action they’ve overlooked, or worse, have things I haven’t figured out yet spoiled for me. Can’t really wait to play this myself tonight!
I’ve started playing it, went in blind, and I think I’ve gotten to the Big Thing (if there’s some even bigger realization I don’t know how I’ll survive it). It’s so marvelous I could cry. Blow’s reached out to me through the screen and taken apart my mind so I could see the glory of Creation. And the best thing is, now the floodgates have opened it’s happening again and again.
Don’t let anyone spoil if for you because if you get to it by yourself it’s incomparable.
oh boy. I’m an hour out from starting myself.
this game looks really really really really good
god i don’t want to spend $40 on this right now help
I thought it was good of them to leave the canadian PSN price at $40 because everything else is spiking with the current exchange rate, I spent like $90 on the “complete edition” of xcom 2
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That’s not really fair to Shane Carruth
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I do not know or care who Jonathan Blow is besides that he made Braid, which i thought was great. And this looks rad to me. i’m such a sucker for Mystlike pretty puzzle wandering games.
This is probably the genre best suited for audio diary exposition?
about 90 minutes and 80 panels solved. I like it. I’m not sure I like it more than the sum of its parts – lots of little logic puzzles and nice world geometry – but I like it.
every so often it’ll feel like it’s straining to be anything other than a formal class in game design in terms of how the puzzles “scale up”
The puzzles are not just linearly scaled via difficulty and rules etc – wait for them to more closely integrate the environment and perception. the specularity panels are a hint at what is to come.
I did a big chunk of the swamp area just now. I also got to an early chunk of “implicit narrative” by which J means quotations.
I like the sequential folding panels and how they challenge your inferences. I was concerned that my poor spatial reasoning would make this game too difficult but it looks like large sections are about analytical grouping rules. J seems to be stressing the “rules” here. I also keep finding panels seemingly disconnected on the ground with an equilateral triangle near the starting node. I think they are connected.
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got a blue red pink yellow puzzle in the greenhouse that appears unsolvable, not sure what I’m missing
Would the controls be suitable for remote play on a Vita?
Yeah, so far I’m finding it exactly the sum of its parts, but I think most of the parts are very good.
There are some sort of unpolished parts, though. Why is the run button different from the go fast button in puzzles? And the penalty for messing up some of the puzzles feels inelegant. Surely there’s another way to discourage guessing?
A couple puzzles feel like needless exercises in mapping/writing things down; I would like a sort of in-game notpad/graph paper for that kind of stuff.
It borrows a lot from Myst, but I mean that mostly in a good way I think.
Some of the early puzzles are pretty formal, as you said. I have seen some glimmers that the game might escape that (not sure if you’ve played the tiny temple area yet).
At minimum, I think how deeply the game explores its concepts is fairly interesting, even if it is a bit academic.
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It’s an annoying cliche to say “that’s a parody, right?” but - that’s a parody, right? Like a review Jon Blow would write of someone else’s game that was exactly like his.
had to use my phone to take pictures of stuff just now to get a puzzle solution because I couldn’t figure out how to view PS4 screenshots in-game but I have two beacons lit so that’s OK
got a few neat environment puzzles so far too. wouldn’t say my overall impression has changed and I’ll probably get frustrated when I start running out of easy ones but this is fun.
curiously I’m not finding it very mystlike because of how self-contained most of the interactive elements are. I’m terrible at myst yet pretty good at this and I always figured that was because myst requires more patience (and is less stringently “fair”)
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Sort of! I’ve found like two or three instances of puzzles that have informed/affected/answered puzzles in other areas already.
Although, yes, it is unlike Myst in that all the interactive elements are obviously interactable. It does seem that some of the puzzles require careful observation of the world, and I think that’s fairly similar in a way.
Some of that, too, is me projecting a bit. There are a lot of ways this game could end up.
Edit: One thing I think is an improvement on Myst is how open the game is. You could quite easily get stuck on the critical path for Myst, and not have any other way forward. It seems like there are a lot of areas open at the beginning of this game. When I get stuck somewhere, I just walk a bit and find more puzzles to bang my head against.
Oh, wow, just played a bit of this swamp area. I totally get what you mean now by “challenging your inferences”. Each example adds a new wrinkle to the rules of the puzzles that you couldn’t intuit from the previous ones. It’s really satisfying and neat!