Good work! I’m super envious; this work schedule of mine limits me to about two hours of play a day. I am guessing that the glitchy path is one necessary to illuminate a symbol on an obelisk, solved while on a boat?
How much time have you put in so far?
I find this game super peaceful and almost meditative; I’ve got 5 hours in and 160ish puzzles done.
I don’t even know how you check how many puzzles you’ve done
so yeah I’ve played this a bit, at any rate. I like how you can just leave a puzzle to go somewhere else. my attention span for a single spatial puzzle in front of my face is pretty low, and I would rate myself as Bad at this kind of shit, so that’s appreciated.
but no, I don’t think a game where you walk into signs that say DO PUZZLE HERE can be as good as Riven. presumably it comes together a bit, as this thread has hinted at, but it’s still too clinical in the moment to moment. I need to see how the island develops as an actual construct. there’s an optional string of puzzles at the beginning that felt fun to find, but the end result is just a door opening that doesn’t seem to do anything and an einstein audio log. zzzz.
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Press “load game” and your save file will be named with how many puzzles you’ve completed.
I know how the tetris pieces work now!
though I’m stuck on the third in a string of four of them…
at like 119/3hrs, by the way.
Oof yeah, those Tetris puzzles get rather tricky, especially when they add the empty blocks. I had to walk away from that area and tackle some other types of puzzles to clear my head a bit.
It feels like they take a lot of spacial reasoning to do them in your head, and graph paper isn’t terribly helpful either because of how dynamic they can be.
I really like how they introduce you to the different facets of them through example and counter-example. There were multiple times when I thought the initial state was impossible, and I had to rework the rules of them in my head to cover that case as well.
I like this part where every time you fail a puzzle you have to redo the previous puzzle in order to repower the one you failed
(I don’t like this part)
wait I did it I shot a laser
but there are puzzles that I can only assume are optional around here that seem more interesting than the ones I did
Yeah same here, I even got stuck for a few minutes on some of the early, extremely simple Tetris ones, completely stumped as to what I could be missing. It turns out I had mislearned an incorrect rule from the earlier panel, and I was unable to conceive of the true rule (which is pretty damn strange really). I like how the complicated puzzles in that area have you perform elaborate mental gymnastics to finally produce a simple-looking, also non-sequitur looking line.
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hmm, the bonus puzzles in this area appear to do nothing when you complete them. rip.
Oh, I don’t want to derail actual game discussion at this point, but it honestly just seems like he’s tackling a laundry list of pet peeves. Some solutions are really cool, IMO, and some are just kind of the same thing with a syntax that is slightly different because the original annoyed him.
I followed j blow on twitter for the first time in years prior to the release of this game and I just had to unfollow him because all the discussion of asinine win32 bugs people are reporting for his game, all of which he is taking at stony-faced value, was making me insane
being too good for middleware is really a mug’s game, but if that’s what drives the creation of something like the witness, so be it
anyway, I think I too may be misunderstanding a Tetris block rule, because the puzzle I’m on (third one overlooking the ledge, with the single dot on the middle block) doesn’t seem solvable based on what I know.
dammit I just solved that puzzle with my eyes closed in bed and had to get up to confirm the solution
this is already the second time this has happened to me in less than two days of playing this game
jonathan blow, you monster
anyway I really am curious what the final analysis is going to be like in terms of the game being too formal/academic/incremental/fair/clinical relative to something like riven. Unless something changes substantially, that seems like the primary critical juncture this game has to face. it is definitely quite playable though.
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Intentionally Wrong> I’ve sacrificed quite a few hours of sleep to get to that point and work would probably be happier if I hadn’t.
Regarding your question: It’s not a boat puzzle, but it is an obelisk puzzle that’s kinda similar in concept, with the same caveat that when you fail it there’s a delay before you can try it again. Out of the two boat puzzles I can’t solve I’m now sure I need to manipulate something else to make one possible and the other one actually isn’t a boat puzzle
Gate88> about 15 hours.
geist> I do not summon the name of Riven in vain. Also opening doors has more uses than it seems. Also also: not all puzzles depower when you fail, only the “teaching” puzzles do: it’s specifically there to discourage you from just guessing the answer to them by brute force.
Though now one of my headscratchers sure looks like depowering a specific puzzle would help. Alas, it’s not one of those puzzles. I am kinda scared this may be a Braid Star case and that restarting from scratch will be the only way to get that one. Time will tell.
Someone spoil the most basic tetromino rule for me, because I’m at that five-panel set outside that one building in the village that just has a single T-shaped block (and little black “go here” hexagons at every intersection), which I assume is the simplest version of the puzzle, and I can’t figure it out for the life of me.
My wife neither. Having two pairs of eyes and brains on this thing is so much more efficient, and so much more pleasant.
you gotta go into the swamp to get the tetromino tutorial. it’s good. I think it was one of the last main areas I found though, the entrance is kind of tucked away.
Yeah, we’re not gonna spoil tetromino rules for you, it’s one of the more satisfying rules to learn in the ingame way. The swamp tutorial starts with much simpler versions than the one you’re referring to.
OK, that’s good to know. I certainly haven’t explored everything yet, but I just assumed it didn’t get any simpler than that.
Yeah, in general any time you see a new symbol or new type of puzzle you don’t understand, there’s a tutorial area for it somewhere else on the island. That doors in the village (and a lot of other doors in in game) are sort of a knowledge check; you won’t be able to solve the puzzles behind them if you don’t understand the puzzle on the door.
I’m not sure if this dynamic changes late in the game, but everything I’ve seen so far works like that.