If there’s one thing I can appreciate about modern metroids it’s that most of them understand that avatar-strength gating is ground too worn, and they’re experimenting with different forms of gating (because let’s be real that’s probably the single most identified characteristic of the genre).
Dark Souls was a zeldaroid–just kidding, but gimme a blood potion if you had an aneurysm reading that.
But yeah like, The Witness and stuff, where gates only exist in your yet limited understanding of the mechanics. That’s neat.
I’m seeing some Donkey Kong Jr throwbacks too. Nice looking game. I love how the animations speak a language about the inhabitants and their environment.
Almost like some kind of interactive urban wild-life documentary.
This is, like, every single adventure game ever made. Riven and the Rhem series especially are known for this kind of gating-based-on-player-understanding
(I’m salty about the Witness compared to most folks because I think a few types of puzzles are extremely uncreative and dreadful to play through and learn, just exercises in tedium, and it kind of sours the whole experience for me. If you’re going to throw 500 puzzles at me, every single one of them better be excellent or I’ll just think that you couldn’t figure out what to cut)
I can’t speak from personal experience, but I have listened to people who enjoyed it whose opinions I also didn’t hate listening to. So, grain of salt!
My understanding is that, as opposed to some adventure games (I’m not very experienced with that genre either), where puzzles may be frequently unique and require you to either use specific clues/items you’ve gathered from earlier, or otherwise work from square one on each new puzzle, that the situation with The Witness was that the puzzles were, while repetitive, incrementally developing to be more and more complex. In a LucasArts or a Myst, you’d have to come at each new puzzle fresh, but with The Witness you have the potential to sequence break purely through revelation itself. By progressing incrementally, the game moves forward like having a conversation, instead of putting pens in pineapples.
I hope that makes sense and doesn’t sound too pretentious? Again, grain of salt, I haven’t had the opportunity to play it myself. Also, Blow is a fuckhead.
No, it operates on a different level. In adventure games the gating is on the knowledge of specific puzzles, while in The Witness the gating is on general mechanics, so instead of being applicable in a single situation the things you learn in the Witness are applicable generally. A much closer analogue would be Toki Tori 2.
A representative contrast would be the way you can finish Myst close to beginning it versus its equivalent in The Witness. In Myst it’s triggered by setting all marker switches except for the dock’s, which is impossible to infer from other puzzles, you have to be outright told about it. In the Witness the path to exiting the island must instead be inferred from the existence of the obelisk puzzles, which themselves have some mechanics that can be inferred to make them easier (using the obelisks to locate the general puzzle locations and directions) and also are “taught” to you in general principles communicated by the regular puzzles (they’ll burn that circle and line pattern into your mind and tech you to boserve your environment in new ways) and the island’s predilection for optical illusions. Then depending on your path you’ll either go through a reset based through the elevator or, having understood the idea of depowering puzzles, will figure out how to close the sun gate. In all that the only puzzle-specific clue is the sun door combination you get from the underground corridors, and it’s optional. Mechanics vs puzzles.
So in the Witness you’re really being taught general puzzle mechanics, a puzzle grammar of sorts, through successive examples, like a videogame version of the close encounters of the third kind’s mothership or, really, the way jumping is progressively taught through examples in Mario. At the most basic level, it’s illustrated in the way many puzzles have multiple valid solutions, and you can redo them at will. It’s not so much interested in your solving the puzzle as it is in you understanding the accompanying mechanic (and then it can deploy its bag of tricks related to how it’ll gate you using puzzles that deliberately only can teach you an actually incomplete version of a given mechanic).
The closest to this that you encounter in Myst is the sound cues in the subway which you have to infer from the rotating fortress, but even that only applies to a single puzzle.
I don’t really agree. Each puzzle mechanic is pretty much independent from every other puzzle mechanic (except that they are combined in the village and the final area, but this is roughly comparable to how the final puzzle is set up in Riven, combining everything you’ve learned about the world in order to solve the final puzzle). Solving the sound puzzles isn’t going to help you solve the color puzzles in The Witness, etc. If you treat each category of puzzle mechanic as a puzzle in itself broken up into many steps, they are (aside from being slightly reused in the small number of puzzle screens in the town) totally independent from each other and no one area is dependent on any other area.
FWIW I would have cut sound puzzles out of the game entirely but I have a special loathing for those types. They’re not hard, they just have no mechanics to learn. I feel similarly about the rocketship in Myst and any other time a puzzle depends on recognizing pitch: It’s not a puzzle.
“Wander through a vast cylindrical world, unveil its governing laws, trigger climatic forces and affect the world on a massive scale to bring life back to Havre.”
