The Witness

http://store.steampowered.com/app/210970/

Loving this so far. A pscychedlic-colored Myst with fun puzzles n shit

there's some talk about it on, uh, the ilb gravity's rainbow thread

obviously

lol

too much riffraff on this board

in that thread i said

this with its openly puzzle-like puzzles seems a lil more 7th guest than riven (riven is the peak of disguised, environmentally integrated puzzles in graphic adventure games imo, at least before the current revival i'm pretty ignorant of) though obv without all the camp.

but have since heard that there is lots of stuff that is more macro than the literal puzzles

http://i.imgur.com/wfQ3f59.png

even though i'd read a bunch about this game i still thought this thread was gonna be a communal playthrough of the infocom mystery

that sounds fun, let's do that

me & this game are in a fight right now at least until i can get through this fucking swamp

From the review I read I got the impression that a) the puzzles all involve drawing lines; ii) there are maybe 400 of them. Is that not going to get a bit tedious?

not so far

but i'm only an hour or two in

stoked to fuck with this when i am a bit more awake, i bought it at 5pm but it wasn't done downloading til 2am and i was wicked unequipped to do simple brain teasers

From the review I read I got the impression that a) the puzzles all involve drawing lines; ii) there are maybe 400 of them. Is that not going to get a bit tedious?

the same basic mechanic is present throughout, but additional knots in the usual logic appear frequently and require additional thought. also just the way that you perceive the world around you seems to come into play in solving the puzzles. trying not to spoil here but it is a lot deeper than it appears at first blush. also just the mystery of the environment (nothing is explained) is my current motivation. sometimes you find strange things that are out of context and all you want is to make sense of them

played this for a couple hours last night and it seems pretty great, the puzzles themselves aren't that hard but the many ways in which you have to infer the rules to solve them is, it's kinda hard to explain without spoilering

& there's also a great 'holy shit' moment you'll have as the player at some point

i like 2 puzzle

yeah this is still great though there's one area that's a bit too myst-like in a bad way imo

apparently you only need to complete 7 of the 10 (?) areas to get to the endgame, trying to decide now whether i want to keep working on the last 3 or move on

there's also multiple axes of Secret Stuff i haven't investigated fully too, seems like a game that will take 5x as long to 100% as to just win

interesting. think i am at maybe 5 of x areas. still no clue what is going on in this game insofar as a story/explanation goes

oh me neither, i don't think you're supposed to know

u guys are going to make me buy this now aren't you

started playing this with my gf, just barely started (it says we did 47 panels) but really good so far.

We miss you Brad Dourif

man i totally forgot that i was playing braid

thiiiis gaaaaaaaaame

jordan, how do you know how many panels you've completed? when i start the game it just puts me back in the world, and it doesn't appear to keep stats anywhere?

Austin mentioned during a recent Giant Beastcast that he didn't want to call the game "pretentious," b/c that would let it off the hook. I haven't tried it yet.

xp if you pause and do 'load game' you can see the number of panels on your most recent save (it autosaves frequently)

i'm in the endgame area and it's got more of a portal vibe suddenly

also i don't really see what's so 'pretentious' about this game, i think people are projecting jonathan blow's personality onto his game. it's just a dope puzzle game with pretty environments and nifty secrets

yeah, i'm guessing it was his interviews, mentioning pynchon and all that. but yeah, any traces of it aren't in the game.

also, man i am the worst at this game.

since this game is just walking and puzzles i wish the walking part were more fun--jumping or falling or even just being faster (the run doesn't cut it) would go a long way for my enjoyment here.

i know the programmatic instruction blah blah is what ppl are excited about i kinda feel like this might as well be a puzzle collection on my phone? idk not really feeling it but i didn't like braid either. but i do like myst.

and i know a more accessible/interactive environment would detract from the puzzling but i don't care. the way the avatar moves makes me feel like i'm in some shovelware fps for the ps2.

like 40% of the puzzles in the game use the environment i dont think it would be nearly as interesting as a phone game

maybe even 50%+ actually

yeah i am enjoying it more this morning. not as much as i enjoyed the talos principle, which is a similar and far superior game.

i 'beat the game' tonight but i've only done about half the puzzles, gotta go looking for the secret areas now

Some of the environmental patterns have an annoying demands for standing in the precise square centimeter that seems not to make it worth it. the reward isn't there for the pains being taken.

Firewatch came out today, and I'm curious how it'll be to alternate playing that with this. Both games involve exploring a painterly environment and not focused around action, but one foregrounds the human element & connection, and the other removes any trace of it it could.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16ONNcwoFSw

this game is amazing. it helps that my gf is really into it (more than me, almost!) so we've been tackling everything together. the puzzles based on the sounds of the jungle were particularly fun, although i guess that's just freshest in my mind since it was the last thing we worked on. i can't imagine anything topping it on my coint & plick ballot next year.

i mean, tarkovsky is in here. this game is everything.

Firewatch is a great little game (semi-game?). One of those that stays with you long after completion

i think the witness is in my top 5 games of all time

~380 puzzles in

and it's doing the thing where real life is morphing into the witness, both visually and aurally

i guess i should pony up huh.
firewatch too?

PC or PS4 for those two?

i've only played it on PS4, so i don't know which is better.

i thought it would start to get old after 20 or so hours, but somehow it's only gotten better. i guess this is probably a 60-80 hour game, depending on how much of a genius you are? (i kind of want to prank someone by casually mentioning that the witness typically take 8-10 hours to complete). i guess the total time estimate depends on whether you're aiming to get an ending (which i haven't done yet, sort of on purpose) or COMPLETE complete it.

also i never did figure out the crazy tree in the bamboo forest, but the sound there is just amazing, especially when you're spending 10+ minutes searching through every inch of it

i haven't done the ship area yet, its a side quest i guess since it wasn't necessary to beat the game or enter the challenge area

and yeah the 'perspective puzzles' are a side quest too but some of them get kind of insane in the level of environment detail necessary to make them work

there's also a ton of other neat perspective and shadow stuff hidden all over the game that doesn't count for anything but is cool to find e.g. http://i.imgur.com/Z8tazxj.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/sHzr1YV.png

Definitely. It sounds crazy that he spent 7 years on this but as you walk around you can sense the investment

alright i'm downloading now. i thought the whole point with this goddamn system was that you could play while it downloaded the rest of the game in the background? not how this seems to work.

I think the game files have to be set up in a certain way for that to work, less likely for an indie game

yeah wow, this completely held me for three hours.
i like how the tutorial helps you feel like you're super smart and you're gonna breeze right through this game and then the laser turns on and it's like oh hi entire island and puzzles i have no idea how to read. No more brute forcing and so much to explore. I went to bed with a massive headache though.

glad you're into it so far!

the degree of difficulty just jumped so precipitously.

we reached the ending (an ending? i haven't read too many spoilery things so i'm not sure if there's a better one if you complete everything) last night. :) now it's on to finding all the secret shit :) :) :)

so, the obelisks - has anyone here completely filled one in? i'm SO close on one of them, i'm only missing one little environmental path, but i can't find it anywhere. i just want to complete one obelisk so i can see what happens. i'm guessing it opens up something in the area beneath the windmill?

Have any of you also played the Talos Principle? How would you rate the two?

i saw you mentioned in it the whatchu playing thread, so i'm going to check it out soon!

i never finished an obelisk

I'm sure I'll come back to this game at some point and go for the 100% finish

oh man, after taking a couple weeks off we're back in, and we've FINALLY figured out how to unlock the secret area near the videos. currently waiting it out. i can see how this forced waiting would piss some people off but i will never forget it, and that's something.

There was a certain amusement when James Burke popped up. It was akin to already having the record before one of its songs shows up in a Tarantino or We'd Anderson flick

yeah, i was just watching his portion again, realizing there were puzzles related to it. this game, sheesh.

also, xpost to self, it did NOT unlock the secret area. FUCK!

i'm trying to figure out whether have to 100% the remaining portion of the game in order to unlock the windmill stuff, or if you can do it earlier.

What, they hid puzzles in the video?

*grimly nods*

At least I think it was in the Burke video. If that one is nothing but a closeup shot of him, though, it was in one of the others. I am an unreliable witness.

This is such a great game to introduce to non-gamers. in certain situations it can get them to reconsider the value of videogames in general. I'm watching that process right now and it's so powerful!

unsubstantiated theory: if somehow the witness replaced the oregon trail as the standard apple II game back in the day we would be colonizing galaxy 20AF23 right now

This is such a pleasant game. I wasn't much into the aesthetic of Braid, but the environmental design and ambience in The Witness are perfect. Exploring beautiful buildings and gardens in an eerie dreamworld is obviously what games were made for.

https://dustmop.itch.io/the-witnes

that was fun!

a little confusing, though - where is the full version? i'd be willing to shell out a few bucks for it but all i can find is the link to the demo.

it's freeware; i think that's it.

http://time.com/4355763/the-witness-jonathan-blow-interview/

damn, after some time off of Witness i got back into it because a few friends of mine got into it heavily, and i finally got the alternate ending (which is way better and trippier than the obvious one). there's no way to talk about the secret/hidden stuff without spoilering but it puts all of the sound clips/videos that you find throughout the game in a different context.

i know there was some backlash but the witness is still a top 5 all time game to me

interesting, watching this video with someone playing the game with Jonathan Blow (http://www.giantbomb.com/videos/we-play-the-witness-with-jonathan-blow/2300-10990/), and he says near the beginning that he designed the game with the intent to make the "secret stuff equal in magnitude and important to the non-secret stuff", and that "the secret stuff was the whole point".

i bought talos principle last night. i can partly understand the comparisons to the witness - the talos principle features another world where you're totally alone and you occasionally pieces of information and audio logs that help to provide some sort of backstory. but for the most part they're completely different games and i'm massively disappointed in it so far. the open world itself is much bigger than the witness, and is also filled with many pointless objects and wastes of space. where you can proceed through the witness in a million different ways, and even skip to the end pretty early on (in fact from what i've seen and heard, i would say that the majority of witness players never got to the "real" part of the game), the talos principle is very linear. i'm guessing you don't have have to complete all the puzzles in order to get to the end, but the first sections of the game are labeled "1", "2", 3", etc, then "A", "B", "C", then a giant tower that God Voice tells me not to approach but that i obviously must approach.

i'll keep going because it was $49 and i was forced to buy the expansion pack, but if the fucking narrator calls me 'my child' with Old Testament God Voice one more time i'm gonna freak out.

This is the War and Peace of puzzle games. Sure you could argue it's somewhat repetitious but hey so are 90% of puzzle games. Anyone who plays sudoko or does a crossword every day shouldn't have a problem with that. Plus there's so much variety and ingenuity within the basic mechanic. Plus the incredible environment, plus all the secret stuff. Unbelievable. Exemplary.

I've been breezing through pretty quickly, maybe too quickly, but I think I'm whittling it down to a core set of real head-scratchers that should keep me stumped for a while, one hedge maze in particular has me totally perplexed (no clues!). And I think there's a whole bunch of secret stuff I've yet to uncover.

I guessed at the baffling hedge maze and got it right, and now I feel worse! It's ok though because there's still another baffling one to go.

the hedge one tripped me up for quite a while too

but my nightmare was the treehouse village thing

which turned out to be not difficult at all for my wife, luckily

That didn't trip me up too much although I've already forgotten which mechanism it was, lol. Love that I'm still finding brand new things on the island after all the time I've spent there - just come across a spooky bamboo grove.

the one with the shepard tone? that is a magical place

I noticed the spooky music but didn't spot it was a shephard tone! Too busy looking for puzzles, will have to head back there.

one thing that's nice about the long tail of the witness is you end up revisiting every part of the island several times trying to figure out shit anyway

(well, i guess that's nice if you like the island, which i do. if i had to live on a videogame desert island it would be witness version)

Good thread idea, which videogame would you live in. (Expanded beyond desert islands since I can't think of too many others. Or any.)

research material: Best Level from Super Mario 64 and favorite place to hang out in Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

btw i wish i hadn't read that KM post about the talos principle because i agree completely and now fear i should buy the witness

Got the first endgame with one laser to go, panicked a bit when I thought I was going to have to start from scratch.

This is an incredible game but I'm very happy I'll never have to solve some of those puzzles again.

https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2014-09/8/9/enhanced/webdr08/enhanced-buzz-21645-1410182243-23.jpg

The part of the game that never ends :)

What did folk make of the challenge area then? At first I thought it was a huge lol, turning what had been a leisurely no pressure pursuit into a frantic race against time, making you feel like a puppet on a string jerking frenetically around to the music, and like a prize chump for going along with it. Then I got frustrated and angry at how hard it was, then all of a sudden I got lucky and breezed it (plus I slightly unintentionally cheated and found out the clue to the maze room). I think it was a good idea but ultimately too reliant on luck, the pillars and not one but two 'pick one out of three' in particular tipping it over into fucking bastard territory.

Had the same experience of butting my head against it and then beating it out of nowhere. Think it's cool thing to have in there and introducing a random element, which the rest of the game is so dead set against is neat. The best puzzles in the game made me feel smart though and beating the challenge just made me glad I wouldn't have to keep trying.

This couldn't be ported to PS3? Doesn't seem too incredibly graphically intensive? Played a bit at a friend's, only did a few puzzles but was very enjoyable. I may actually re-download steam after five years when I decided my computer would only be for work related stuff (which really just meant I play rubbish flash games or android phone games) for this.

Can I recommend people have a look at this?

https://severedheads.bandcamp.com/album/snowglobe-for-pc
https://severedheads.bandcamp.com/album/snowglobe-for-mac

Mac port arrived today