I know that the "secret ending" sends much of this stuff up, that it's meant to be a kind of commentary on pretension. I got to the ending area of the game, after dozens of hours of making terrible charts and cutout cardboard tetronimoes and literally making a crappy paper crosshair in the middle of the screen, because playing it without that gave me a massive, splitting headache.Ībove: the saddest and most dramatic statues in The Witness, (a video I edited earlier in the year) The entire last section of the game was a whole world of painful bullshit with this, with puzzle boards that are obscured in some way. But there's no intuitive way to actually map the colors, even once you've done the "harder" work of coming to that trick. Different colored lights affected the puzzle board on each floor, and you need to bring an elevator up to the roof. Much worse were puzzles that I figured out the trick, enjoyed that process immensely, and then knocked my head against actually implementing the solution. At living branches that were upright against the light. Nowhere else in that area did it indicate that you need to look on the floor-it spent the whole area teaching you to look at the trees. I spent hours of my life in that section. There's one puzzle in the Monastery-which has you making patterns on the circuit boards based on the shapes of tree branches around you-that requires you to look at the floor for a part of the branch that fell. Related, from Waypoint: For performances that affected us in far better ways than those statues, check out our Drama Club writeup, featuring voice actors from some of 2016's best narrative games. I never lit that goddamned beacon, despite hours of tweaking my viewpoint. The pleasure of finding angles in the early part of the desert led to a final room that I could not, for the fucking life of me, find the perfect angle on. "This is good design!" I jabbered, "showing the player that elements in the environment like this are important and constructed!"įor every happy moment of revelation, there were twenty of banging my head against solutions that didn't feel intuitive at all. "The angle matters!" When I figured out that the sounds-high, low, middle-coming from the speakers in the jungle were the key to the puzzles, I got so excited that I immediately held a little chat session for my game design class, showing them how that puzzle was implemented. The first time I moved just so and figured out that the desert puzzles left a distinct impression on the panels, I was overjoyed. You did it.Īnd there is so much about the puzzle design to love. When you tease out the methods and logic-better, when you start to find secrets in its gorgeous landscapes-you ride a high that's akin, at least for me, to beating a Dark Souls boss, or nailing a fantastic lap time on the track. And when The Witness is at its best, that learning process is wonderfully satisfying. The Witness feels like learning math in some ways, and grammar in others. There's a great deal to like about it, and even more to admire: It's a precise, fiendishly difficult (in places) puzzle game that requires the player up to learn a language-no, nine languages-to solve its puzzles.
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