f13.net

So what is up with this game? I've watched a number of videos and also some of the hidden stuff, and it seems boring as fuck with random bullshit masquerading as indirect storytelling.

Make trace puzzles in different ways, whee. I hate most puzzle games anyway.

I didn't care for Braid, and I never really had a thing for Myst/Riven puzzlers.  I'll wait for this to go cheaper.

Anyhow, there's a number of people saying that if FPS can give you motion sickness, this one's a pretty bad offender. I still haven't beaten Half Life 2 because of this.

Apparently the combination of the FOV and head bob is really bad for some people.

Played 2 hours on PS4 last night. Love it.

This game is certainly not for everyone. I think color-blind people should stay away. Some puzzles require to recognize red, orange, green. Also a small subset of puzzles (that I encountered so far) require good hearing. I've got tinnitus, so I have difficulties with those. But they seem to be optional. I'm not 100% sure since I've only solved 300 of reportedly 700 puzzles.

It has its moments. Sometimes it feels that everything has meaning. Even the peculiar art style has a reason. There is no explanation, no help, no text, everything is conveyed via small icons, symbols, arrangements.

Not for the easily frustrated. Most of the time I feel like the solution is just quite there but not there. If you can step away and sleep over it then do that.

Noticed no head bobbing.

Colorblind people can play it. Kotacku created a primer to help them with that. People who are getting motion sickness can try to adjust the settings in their PC files but are out of luck if playing on the PS4 until Blow delivers a patch.

It's people who are deaf who are screwed the most when playing this game.


Anyway I have none of those problems. I've played for 15 hours and finished over 100 challenges so far but it's not giving me a constant high like so many others are getting. I definitely feel accomplished when solving the more demanding puzzles but the time it takes doesn't make the reward worth it so far.

What I do like is how it's an open world puzzle game. It's very refreshing over other puzzle games that have linear progression. The best part is that the puzzles inform you on the design of the island and the island itself informs you on how to solve the puzzles. It's a very sophisticated blend of level (well actually world but the regions are levels onto themselves) design with the gameplay.

This game suffers from the same general problem most puzzle games do. The puzzles were designed by someone who already knew the solutions. This means that the amount of and type of hints placed in the game are generally too few and too obtuse as they have been placed by people that already know too much and have already bought into the 'obviousness' of the solutions.

It also oozes a very uncomfortable 'hey look just how much smarter I am than you' sort of vibe that is really grating

The game is also incredibly boring because it's exclusively that sort of puzzles (600 of them) you see at the start with almost no story or anything really to break up the monotony.

It's basically like those "1001 puzzles, crosswords and sudoku" books you find at the airport or at train stations except as a game. There will be people who like that a lot and the island itself is visually very good.

I was thoroughly bored after about 80 puzzles and two hours of tracing lines in mazes of varying diffculty though.

This is one of the reasons why it's great that it is in open world format. The clues are there but you have to explore and take advantage of your surroundings. In addition, when a puzzle is too hard youo can skip it midway through and go somewhere else. Trust me when I say you will find the clues you are looking for while playing a couple of other puzzles in different areas.

This game is a big step up from linear puzzle sequences where the devs think they gave you enough clues but didn't. This game does provide the clues but makes sure you move around the map to get them.

It's hard to elaborate on this point because ultimately such an argument always gets reduced to a question of intelligence i.e are you smart enough for the game or are the puzzles simply too hard. So you're ultimately pushed into a situation where you first have to prove that you are smart enough before you can criticize the game design of a puzzler.

Yes the game is open world-ish and you can always switch to a different puzzle when you get stuck and yes the game sometimes teaches you concepts with an entirely different set of puzzles that you then need to integrate and adapt. That's technically a step up from Myst or asimilar games. It also works reasonably well for the first third of the game.

It still doesn't really touch on my main point though. To be able to solve a puzzle you need to understand the context and also what the puzzle requires of you to solve it. Both the puzzle and the steps to solve it have been created by a person that already knows how that puzzle should be solved and what steps you need to take in order to solve it. That person is privy to important information you are not - namely the solution - and most of the time the puzzle is actually designed to fit a certain solution or underlying concept. So the solution drives the puzzle design and what kind of hints the game should give you to solve it. There is naturally a disconnect between the designer, who knows the solutions and how the puzzles interact with each other, and the player who has no prior information about how the whole underlying puzzle mechanics work and need to be solved.

So it always comes down to how the game communicates its underyling concepts to a player that has no prior knowledge. This is hard. The witness also almost exclusively teaches you a concept by making you solve puzzles of increasing complexity and difficulty. So an easy version of a puzzle teaches you a concept and the increasing difficulty of subsequent iterations teaches you how to apply it to a problem domain. Then they add another concept or two into the mix you haven't seen before. Until you encounter another set of puzzles that teaches you that abstract concept and how to apply it to that problem domain. Then you can hopefully abstract it and integrate it into other puzzles. The other way the game communicates hints and concepts is by means of environmental storytelling

For this to work though you have to first find that set of puzzles that teaches you a concept you haven't seen before or find that certain item of environmental storytelling that gives you the key clue. Which is hard because the island is relatively big and full of nooks and crannies that entire areas can get lost in. Reviewers can and have missed entire areas. It also breaks down as the puzzles get more complex. It works pretty well for the first set of maybe 80 - 100 puzzles where the underlying concepts are reasonably clear and abstract and the principle on how to 'fuse' those concepts is relatively simple. It breaks down more and more the deeper you go down into the game as the puzzles get more complex and intricate and the game is twisting and turning the concepts more and more on its head.

So you end up scouring the island and running back and forth multiple times in order to look for an area where a new set of puzzles might teach you a trick you didn't know or to catch that piece of environmental story telling you missed the first ten times you searched the island. Since the game design limits the ways the game can tell you information it gets harder and harder for the game to give you the information you need if all communication pathways it has are either 'teach by giving you a puzzle' or 'teach by giving you an environmental hint'. The concepts at some point get to complex for that. This is on top of the general problem that this information is disseminated by a designer that already knows how the solutions work and therefore has already been blinded to shortcomings of how the game tells you things because once you know the solution the solution becomes 'obvious'.

A great puzzle game should give you the hints to solve its riddles from the perspective of someone who doesn't know the answers. Which is almost impossible to do. It also shouldn't assume that every player has the same "mindset" the developer/designer has including the same cultural canon and context. Some of the puzzles might prove to be harder if you are not a western audience for example.

In that respect it is exactly like Riven or Myst except that you have more puzzles to get stuck on and eventually abandon for another. While the game smugly judges you for it.

Another issue I have is that the game offers no way for you to collect hints. There's no scrapbook, no easy way to look up solved puzzles for a concept you can't remember, to doodle or write down notes or to take pictures. At some point you have an assortment of scraps of paper, a notebook and pictures taken with your smartphone camera next to your game iin order for you to keep track of all the bits and pieces of information you need to solve the current puzzle.

Some of the puzzles are also impossible to complete for people with vision or hearing impairments which is something no major game release should suffer from in 2016.

Wow. Tell us how you really feel. Look, that is a lot of words. I'm going to reply with this:

1) I'm not going to read any of those words.
2) I don't know anything about anything leading up to this game other than I enjoy the handmade hero videos and the blog posts talking about challenges faced on this game.
3) This is a puzzle game - I am doing puzzles. It's fun.

It's really true what they say about satisfied customers don't write reviews. I'm going to take it a step further and say that satisfied customers don't even read reviews.

It's possible that Jeff isn't intelligent enough for this game.





 :why_so_serious:

Always a possibility  :grin:

According to the dev 99% of all players are not intelligent enough for the game though.

Sales must not be good since the dev is complaining about piracy already (that's so noughts).

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2016-01-29-the-witness-is-being-heavily-pirated

Personally, there's two things that make this game a no deal even without playing. One, it's fucking puzzles for their own sake, gods no. Two, it's a first person game with super restricted movement and invisible walls everywhere.

fake edit: I think why journos like this so much is because they get no satisfaction solving problems during their workday.

$40 is too steep for me on this game. If it were priced at $20, I would have bought it without a question. But for now it's in my wishlist until it drops. I'm also holding off because this has serious potential to be a free PSN+ game in the next few months; dropping $40 on something I might get for free soon would make me feel salty.

Where did you get that impression? Blow's stated goal was to create a gaming language so to speak. As you progress in the game you are supposed to be taught how to string together a bunch of concepts to unravel deeper ones. From what he has said in the past he was interested in giving an experience of discovery and learning unmatched in gaming. He wasn't interested in intentionally laughing at your failed efforts.


Now you touch on one of the problems I really agree with. This game is worse than MUD's of yore because they weren't built in a 3D world but this game game demands a lot of note taking even though it tries to make the gameplay intuitive.

After 8 years they definitely had a few play testers starting fresh who had to be forced to do this out of game. They should've made in game tools.


I personally have only did a little over 100 puzzles as of this moment. I feel with every new revelation he has made some missteps but those mistakes count for 3% of the puzzles so far. I think the overall design is very solid and I'll definitely comeback to this thread if I'm more inclined to agree with you that he didn't avoid this design trap in the future.


That said you sort of been touching on a point that is inherent problem with the design decisions behind this game. Quite a few puzzles were designed for the sake of teaching you how to do other puzzles. Blow has made quite a few challenging puzzles that aren't really fun to do and the sense of accomplishment can be muted when the solution fits a halfway measure instead of a hard rule.For example, there's ambiguity in  how the Tetris puzzles work. The Tetris puzzles defy the conceit of all the other symbols used in the game so far which have solidly fixed rules.


Where did you encounter invisible barriers? That most likely is a bug. I had the same problem a couple of times and fixed it by restarting the game.

Since I haven't played, it's just second hand experiences. Bugs might have played a part, but in any case it's one of those games where you can't jump off ledges and the "movement space" is narrower than the modeled environment. Totally kills any sense of exploration for me.

Ok in that case you're right. You can't jump off ledges. I don't see it as a big deal but you may feel differently once playing it.

Can I ask why? I see lots of players saying this, and leaving aside the PSN sale possibility, there's no question that in terms of money spent on its budget, and game length, it needs to be priced at a premium price. I mean, heck, its budget is in the ballpark of what UO cost to develop.

(FWIW, what I have heard from Jon is that it is doing just fine in the marketplace).

Jon tweeted about a PC test you can try out if you get motion sickness btw.

I can't answer for Hawkbit, but to me personally it looks like an indie game, and those typically go for ~$20.  The gameplay I've seen (which is just what's in the the trailer) is just very basic puzzle game stuff that plenty of cheaper games are pulling off.  I appreciate that there's a really expensive world you can wander around in between puzzles, but that doesn't make the game fun, and in terms of gameplay it doesn't seem that interesting.  Maybe I'm misreading the game, but if there's more to it then it's not presented on the store page.  The trailer makes it look like a generic maze game like a million others you can find on Newgrounds, the screenshots don't look like they have anything to do with the gameplay, and the description is completely useless (standard "you wake up without your memory and have to discover the secrets of the island, find out the answer to the mystery in this game" bullshit that every first person horror game also uses).

People don't care about budget, they care about apparent budget.

Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is $20 and has as much or more money on the screen. Without someone telling us there's no reason to believe that The Witness cost a lot more to make.

"Money on the screen." So, confirmed, graphics > gameplay. :) I loved Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, but it had zero game systems in it.

(I knew that, from a marketing POV, of course, silly to argue against it. It just speaks to exactly why veteran gamers complain about games these days).

Kail, the puzzle play is far from basic. It's both brutal and innovative. Not for everyone, for sure. But for example, "the screenshots don't look like they have anything to do with the gameplay" is outright incorrect, but I don't want to say more because spoilers.

Jon just tweeted "The Witness is on track to sell more in a week than Braid sold in its first year" so it does seem to be successful.

Because Jonathan Blow is a prick?

This is a weird point to make given how much the graphics of the Witness are a selling point. I suppose it has more gameplay than Everybody's, but it's still very light on gameplay systems. I mean...it has one gameplay system as opposed to zero.

It's definitely not any sort of example of complex deep systems but maybe iffy graphics.

Because "it's just a [insert game mechanic here] game" and that's enough for a lot of people to comment on price regardless of how much effort it took to make the game.

As if those people would have bought it for half the price anyway.

From Jonathan Blow himself. According to multiple interviews and his own Twitter feed "there will be puzzles 99% of all the Wittness players won't be able to complete".

He might as well have said that he is smarter than the people buying his games.

For me personally, is I haven't totally figured out if there's a big story you are unlocking (like Myst) as part of the exploration and puzzle solving, or if you are just puzzle solving for puzzle solving sake.  It also concerns me from the little bit I've read in reviews about how well everything flows together outside the puzzles.  Also the idea that I have to have a pen and paper to keep notes instead of in game is a massive turnoff. 

All in all, there are a lot of unknowns about the gameplay that haven't been satisfied by reading reviews, and with so many other games I can choose from I don't feel like paying $40 to try it out.  $20 is a lot more at the "sure why not" amount.

I have a soft budget of $100/month for all media. It's easier to throw $20 into the wind to see if I like a game or not; $40 is too much on an unproven title or dev. Sometimes it works out and I get Rebel Galaxy for $20; other times we spend blindly and get the release iteration of Diablo 3 for $60. Essentially, this purchase is a risk I'm not ready to take yet.

As a game consumer, I don't consider development time and expense during the purchase process. I consider the game, the game's fun potential and the cost.

As a counterpoint to my own logic, I'm certain I paid full price for the thematically similar Myst back in the mid-90s. It may be the problem isn't the price or perceived value; maybe it's the fact that there's so many other options competing for my time and money. I'm not sure. I know only that a quick assessment put this in a "wait until cheaper" or "wait until there's a month with no other releases" bucket.

As an additional counterpoint, I will almost certainly drop $60 on No Man's Sky in June. So it really isn't that $40 is too much on an unproven dev. The core of the problem is that I'm not sold. Nobody has proven to me that this is worth my $40 yet.

I picked this up because a friend was enthusing about it.  I'm maybe 50-75 puzzles in and haven't had too much trouble sorting them out, have had some fun "aha" moments, and am enjoying seeing how far the "build a set of puzzles around a common but evolving design language" thing goes.

I definitely fall into the "hello motion sickness" category, unfortunately.  I feel like the fact that it's struggling to maintain framerate on my 12GB, 3.5GHz quadcore machine with a GTX670 is a contributing factor -- it's a pretty looking island, but it doesn't seem that it should thrash the CPU and GPU as much as it does.  The graphics settings are very coarse so turning them down rapidly degrades the visual quality.  Bummer.

I do find the invisible walls (mainly around tiny unclimbable ledges, etc) to be a bit annoying.  I get that he doesn't want players to wander too freely, as the various puzzles lead to various other puzzles, but movement does feel a bit constrained at times.

If you opt into the "future" beta on Steam, it has some changes that may help.

I tried that and it seems a bit better, but I've started hitting some trickier stuff that seems to want more hiking around to look at things which balances that out.  For now it remains a game that I will not be playing in long sessions.

If people are talking about the game being great, I'd personally say $20 isn't unreasonable to gamble even if it's not precisely my thing.  There are puzzle games I enjoy even though I'm not a huge puzzle game fanatic.  But $40 is a pretty big risk to me, and nobody has really said anything about what makes this game stand out from the competition, so I'm not really tempted at this point.

It's amusing to me that after years of "Blow is a mad genius, the most dangerous man in games, turning game design upside down" hagiographies he made a puzzle game with invisible walls, audio logs, etc. So radical!

Wish you guys could see how people in the industry are talking about it. "Masterpiece" is the most frequent word. Near universal admiration. Maybe that's because we're the target demo, I dunno. :)

Why, exactly?

This game is almost universally praised by devs and reviewers/journalists and you can feel the disconnect for lack of a better word between the praise it gets from insiders and how the general public reacts to it. I watched a video review recently that consisted of a short 5 minute presentation of the first tutorial area and 25 minutes of walking around the island to 'not spoil the experience'.

This turned what should have been a review into a creepy sales pitch as two reviewers talked about the awesomeness of the game they had played for 40 hours while showing you literally nothing of how the game develops further on.

Spoiler obsession is making communication about this game fail. It's ridiculous. The game has nothing rightfully spoilable apart from secret locations.

This is especially bad with reviewers, who start sounding like snake oilsmen.

1. Puzzles are my thing.
2. I love this game.
3. It was worth the money to me.

I really can't stand it when people say "people in the industry" when they mean "my buddies in the industry." It's like when Rami says he knows "every indie developer" when he actually knows less than 1% of them.

The Witness takes zero motor skills, hand eye coordination or ability of any kind, it makes you feel smart and accomplished while playing, it has some philosophical mumbo-jumbo bullshit 'story' bits, etc. Yes, it is basically designed to appeal to a certain segment of the industry. The segment that would have a nervous breakdown if thrown into a MOBA.


As you say, there really isn't that much to spoil.

I suspect a lot of critics don't want to say that "it's a really good puzzle game" because that comes off like "it's JUST a really good puzzle game." So instead they pretend like there are vast spoilery secrets. Spoiler: you do a bunch of puzzles, then you do a bunch more, and that's the game.

Funny enough I also play league of legends.

Wait what? How do you get that implication from that quote? Since the process of making puzzles is highly different than the process of solving puzzles there is no intelligence comparison that can be made between the maker and solver, nor does that quote make him sound like he was trying to.

Put it another way, you might as well have just said, "That Jonathan Blow, he thinks he's so smart!" *sniff*

This game just sounds like it appeals to a certain gamer demographic, and that is just fine. But games like that are always going to pick up bad reviews from people who maybe *thought* they were in that demographic, or who think "fun" is some universal standard that must the be same across all activities, (as in, the game is a failure if it does not have something for everyone).

If actual puzzle gamers are buying this in quantity enough to make a profit, then success!

Based on everything I've read and heard here, I'd really need a demo for this.  Even $5 is too much to pay for something that'll potentially make me yack or be unplayable due to my colorblindness.  I miss demos.

Or: I'm not really a puzzle gamer.  I'd never had bought Portal if it was a stand alone, but I did like that enough to buy Portal 2 at launch. 


Yikes.  This is possibly the snootiest thing you've ever said here. 

It's a video game version of oscar-bait which means critics will cream themselves over it but it can still be good, which I think it is.  This is more the revenant than it is concussion.

It isn't just a puzzle game it's an exploration game. I will rarely call this game fun but it is deep. It's easily one of the best designed open world games. If you like examining game mechanics this game is sort of for you. If you like exploring a tightly tuned world this game is definitely for you. If you like open world gameplay then The Witness can be a revelation on how much better they could be. Too bad for the Witness it came out after the Witcher but that's Blow's team's fault for taking 8 years.

From this thread I'm 100% sure I wouldn't play this game if they installed it onto my steam while I slept for free and it had steam trading cards.

"all the industry insiders love it"

Is that ever said about a legitimately fun to play game? Its always indie wankery, zero gameplay substance having, "clever systems" game, clever systems being code for unfun shit.

"People in the industry" doesn't mean "all people in the industry" or even "a majority of people in the industry." And yes, people who make games for a living *do* tend to have somewhat different tastes. It's not snooty, it's actually quite often a handicap. It's a desperation for stuff that's fresh, most of the time. Yes, cleverness, yes sometimes wankery. On the other hand, devs buzzed about Guitar Hero when gamers were skeptical of a dedicated peripheral, and about Journey, and about plenty of other stuff that had pretty great popular resonance.

FWIW, the admiration I see in my circles tends to be around the smoothness of how the puzzle language unfolds, the level design around them, and the way in which changes are rung on it all, all the way up to how


It's not universal praise, for sure. Those who dislike it tend to cite the controls (movement speed and turn rate), the disabling of prior panels when you screw up, the fact that it is, in the end, a series of puzzles, and the fairly diffuse nature of the story... not much different from what you guys are saying. And ofc, everyone cimplains about the motion sickness thing.

Oh yeah Raph, I totally get what you are saying. Whenever movie insiders are ultra pumped about some movie (that is often somehow about or an allegory for making movies) its almost never actually an enjoyable watch.

I bet if I ever listened to anything theater people said it'd be even worse.

I'm not blaming you or them for liking what they like, just pointing out that this game seems to prove that point pretty well. Touche on the Guitar Hero thing if that's how it went. There is def fun to be had there.

Journey... is basically exactly what I'm talking about.

I'm not really sure what is that novel about cleverly presented puzzles. Are the puzzles themselves amazing? I find that hard to believe, given human being love puzzles and have been making them for thousands of years. Is it the expression?

Ultimately I'm not going to by this because it sounds like an aesthetic or craft appreciation as much as anything else. I'm not paying $40 for that. I don't care how much it cost to make, or how clever it might seem to someone in the industry; if it doesn't all come through in my experience of the game I'm not interested. I'm not a journo or academic or professional, I don't have money for industry novelty, my gaming money is for games I like to play.

(I do own a few board games that would fit into this area, but I find the design and craft of boardgames interesting, as it's something I have dabbled in).

If there is something genuinely special about this game, for those playing it, it's not being communicated in a way that is getting through. It just sounds like hipster noise, with a price-tag to match.

Eisenmann is a brilliant Architect, as is Ghery. All our buildings should look like the DAAP extension and the MIT Stata Building who were complex, engaging and took things in brilliant new directions, challenging modern ideas of building and design. If you don't believe that their value far exceeded the minor quibbles about usability and maintenance, then you clearly aren't cultured enough to get it.

Sometimes a thing that is appreciated by the industry is also garbage to the rest of the world because it fails to meet base requirements. It's the nature of "Ivory Tower" defenses to dismiss such criticisms because the industry in question DESPERATELY wants something new.

Being aware of the criticisms and shortcomings of something while also acknowledging them doesn't diminish the final product or its breakthroughs. It helps by letting people know you're not going to make the same mistakes if you cite the as an inspiration AND lets users know, "Yeah, this was a problem but it's not why <object> was great."

Throwing up lame defenses like, "But it cost so much!" Bush league and invites criticisms like, "Well <x> company did far more in <y> with less cash and fewer resources. Guess you suck at your job."

If you like puzzle exploration games, you'll like this.  If you don't, you won't.  Might be worth $20 to you not $40 but you'll like this game.

Light spoilers I guess:


It's also worth pointing out that Blow has a weird cult of personality around him, and that certainly plays into the praise, at least in some circles. He has a reputation and so people look to validate it by finding good stuff in his games.

Look at a guy like Jason Rohrer. He had a reputation for making great games, he kept putting out crap, and people kept trying to claim that his crap was gold. No matter how simple, inane, or just poorly crafted his games were (for fuck's sake a recent one is just a shitty online checkers-type-thing with betting!) people would write breathless pieces about how he was some sort of crazy interesting hippy genius.

People only woke up to the fact that his game are crap after he made 3 or 4 crap ones in a row, and made a bunch of weird sexist statements and turned out to be a retrograde caveman rather than an enlightened hippy.

Now Blow's games are much better than Rohrers, but the same principle applies. To some degree you can say the same about Molyneux. People had to pretend that clicking on cubes was interesting, simply because he was involved.

In general video game people, meaning both press and devs /academics, are terrible at critical evaluation in the moment. You have to wait a minimum of 6 months for honest evaluations.

I like good puzzles. I'm not sure what a "puzzle exploration" is as a genre though.

I don't really care how tweely the puzzles are presented if they're ultimately not interesting puzzles. There are plenty of very interesting puzzles you can tackle for free; if you want me to pay $40 for them you need more than "with hollywood voice recording".

If ultimately you're just providing puzzles you're asking for a lot of money for the bells and whistles at $40 ($55 AUD, given the current exchange rate). Meanwhile I paid ~AUD$55 for XCOM2.

I think thati's a misinformed take on Jason Rohrer. Disclaimer: I know him.

Passage was revolutionary in its time. Sleep is Death was a fairly fun two-player storytelling experiment. The "online-checkers-type-thing," Cordial Minuet, is a surprisingly deep head to head game that was probably sunk by its ties to real money. And the "weird statements" were political controversy over his game The Castle Doctrine and the very real backstory behind it (see http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/197707/The_strange_sad_anxiety_of_Jason_Rohrers_The_Castle_Doctrine.php).

You're not helping yourself - or The Witness - here Raph.

I don't think it's really contestable that there is a weird cult of personality around Blow, given pieces like this: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/the-most-dangerous-gamer/308928/ . And the fact that so much writing about his games is as much or more about him than the games themselves. Even criticisms of his games often read more like personal criticism and invective than criticism of the work.

I'll leave the Rohrer stuff because he's your pal, beyond pointing out that when you say I'm misinformed what you mean is that you disagree.

I think it's very fair to say that video game hot takes are often way off for a variety of reasons, and that people proclaiming "masterpiece" on Twitter two days after release is not particularly meaningful. The same can be said in other mediums, though games do seem particularly vulnerable to hype and expectations. In general I'm very skeptical of instant reaction culture, which is often much more about the person doing the reacting than the work itself.

As far as the game itself, I think it's one of those "if you think you'll like it you'll like it" games. Which sounds tautological but really isn't.

A masterpiece is a masterpiece if it has stood the test of time i.e if it has managed to stay relevant, is still able to inspire and if it is still part of the 'cultural consciousness' decades or even centuries after it was made.

Industry insiders are not the best judges of lasting cultural impact or even quality. This has probably always been the case but thanks to the fact that we can archive media we can now go back and check what has made the most buzz around its release and during awards seasons and what people today still remember and talk about. There's also a difference between something that is very very well crafted and conceptualized and what is palatable. Ulysses is objectively a very well written and crafted book where an author implemented a few very high brow concepts in a very well crafted way. I can appreciate the effort in executing that concepts well on an abstract level but I have never heard of anyone ever that considers it his or her favorite book.

Sometimes its just 'art for the sake of art' which I can appreciate (as an amateur musician my musical tastes are as weird) and I think appeals to 'industry insiders' often tasked with the equivalent of writing copy for advertising campaigns but this game has been yet another example of a game that is almost feverishly praised by developers and writers yet seems to fail to connect with the general audience. The ones who buy games and don't get it via review codes.

We've had quite a few games this last two or three years where this has been the case and this concerns me a lot. For one because it shows that the creators and curators are more and more getting out of touch with their audience. Secondly because it perpetuates the supid idea that great art is inscrutable and can only be appreciated by the initiated when the opposite is the case. Great art connects with all people.

That's because nobody has worse taste than people in the industry.

Nobody.

What about people who post on on the official forum for a MMO?

I thought it was proven those aren't people but rather semi-sentient blobs of rendered chicken fat.

I'd have to dig up the article on Gamasutra or Insert Credit or Jezebel.

Jeff you make some horrible arguments. Many people like Ulysses and it is a classic.

I definitely recommend you get this on a steam sale.  I personally wouldn't call this a $40 game, $20 easily but even saying that I don't feel like I wasted my money.  When I say puzzle exploration I mean the environment is a heavy part or the puzzles themselves.  Without giving too much away which angle you stand at or what is around you can directly influence how something is solved.

I never said anything different. I agree, Ulysses is a classic. I never met anyone who said it was his or her favorite book though.

How many people have you met and asked what their favourite book is? Your experience isn't really a meaningful point. Moreover it's somewhat contrary to the argument you seem to be trying to argue about The Witness.

https://medium.com/@JoeKllr/misunderstanding-489fd4ff3b6a#.tvd8gchbx

I don't 100% agree, either with this or the linked "Lulu Blue" piece (not capitalizing things isn't edgy, it's just annoying! And the digression about reactionary politics is just daft), but I would say that this is more right than wrong.

I would also point out that these are also as much about Blow as they are the game itself. It's very hard to separate talk of his games from talk of him and people's personal opinion of him.

It's not hard to not talk about him if you're not in the gaming media echo chamber, but then, those who aren't in there don't really care to talk about it in a way that attracts attention.

Reminds me that I recently got linked to PCGAMER's 50 most important games of all time, which was mildly interesting and subject to the usual issues people have with these kinds of lists, up until it obviously got to the part in the timeline when the bright sparks somehow thought it would be clever to add in titles like Spelunky ("as being one of the first games to establish Roguelikes as a thing") and Broken Age ("Changed the way games could be financed in a flash, and over the next several years gave fans a more detailed look at the process and challenges of game development than ever before").

Most of these people talking publicly about such things like they matter are just idiot kids, or industry vets/groupies with no perspective.

Also Raph, Budget wise: UO was over 18 years ago. Budgets aren't relevant to consumer experience anyhow, but even if they're an interesting analytical point, inflation is a thing (or did it cost that much?).

Edit: Can anyone actually link some of the interesting bits in The Witness? My youtubing so far has just shown people labouring over simple stuff.

tl;dr generalized fairly polite rant.

"...when the same game is propounding that this search for patterns and rules is more noble, more honest, more truthful than self expression, my eyebows end up wandering to the top of my skull. Jonathan Blow may mean no harm, but the ideology his games are steeped in is far from harmless."

Bleah. Talk about a cultural gap here. It is one that led to all the "what's a game" crap a while back, it's one that fed into the GG mess, and one that continues to divide things, and it's a stupid gap. All the arguments over whether objective truth is more harmful or less truthful than subjectivity, or assertions that self expression is noble... it's all basically good old Two Cultures writ small. That paragraph could be inverted in its assertions and hopefully our collective eyebrows would still climb.

Not to bring up Rohrer again (not "a pal" by the way -- we've traded some emails and met twice) -- but this same sort of political over-layering is what turned discussion of Castle Doctrine into a debate on gun control, animal cruelty, and patriarchy (and for that matter, just to go in the other direction, turned discussion of Gone Home into a referendum on gameness, systemic depth, and the supposed insider industry bias towards specific sorts of stories).

On the one hand, it's nice that discussions like that can even exist around games, regardless of which side you come down on. Gives academics and critics a niche, improves leigitmacy and defensibility of the medium to the wider world, etc. On the other hand, it's also a game in which to score points, in a lot of ways, and we need to be careful not to take it too seriously.

Koller's piece is indies eating their own; not that long ago, Jon was an exemplar of the indie world, and he's still an active supporter of it to this day, both from a financial point of view as a member of Indiefund, but also as someone who has been helping "indie" happen for over a decade. But today a lot of the younger indies are fighting The Man, and Jon is now The Man.

Similar essays like Daphne's (someone I ALSO know -- the essay is linked at the bottom of Lulu Blue's) elide the fact that perhaps Witness is personal expression for Jon to the same degree that the games of self expression, like, say Anna Anthropy's Ohmygod Are You Alright, are grappling with "patterns and rules" on a different level. It's all the same thing.

Jon rubs a lot of people wrong. He's opinionated, blunt, almost Manichaean in how he talks about issues. But so's Schild ("nobody has worse taste than people in the industry"). People just have different tolerances for that depending on where they sit and whether or not the black and white take validates their existing worldview.

I don't know whether The Witness is an *important* game. What's novel about well-presented puzzles is simply "craftsmanship." That's what gets jaded devs excited: seeing something that hasn't been done, seeing something hard to do done well. Not just fun -- how the fun was made. It's why devs often get as excited over a Prune or a Guild of Dungeoneering as over a Witcher 3. Given how much players complain about buggy choppy or incomplete gameplay or lack of innovation, I think players by and large share the same value. Put another way, the fact that many of you don't see The Witness as remarkable *is* what's remarkable; to a lot of devs, it looks like a triple somersault with a half twist and perfect 10s, and you're commenting on the lack of a splash.

That doesn't mean it's for you, in the sense that it is to your taste. Tastes vary. Denigrating the aesthetic that admires the craft in Journey or the way it pulled off multiplayer engagement by reducing communication channels, or the effective narrative it provided without using text, or the surprising emotional resonance it achieved, is just being snobbish in a different way.

My original question was around the perception of VALUE, and not even because of this game per se. (lamaros asked about inflation -- in today's dollars, UO would be in the $10-12m range). Budgets are ABSOLUTELY relevant to consumer experience. Sadly, they're strongly DETERMINATIVE of it. Fun costs money, because it costs iteration time. Experience costs money, because art costs money. And frankly, marketing costs money, and a huge part of whether you ever get to have the fun is driven by the marketing because fun games vanish without a trace every day because they don't have marketing budgets.

The equation is simple: a game of a given scope must have a certain price point or engage in specific business practices, or it won't exist. There is no arguing with this cold logic. Further, the market as a whole is experiencing strong downwards pricing pressure, and the idea that a game that cost this much money cannot price at a point where it can recoup is actively dangerous to games. Put another way: if you don't think that games like this can or should price at this price point, you probably won't be happy at $20 when the average price is $10, or at $3 when it's 99 cents. We have seen it happen in other markets. It'll happen with PC too.

And then you won't get games like The Witness. Or really, any games that aren't either massive AAA blockbusters or tiny mobile games with exploitative business models.

As far as top games lists... most best games lists voted on players seem to always only have games from the last five years in them. That PC Gamer list was pretty good. Spelunky was indeed important, in terms of the effect it had within the industry. Broken Age as a game wasn't what mattered, it WAS its funding method, which has completely reshaped the games development landscape for good or ill. And the list was also crap because it didn't have M.U.L.E. on it. :)

It's not "no perspective." It's "a different perspective," and different perspectives are good.

Well crafted != fun and the corollary is also true fun != well crafted.

If you want to talk about the craft behind the witness I'm all for it. Don't simply assume though that what an insider thinks is interesting or well made is also appealing to a layperson or is indeed any indication of overall quality. I like Stockhausen's work and I can appreciate a lot of stuff from the prog rock era. I can also break down to you just how intricately composed and well crafted the oieces are and just how much thought went into some of those high concept albums. I also know that it has limited appeal outside of the realm of amateur or professional musicians.

Also Schild is not operating in any sort of official capacity and he's also not responsible for PR. Blow can communicate however he wants to if he's OK with it, he doesn't need you white knighting him. He also should be (and probably is) aware that it is a difference if you are a "normal guy" flapping his gums on a forum or if you are on a PR tour to drum up enthusiasm for your latest game you expect to sell for $40.

I also really utterly despise the deflective "it's not for you, man!" argument people always end up using when the discussion doesn't go their way. That's just patronizing and elitist snobbery.

[edit] an in that particular case it doesn't even seem to be true since it apparently sold quite well

Correct! I didn't argue to the contrary, though.


That's why I said I said maybe devs were the target demo. With a wink, to indicate that I was kinda joking.

Seriously -- I completely agree (and went thru my own prog rock phase). Look, my personal tastes in *playing* games is fairly populist, actually. I'm way way more likely to finish the last Tomb Raider game than The Witness. And I regularly make the point to artsy devs that "pop is hard."


Very true. On the other hand, controversy drives attention, and any attention is valuable and powerful. Knowing Jon, I don't think he's doing this as a persona for marketing purposes, but I do think that his actual persona is pretty effective at getting attention.


I agree it's often used in that way. But it can also mean "you are outside the target audience" (that's a real thing, after all) and it can also mean "we all like different things." That's why I explicitly said "in the sense that it isn't to your taste."

I have nothing against people wanting to read anything in to anything, life is political. That doesn't mean sometimes they'll read stuff that isn't interesting, or over-reach or project their own issues. All that is by the by and nothing to do with this game being 'good' or not.

What has The Witness does that is remarkable? Myst was an average game for me, but it did something much more remarkable for games than The Witness could ever do.

This is a genuine question. I've watched a few videos of the game and it looks pretty boring. So maybe I haven't seen the good bits. If that's the case someone point me at them.

I get that I'm not the target audience but that's not what I'm on about.

This game is a treatise on communication and 'language'. About the epistemiological limits of knowledge, about the limits of language, grammar and semantics and about how semantics are created by iterating on and layering abstract concepts in a way that lets people derive meaning from what is essentially meaningless. The whole "puzzle language" is an attempt to communicate ideas and concepts that get more and more complex and abstract as you internalize them and they are used ultimately to teach you something about the game world/the island.

According to Blow himself he spent eight years trying to come up with semantics and a sort of language and to hone the concept.

My arguement is not that it is a bad game or a game that I didn't like but that he ultimately failed in his attempt. For example he spent all of this time thinking about language and semantics and how you can derive concrete meaning from abstract concepts and yet it never occurred to him that people with auditive or visual impairments exist that might not be able to hear or see in the same way as him. How good can his attempt at meta-language construction ultimately be if he failed to take something so simple into account?

The game assumes alot about its target audience. Cultural canon, societal norms, how a culture communicates concepts. How people of that culture process them. How people explore the game's state space. How visual concepts are presented (The concept of a tree presented in the game for example is a computer science model of a tree).

That would be OK if it was just a puzzle game but it isn't it is a high concept exploration of a high concept idea that fails at basic level stuff because the developer is so far up his own ass that he doesn't even know that other people's failure to understand his concepts might not be an indication of their intelligence or lack thereof but an indication that the language and communcation principles he designed might not be as sound as he thinks.

The language is aspect is pretty fascinating to be honest, but not enough to make me learn the language of trace puzzles.

Reminded me of a piece of news I read about new study on the universal structure of language.
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/01/25/1520752113

The second main issue for me is that he never accounted for how people today play games. Which is almost more of a failure if you consider that he uses a game to present his concepts to his audience.

For example I failed pretty hard early on at the puzzles you need to listen to the ambient sounds to. I had headphones on at that time and I listened to some podcast. The game offers you no audio visual stimulation. There is almost no ambient sound, there is no in game music and there are only a few audio log style story tidbits. After ten or twenty hours or so the sense of loneliness and isolation due to the lack of ambience becomes rather off-putting and it also gets pretty boring if all you ever listen to are the artificial sounds of the puzzle machines.

I guess that most gamers today do something besides playing a game to make downtimes more bearable or to counteract the repetitiveness of a set of audiovisiual stimulations you've been exposed to for days on end. The soundtrack for video games has always been designed to not drive you insane even though you might have been hearing the same 20 second vignette over and over again. I guess that even the developers themselves or the game testers have headhones to listen to music or podcasts to counteract the repetitiveness of replaying game bits while iterating or testing. Since the game is never explcitely telling you anything about its 'grammar' and because it might take you ten or more hours to encounter those environmental puzzles you might not even realize that you have missed an important clue.

This sounds nitpicky but again if this was just a puzzle game I'd let it slide after all it is not a failure of the game that I listen to music while playing it. Someone who is ostensibly trying to make a high concept game about communication and reception should at least be aware of how people consume games though.

First, let me be clear that although I agree with what I linked more than not I have significant problems with them, in that they are weirdly both political and personal when they don't need to be. You could remove those parts and just leave the game critique parts - the fact that Blow was an ass on Twitter one time is meaningless and adds nothing, and the bit about reactionary politics is total nonsense. But at the same time praise of his games is also often needlessly personal and political as well. If you check metacritic and read the first review of the Witness 70% of it is about how Blow is a cool guy and says deep things over the phone, and 30% about the game. Interviews are prefaced with shit about how Blow is some zen master who fights the man in ways never elucidated. So the political bullshit cuts both ways.

I linked them mostly because they speak to (and against) the cult of personality, but are in some ways also largely about personality themselves.

Gone Home was praised largely due to the perceived progressive politics and subject matter. Similarly Rohrer's games have (or had) a perceived progressive bent, and his personal brand is tied up in him being a wacky progressive hippy. In that context it doesn't make sense to me to bemoan divisive political discussions that make these things look negative, while embracing the ones that make them look positive.

Some people claim that Gone Home is not a game for political reasons. But people also claim that it's "ludically" interesting when it clearly isn't, also for political reasons. For example Frank Lantz, who made that claim so that he could position himself as a good progressive in an argument. It's nearly impossible to talk about the actual game without political shit getting in the way. I could say "the main gameplay mechanic is picking up things and looking at them, which isn't at all interesting or novel" and the discussion would almost immediately become about how I'm a GamerGater who hates lesbians or some shit.

I would love for none of this political bullshit to exist and for people to just talk about the work. And that's not me saying "keep politics out of games" - games can be political, and we can discuss the politics of games, that's fine. What annoys me is the "everything is political" mantra people trot out to turn everything into a nasty political debate - politics in the worst sense of the word. (See again: Frank Lantz arguing with people over "ludocentrism", a debate that was rancorous, personal and political for no reason)

Buuuuuttttt....if we are going to praise games and creators for political or personal reasons then ripping them for those reasons is also on the table.

TL;DR - game criticism as a political battlefield is weak, but if you accept praise based on politics you have to accept condemnation as well.

On to a totally different topic:


This is kind of true but also a dramatic simplification. In movies there is the idea of putting the money on the screen, and some movies are much better at this than others. Obviously on the extremes a movie with a $250 million budget is going to look more ambitious and produced than a movie with a $10k budget, but there are $30 million dollar movies that are not just better than $100 million dollar movies but also look more expensive - they put every dollar on the screen.

The Witness does not put every dollar on the screen. The game took a long time to make in part because they made an engine from scratch. (Which has some performance issues!) As far as I can tell there was no reason to do that, just the common pride/ego thing and the "why bother spending a month learning someone else's engine when I can spend years writing my own!" That money is not on the screen.

The Witness has nice graphics and art. But it has very little interaction, systems, animations (especially non-rigid body animations), set pieces, cutscenes - the things that actually cost the money in AAA games.

I'm not saying the game isn't worth $40 or is overpriced. I'm just saying that it doesn't appear to have 2/3rd the money onscreen as a $60 title.

Personally I buy every game new and I buy the games I want to play, so to me value has very little to do with apparent budget or money onscreen. I mean, I'm buying Project X-Zone 2 - I don't give a shit what the budget or apparent budget was, I want to see pixel-art Kazuya and Jin beat someone up.

On a side note, look at a game like Transformers: Devastation. Re-uses a lot of assets, not much enemy or place variety. It's $50. $10 off a standard Platinum game. Legend of Korra, which was similar in scope, was $20. (Same developer and publisher)

Now some of that is just charging what people are willing to pay, and people will pay more for Transformers than for Korra I guess. But I do see a trend with games being say half the size of a AAA game and costing 10% less rather than 50% less.  As another example games like Evolve and Titanfall - dramatically smaller scope and apparent budget than huge AAA titles, same price.

So maybe the Witness is part of an emerging trend of reclaiming the $30-$50 price point.

Ultimately everyone has their own criteria for what a game is worth, so while it may make sense to survey people and get a feel for that to argue it is pointless.

The game has taken in $5m of revenue in the first week (http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/02/witness-40-experiment-worked-creator-reports-5-million-first-week-revenue/).

You need to take a step back on this train of thought for a moment. Human language doesn't account for people unable to perceive it as well. That's why we had to construct braille and sign language. Blow isn't flawed for making that mistake. You're making a well reasoned point but you are hanging your ideas on the wrong example.




Now here you get across your main concern better and I agree. I think the one that really assumes the most about the audience is the Tetris puzzles. It's a very popular game but not so popular that you could even expect more than a third of the world to have played it. There is a big logically leap required in figuring out that you need to look at these puzzles of a means of rearranging them on the board to fit all the other established rules. The Tetris puzzles offer a ton of variability that is nonexistent in the other rules you have to learn.

At the same time I would go one step further and say Tetris puzzles expose Blow's failure to construct a language. When you think about it the way we use language also involves expressing subjectivity which is why we use words like just, very, the, etc. Therefore language doesn't allow for the communication and interpretation in a binary format yet the answers in the Witness are explicitly binary when they shouldn't.

I don't think it's a fabricated persona either. I think he's a genuine arrogant piece of shit.

A few posts up it mentions the game has taken in $5M. Good for him. It's nice to have success when you don't deserve it.

The Witness is more or less exactly what I wanted it to be. High budget puzzle/exploration games are super rare because they've got such a niche audience (and negligible replay value)(and the gameplay doesn't screenshot well or make good videos), so I'll take what I can get. I'm obviously not alone.

Is it a perfect game? No. By far. The homebrew engine has all sorts of exasperating failure states. Also I'd rather have a whiff of story in the background than a fog of pretentious bullshit... and I think Blow is deliberately cruel to completionists.

Other than that? I'm thrilled. Seriously.

Buncha short replies:

Jeff, the fact that you can make your critique AT ALL is already a huge game design achievement, IMHO. Just look at what you wrote and compare it to the typical things we might say about a given game. If Blow's game pulled that line of thinking from you, that sort of reflectivity, that's already more than 99% of games do.

Hmm, that may also serve as an answer to lamaros. That said, a very consistent thread I have seen is that the game's specialness doesn't become apparent until you are fairly far in. It doesn't have a "James Bond opening," as we have become accustomed to.

Margalis: I have the feeling you & I could have a discussion on the political angle that maybe lots of people here don't have the insider knowledge for... you're clearly pretty up to date on the controversies and the players in them. But maybe we shouldn't do it in this thread if everyone else is just going to get confused... in any case, I actually use Gone Home's core mechanic as a game systems example using much the language you do -- it is absolutely tiny and arguably trivial, and even dissonant to the story (after all, the best way to know you saw everything is to pile every item on the patio). So yes, there are those saying what you are saying.

As far as whether Witness has the money on the screen... it runs at 60fps in 1080p which is a very high bar; the art direction strikes me as stunning and very difficult to pull off; and it has WAY more hours of gameplay than a typical AAA title. I suspect we're just looking at different things?

That said, there's no question that is it in fact an attempt at reclaming the price point...

I'm tempted to ask what Schild means by "deserve" but...

The first duty of games is to be fun.

To elaborate on that, games need to engage you, make you want to continue playing until you don't anymore (either through a deliberate completion of the story or through exceeding your pain threshold on increasing difficulty). It doesn't matter if they are walking simulators with a political message, MOBA's, shooters that are either hyper-realistic or extremely silly and stylized. Or if they are incredibly layered masterpieces of puzzle design.

If you're the kind of person who enjoys puzzles that just keep wrapping around on themselves and getting more and more elaborate until they erase the boundaries between 'puzzle building' and 'world building', The Witness is a fun game and genuinely advances game design. If you are the kind that hates puzzles and looks up spoilers to get past the cockblock Towers of Hanoi clone (which every second game seems to have) to open the next door and do some shooting again, The Witness has nothing for you.

And that's okay, either way. But too often, in their desire to see games that advance the art of design and their preferred styles be rewarded, advocates overlook their blatantly niche nature and imply that if you don't like what they like, there's something wrong with you. Throw in some real world political agendas, and this can escalate to genuine Holy War levels of screaming past each other.

--Dave

I don't buy games to be bored for hours before being inspired to write an essay. (I studied philosophy and literature for that... without the bored bit often enough to actually finish.)

That's fine and great and good for you. But some people do, just like some people make theorycrafting websites, or hang out on Internet forums with black backgrounds and write snarky posts about games.  :grin:

I'm still no clearer as to what the value of the game might be, unless we're just leaving it with this "it's interesting on an analytical level" stuff?

The primary appeal of the game is that you get stumped, then when you get over that you feel smart.

Personally solving puzzles for no reason other than the satisfaction of having solved them is tremendously boring to me. I need the puzzles to also have some interesting theme or aesthetic, or something interesting mechanically, or to be part of an interesting yarn, or something else.

That's not to say that I need XP or to get loot or to see a bar fill up or something - I don't need "gamification." (side note: fuck gamification and fuck everyone who blabs about it!) But solving puzzles by itself is just not appealing to me. I have enough "puzzles" to solve in my real life that I don't need the validation from solving them in video games.

My point is that I disagree that the philosophical ideas he ostensibly approached the game with work and are well thought through as seems to be the general consensus among developers. So if the high-concept approach doesn't work then the question remains if it is a reasonably enjoyable game.

I'd say it depends entirely on how much you like puzzle games

A video review that might stir the pot some more. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDxxwFLs0d8&feature=em-uploademail)

Ok, watching that review, I would be SO angry if I paid $40 for a game that had a bunch of puzzles that could have been self-contained on an iPad with a world crafted around it for no reason whatsoever.

Wow, that game is not worth $40. The graphics aren't good (worse than say Skyrim, or vanilla WoW even because they're so soulless), so he shouldn't have bothered. Something more like Professor Layton would have been much better than trying to remake Myst.

Yep, not my jam, and I could see the accessibility issues that I'd have with it from the video alone.

edit: wow, the reddit reception for this video was brutal.  Reddit loves it some Witness.

So essentially it's an IQ test, which they've cut up and pasted around a 3D 'island'. Except, mostly just still in 2D form. Why?

Why did this take so many years to make and cost so much money again? I like IQ tests, but you can buy these sorts of books cheaply or find them on the internet for free.

Also they're more varied than this seems to be?

Reddit, particularly the gamers, like to think they're way smarter than the average bear. When really, they're basically scraping the bottom of average - which is what happens when you're one of the most active sites on the internet.

Two things:

1: The Super Bunnyhop review is the first one I know that shows more than the first tutorial area. All other reviews I've seen only show you the first five minutes or only talk about the first five minutes and then tell you why this is a masterpiece you need to buy, trust us.

2. About 30 seconds into the video he says that "it's just - like - my opinion, man" and he repeats that phrase a few times. He knows that his opinion is contrary to the majority of reviews and the fandom hive mind and he has to constantly remind his viewers that this is just opinions expressed by him.

The comment sections on Reddit and below this video deal with that opinion in an intelligent and mature way - just kidding. It's mostly people frothing at the mouth and people who question his intelligence and claim that he only hates the game because he's retarded.

I agree with most of his points - especially the one about how bad the game is about communicating stuff that you need to know because it only uses puzzles.

I'm taking notes.  I must remember to anger reddit gamers when I deploy my channel.

His point on his comparisons to Portal and even Braid really sold the game as a do not buy for me.  I didn't realize that the whole entire game was walking around to do 2d line puzzles.  That seems much less innovative than I was expecting.

As I understand it, the big gimmick is that there are many ways to use a 3d environment to project a 2d trace puzzle board. Like, a tree growing from the middle of the board blocks the route, but if you look from a certain angle you can make it to the finish.

I agree with this. I don't go there for brilliant insight, I go there for the average sentiment of the place.


Anger or cuteness win the battle. Your son would do well for the next 3-5 years if you use him as your proxy voice.

That's pretty easy. Create a youtube channel and make videos where you play games. Pretty much anything related to games is sooner or later fraught with a bunch of pathologically angry subhumans throwing up their bile all over the comment section. The fact that you might not play the game "right" (meaning: exactly how the current meta prescribes it) or that you might have a different opinion elicits a seething and burning rage in some people usually only seen in genocidal maniacs.

Hmmm.

I'm still playing this on and off again. I'm now at the point where I encountered the 'meta-layer' of the game.
The Witness is also unironically advocating for Technocracy as the One True ReligionPhilosophy, which shows that Jonathan Blow not only doesn't know how language works and how semantics are derived from syntax, grammar and context but that he is also blissfully unaware of 20th century world history and why governing via science and technology might be a bad idea.

He unironically included short video snippets of speeches - unlockable via maze puzzles of course - by various science advocates. Speeches that border on evangelism. Also snippets that are clearly thirty years old or more (probably because they are public domain) full of people arguing for 'Science' and 'Rational Thinking' as the Solution to everything. I'm seriously expecting to find a clip from a dawkins speech next. He's clearly very much in love of the idea that Everything(TM) would be better if only humanity would listen to science and if people were more "science-literate". The whole "story" - that is if you can even call the different bits and pieces a story - is basically a manifest as to why humanity should embrace science and why we should listen to the 'experts' if we don't have the strength, willpower or intelligence to become experts ourselves. Interestingly enough the word 'Ethics' is never uttered even once.

I'd call that notion naive but naiveté is not really strong enough a word for that sort of utter ignorance.