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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   2442 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 26, 2024

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The Witness did suffer from puzzle reuse though. Not that that’s a bad thing, there are obviously famous puzzle games (sudoku, tetris etc) that consist of scaling levels of the same core mechanic. But I think that’s different to the traditional adventure game format where there are many different types of puzzle.

I didn't feel like it did. The shrine and the forest both used "use the environment to find the shape of the answer", but I think that's the only case when two groups of puzzles were similar.

The shrine and bamboo forest use the environmental clues most heavily, but they're present in the Red Ship's door puzzle, a couple Town puzzles, and a decent number of the coastline ones.

But I think 2rafa is more commenting on the emphasis on 'maze'-style line-tracing puzzles, which aren't the only puzzle in The Witness, but they do make up an overwhelming majority of the content. There are a bunch of modifiers that get thrown in such that they mostly feel 'fresh' -- I'd argue that a few, like the hollow tetronimos and gamma symbols, are kinda underutilized -- but both panel-staring and even the most clever bit about panel-less point of view puzzles gets a little rough after the first few-dozen even if each has a gimmick. Completely discrete puzzles, or where the line-tracing is just a completion mechanic after you've done the heavily lifting, are a small minority of the puzzles, and most of them aren't great (most infamously, the Jungle sound puzzle).

Contrast Myst, where the only real underlying overlap in game mechanics was button pressing, lock-combination-solving, or use-x-on-y. That wasn't always a good thing, and I don't think there's a single Myst player that likes the sound tunnels section! Even the good puzzle mechanics seldom got time to breathe or develop. It does feel more varied, though, and you can tell Myst's background as an adventure game, in contrast to The Witness as a puzzle game.

On the gripping handle, while the line-tracing is never sudoko-level, I could see it as tetris-level; it is engaging for most of the play. And it is critical for the whole meta-plot's core concept that it be everywhere in the Island.

I will make a separate complaint that The Witness's story also just not that compelling. No matter how bad the Myst series got, the basic concept of linking books and creating ages and rifts in unstable ages is cool, and leaves a lot to be said both within the Myst narrative and without it. There's a reason things like MystCraft exist.

The Witness tries to do some interesting stuff with Themes, and there's a lot of interesting questions raised in universe, but they're ultimately not anything relevant to the setting or its story. Indeed, the 'true' ending does little but (falsely!) present the skills and pattern recognition that the player has gained as pointless. It may just be that's not what Blow set out to do, but it still feels disappointing for how atmospheric the game is.

and I don't think there's a single Myst player that likes the sound tunnels section!

I guess that's the puzzle that made me rage quit yesterday. Were the tunnel animations skippable in the original game?

I don't think so. The animations were a little shorter, but not enough to make it less annoying. I don't know whether it's the worst puzzle in the series -- some of the solo version of Uru was outright broken as a result of its weird development history -- but it's easily the least fun part of Myst proper.

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