Abandon all hope, ye who listen to this podcast: Ben (Trelliz) takes Karl and Pete (Pedz) on a journey through a Hell of bad indie games. What do they find there? And will they make it to Paradise?
Ad7 wrote:Just got to the bit about the witness and my chest hurts because I'm so wound up.
I'll post my thoughts on that at lunch time.
Trelliz must have one serious fedora.
Are you saying you want to....debate me?
[Tipping intensifies]
But seriously; i just didn't like it at all, it wasn't for me. If i had struggled through it to get to THAT ending i would have flipped my strawberry floating lid.
The bit he mentions and thinks is an ending isn't an ending, it's the (admitadly pretentious) payoff to a puzzle and only counts as a puzzle solution. There are two actual endings, one of which is locked behind something so difficult that I've not done it yet and I spent over 70 hours playing.
I will gladly admit my ignorance - i only played it for a couple of hours before dropping it because i fundamentally disliked the core mechanic of solving line puzzles; i don't care for abstract puzzle games at the best of times. I skipped through a video playthrough jonathan blow did with giant bomb, with that bit as the end of the video. Feel free to come on the podcast and exonerate it, i don't claim sole interpretive authority on the game.
It's such a shame you dropped it when you did and felt the need to watch a video on it. Imagine if I did that with the talos principle (which coincidentally I'm playing on and off at the moment). Oh it's just connecting a load of lines up and putting boxes on switches, and the terminals are just pretentious story that's up it's own arse. See, it's the same thing..
The witness starts out by making you do some maze drawing puzzles which start very simple and build to harder versions, but they're still just maze puzzles. I thought it was alright but didn't see what the fuss was about. Playing a bit more introduced some obstacles on the puzzles, where your immediate surroundings would give hints until later areas of the game where the puzzles stop being the solution and more of a tool to express the solution of what's around you. You get ones linked together, ones that solving will give a eureka moment to.something you thought you'd actually completed earlier (some have multiple ways yo solve with different outcomes and only.by learning later on can you mentally see there's a different way to do it).
But the absolute greatest part of the game for me, and this is entirely missable, is that there are environmental puzzles hidden eeeeeeverywhere. In the environment. They're there right from the start and it's omly.by paying attention to some subtle cues that you'll spot your first one. There's about 6 black monoliths dotted around the island with strange lines on them. These have no explanation, but you'll come to learn that they're the environmental ones. Hidden in clouds, Lining up objects big and small. Even hidden in videos ffs! It's absolute genius.
To see an 'ending' as the point and the payoff of this game is besides the point, it's so rewarding to play and the satisfaction from.working something seemingly impossible is like nothing I've experienced before or since in gaming.
At the moment the talos principle is nowhere near it.
I totally agree that you can reduce both games down to their bare functionality, however for me the talos principle works so well because it is so accomodating; if you just want to move blocks and lasers about then that's fine, but there's more there to discover if you want to. Thinking about this, for me the witness is the perfect storm of things i don't like; abstract puzzles (i ragequit hexcells several times) and starting in media res with little explanation.
I get your point about finding puzzles within puzzled in the environment etc, but to me that isn't enough of a motivation. As for endings, i have been burned by games i thoroughly enjoyed but the ending was so resoundingly bad that it retroactively stained my opinion of the whole game; mainly The Vanishing of Ethan Carter.
Its probably a remarkably structuralist perspective, but i like that the talos principle has a more clearly defined story; as a fellow racing enthusiast i can definitely appreciate games which require you to make your own fun, but the witness did nothing to draw me in in that way.
I noticed that while I was editing but it didn't seem like there was anything I could do about it since the speech overlapped with it a bit. It's not a problem anyway, it's quite funny.