kane_magus (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kane_magus) wrote2025-03-10 06:35 pm
kane_magus) wrote2025-03-10 06:35 pm
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I think I might enjoy watching a Let's Play of The Witness than I would actually playing it.
After finishing Outer Wilds, I decided to give The Witness another shot, since a lot of people seem to compare the two. This was a game that I got about a year after it was first released, for around $10 on sale (not on sale, still to this day, it costs $40).
Here's the premise of The Witness: you're on a mysterious island that is filled with a bunch of puzzle screens. You go around and solve puzzles, which unlocks new areas for you to go to in which you solve more puzzles. And... that's pretty much it. There's no real underlying story (or, if there is, it's something that only comes up at the very end and which I didn't play long enough to see). There's no real reason to do anything in The Witness other than "puzzles are here, and I should try to solve them." That's not necessarily a bad thing, per se, but still... it ultimately wasn't enough to grip me.
The first time I played it, right after I bought it, I lasted maybe 30 minutes or an hour before bouncing off of it. The second time, a year or two ago, I lasted maybe three or four hours before giving up on it again. This most recent time, I made it all the way into the final area (the mountain), with all eleven beams pointing at it (it makes sense in context). You want to know how I made it that far this time? Because after a while, I just straight gave up trying to solve hundreds of samey puzzles and just looked up solutions online. You want to know why I gave up even despite that? Because I made it to the first timed/random puzzles (two of them, simultaneously), i.e. you have to stand on a floor panel and it raises a plate on the wall that reveals two more puzzles, which are timed, and if you fail to solve them in time, the panel comes down and you have to retrigger the floor panel which reveals two new, randomized puzzles. And that's where I just noped right the unholy fuck out yet again, because you can't be spoon fed solutions to randomized puzzles, sadly.
The game is pretty, I'll give it that much. The environments are nice to look at. And I actually liked the puzzles that involved the environment in some way (like having to line the puzzle screen up with rocks or palm trees off in the distance, or having to take into account the shadows of trees and such on the puzzle screen, or having to see how light reflects off the puzzle screens at a certain angle, etc.), but after the two or three hundredth (there are 523 puzzles in the game total) samey puzzle where you have to finish the maze while connecting the dots while simultaneously separating the different colored blocks while also making a Tetris shape with the lines while also having to deal with any or all of the other three or four similar gimmicks introduced the further you progress, it just started to feel like math homework. No thanks.
To contrast The Witness with Outer Wilds, OW had charm to it. TW, outside of the puzzles themselves, which were just, you know, puzzles, felt pretentious as fuck. Like, you keep finding these tiny audio devices and all they do is play high-minded-sounding quotes from famous people or the devs talking about random stuff or whatever. Or you find the projector room and, once you find all the codes to activate the different videos (or just look them up online as I did after the second one or so), it's stuff that has nothing to do with the game itself in any direct, useful way. One of the videos is literally like an hour or so of a dev talking about whatever to the backdrop of real-time footage of an eclipse. (I didn't watch that one, because I'd already read about it being in the game, and when the guy at the start began talking about an eclipse I just skipped it. And if you really want to see/hear those video/audio logs, here are a couple of Youtube links to them.) OW feels like a cohesive story, where you're trying to actually solve a mystery and learn about what happened in the world/solar system, and everything in the game is connected in a meaningful way, whereas TW feels kind of like being in a toybox, but all the toys are just tablet computers with maze puzzles on them and which occasionally spouts pretentious gobbledygook at you that has little to nothing to do with the puzzles or the toybox at all. Playing TW is sort of like playing Hexcells or something[1], except that every time you complete one of the puzzles, you have to traverse an open world environment to get to the next puzzle.
As such, as I stated in the subject line, I think I might actually enjoy The Witness more if I just watched someone else play it, and maybe if I just skipped past the bits where said someone else is actually solving the tedious puzzles. Like I said, at least the world around the puzzles is nice to look at, and I guess at least some of the audio/video logs are kind of interesting to listen to/watch. It's not something I'm going to do any time soon, mind you, but if I ever get some weird urge to play this game again, I'll remember this post here and just find a LP on Youtube instead.
So, yeah, nah, I don't think I'll be recommending The Witness in the same way that I recommended Outer Wilds. I mean, if you like the idea of just wandering around a pretty world and solving hundreds of similar maze puzzles with extra doodads involved to spice things up and make them increasingly more complicated, then sure, give it a look. Otherwise... nah.
(And I won't do more than just mention here the whole thing about Jonathan Blow apparently turning out to be an alt-right, Trumpanzee piece of shit, because that actually has nothing to do with my lack of enjoyment of The Witness itself.)
Anyway... I think I might give The Forgotten City a try next.
[1] - To note, I recently played through all of Hexcells, Hexcells Plus, and am currently up to the final 6-# set of puzzles in Hexcells Infinite, and I'd recommend those games way more than I would The Witness. Didn't feel the need to look up solutions online for those, whether out of difficulty or boredom, either.
Here's the premise of The Witness: you're on a mysterious island that is filled with a bunch of puzzle screens. You go around and solve puzzles, which unlocks new areas for you to go to in which you solve more puzzles. And... that's pretty much it. There's no real underlying story (or, if there is, it's something that only comes up at the very end and which I didn't play long enough to see). There's no real reason to do anything in The Witness other than "puzzles are here, and I should try to solve them." That's not necessarily a bad thing, per se, but still... it ultimately wasn't enough to grip me.
The first time I played it, right after I bought it, I lasted maybe 30 minutes or an hour before bouncing off of it. The second time, a year or two ago, I lasted maybe three or four hours before giving up on it again. This most recent time, I made it all the way into the final area (the mountain), with all eleven beams pointing at it (it makes sense in context). You want to know how I made it that far this time? Because after a while, I just straight gave up trying to solve hundreds of samey puzzles and just looked up solutions online. You want to know why I gave up even despite that? Because I made it to the first timed/random puzzles (two of them, simultaneously), i.e. you have to stand on a floor panel and it raises a plate on the wall that reveals two more puzzles, which are timed, and if you fail to solve them in time, the panel comes down and you have to retrigger the floor panel which reveals two new, randomized puzzles. And that's where I just noped right the unholy fuck out yet again, because you can't be spoon fed solutions to randomized puzzles, sadly.
The game is pretty, I'll give it that much. The environments are nice to look at. And I actually liked the puzzles that involved the environment in some way (like having to line the puzzle screen up with rocks or palm trees off in the distance, or having to take into account the shadows of trees and such on the puzzle screen, or having to see how light reflects off the puzzle screens at a certain angle, etc.), but after the two or three hundredth (there are 523 puzzles in the game total) samey puzzle where you have to finish the maze while connecting the dots while simultaneously separating the different colored blocks while also making a Tetris shape with the lines while also having to deal with any or all of the other three or four similar gimmicks introduced the further you progress, it just started to feel like math homework. No thanks.
To contrast The Witness with Outer Wilds, OW had charm to it. TW, outside of the puzzles themselves, which were just, you know, puzzles, felt pretentious as fuck. Like, you keep finding these tiny audio devices and all they do is play high-minded-sounding quotes from famous people or the devs talking about random stuff or whatever. Or you find the projector room and, once you find all the codes to activate the different videos (or just look them up online as I did after the second one or so), it's stuff that has nothing to do with the game itself in any direct, useful way. One of the videos is literally like an hour or so of a dev talking about whatever to the backdrop of real-time footage of an eclipse. (I didn't watch that one, because I'd already read about it being in the game, and when the guy at the start began talking about an eclipse I just skipped it. And if you really want to see/hear those video/audio logs, here are a couple of Youtube links to them.) OW feels like a cohesive story, where you're trying to actually solve a mystery and learn about what happened in the world/solar system, and everything in the game is connected in a meaningful way, whereas TW feels kind of like being in a toybox, but all the toys are just tablet computers with maze puzzles on them and which occasionally spouts pretentious gobbledygook at you that has little to nothing to do with the puzzles or the toybox at all. Playing TW is sort of like playing Hexcells or something[1], except that every time you complete one of the puzzles, you have to traverse an open world environment to get to the next puzzle.
As such, as I stated in the subject line, I think I might actually enjoy The Witness more if I just watched someone else play it, and maybe if I just skipped past the bits where said someone else is actually solving the tedious puzzles. Like I said, at least the world around the puzzles is nice to look at, and I guess at least some of the audio/video logs are kind of interesting to listen to/watch. It's not something I'm going to do any time soon, mind you, but if I ever get some weird urge to play this game again, I'll remember this post here and just find a LP on Youtube instead.
So, yeah, nah, I don't think I'll be recommending The Witness in the same way that I recommended Outer Wilds. I mean, if you like the idea of just wandering around a pretty world and solving hundreds of similar maze puzzles with extra doodads involved to spice things up and make them increasingly more complicated, then sure, give it a look. Otherwise... nah.
(And I won't do more than just mention here the whole thing about Jonathan Blow apparently turning out to be an alt-right, Trumpanzee piece of shit, because that actually has nothing to do with my lack of enjoyment of The Witness itself.)
Anyway... I think I might give The Forgotten City a try next.
[1] - To note, I recently played through all of Hexcells, Hexcells Plus, and am currently up to the final 6-# set of puzzles in Hexcells Infinite, and I'd recommend those games way more than I would The Witness. Didn't feel the need to look up solutions online for those, whether out of difficulty or boredom, either.