I don't think I've ever played a game so great at teaching you how to play it without ever actually telling you how to play it. And I will forever remember the mindblowing experience of realizing you can trace patterns in the environment itself. Yeah, the "true ending" is terrible and so is the inclusion of audio logs and videos (such a cheap way to reinforce the theme of the game without putting any actual work into it), but this is still a masterpiece in my eyes.
First playthrough I didn't even know about the audio logs and I definitely prefer the game without them. The videos are the same problem but the way you unlock them is fun, the reward just needed to be something else
Baba is You is hard. This is just obtuse. What's the fun in a puzzle game when your not sure what the rules or worse yet when you solve one but don't even know how you did it? And not that this influenced my score but inserting a clip from a Tarkovsky film is just about the most "take me seriously, take me seriously" moment I've ever seen in a game.
The fun comes from figuring out the rules for yourself. One of the best gaming memories I've ever had was when me and my brother sat in front of the tower puzzle (the one near all the hedge mazes) for twenty minutes, each one of us offering different theories as to what the symbols on the grid meant and discarding the ideas that didn't pan out, before finally hitting on the right answer.
Jonathan Blow has said in interviews that if there's a thematic throughline to The Witness, it's that the game is concerned with "understanding the truth of the world" (source). It can sound a little pretentious (Jonathan Blow is no stranger to pretension—I also found some of the video clips to be a little much), but I think there's genuinely something insightful in that explanation. The game is all about replicating the beauty and joy of scientific discovery. Every puzzle invites you to hypothesize about the rules that govern the game world, and as you test those hypotheses, some succeed and some fail, but with each attempt you come a little closer to the truth. I think the game succeeds because it draws on our inherent scientific curiosity as humans to learn and understand our environment.
my god, i'd rather get nails in my ass
This is just obtuse. What's the fun in a puzzle game when your not sure what the rules or worse yet when you solve one but don't even know how you did it? And not that this influenced my score but inserting a clip from a Tarkovsky film is just about the most "take me seriously, take me seriously" moment I've ever seen in a game.
Jonathan Blow has said in interviews that if there's a thematic throughline to The Witness, it's that the game is concerned with "understanding the truth of the world" (source). It can sound a little pretentious (Jonathan Blow is no stranger to pretension—I also found some of the video clips to be a little much), but I think there's genuinely something insightful in that explanation. The game is all about replicating the beauty and joy of scientific discovery. Every puzzle invites you to hypothesize about the rules that govern the game world, and as you test those hypotheses, some succeed and some fail, but with each attempt you come a little closer to the truth. I think the game succeeds because it draws on our inherent scientific curiosity as humans to learn and understand our environment.