Is this game TOO hard?
Jesus christ I know he wants us to turn back when we can't solve something but I got to the point where I solved everything I could and every zones that are left take me about 1 hour per puzzle and it's literally making me dizzy to the point where I have to take a break. I'm thinking about dropping it. It's good but is it really worth all of this? I can just play Picross for a fairer challenge. At least I can watch movies while playing it so that redeems it a little
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nah, ur dum
I thought the difficulty progression worked pretty well on the whole.
Probably the only issue I had is that sometimes it's hard to know where the 'starter' area is for a new concept. I would start to see new puzzle elements that I didn't understand and I had no idea where to go to get the basics.
If you're looking for a puzzle game you can play while watching a movie this is not the one though.
Took me a great while to understand that the pillars with the enviromental puzzles actually points in the direction they are at. Besides that the puzzles can make one want to puke especially Inside the mountain with the colour shifting puzzles
Them fucking geometric shapes eh?
Which ones? My memory of the puzzle types is a bit hazy now.
The audio segment was probably the worst for me, I could tell when the notes were different but I had to just guess which one was higher/lower.
i actually had to record the audio and put it through a spectrogram for one of them
I had to get a friend to help me with that since I myself have a damaged hearing. Shit sucked.
See I didn't even know there was sound puzzles, I thought i was far in the game but fuck seems I really am a scrub cause I'm stuck in so many places. How do I get good guys? I must be missing something. For instance the Treehouse: I've opened half of all the bridges but after that for the last 2-3 tiles of the bridge I just cannot for the life of me do it. Maybe I could, but as I said instead of staying there for an hour trying I just turn back and get stuck elsewhere
just walk away from it for a few hours and focus on something else.
There's probably a new concept in those later puzzles that you've not seen the entry level explainer puzzles for.
I think you need to go to the bunker with all the plants on the side of the mountain before you can complete the treehouse.
Or if it's just a hard puzzle then
Is it a comfy game to walk around and solve puzzles on the little island?
It is pretty comfy until the puzzles become impossible
I still have no idea how you were supposed to solve this without brute forcing it.
also there are stone statues of people everywhere that one of my friends described as "not christian"
not spooky but just uneasy.
I assumed they were people turned into stone initially.
I 100%-d it in 30 hours. I never found actual puzzles that challenging, none of them took more than 5 minutes, world puzzles were harder though.
Maybe you're not that good with logic puzzles?
question for those who've beat all of it.
i opened the mountain, solved the puzzles to get down to the water, and then rode in the willy wonka elevator. i did not however, finish ALL puzzles and get all those video recordings. is it worth going back for that? I'd have to start from scratch which I wouldn't mind but just curious.
> that one of my friends described as "not christian"
i think they are but i'm not sure, have not 100%'d it.
i think you're an outlier. some of those puzzles are very esoteric.
Might be. How do you define a logic puzzle? I play a lot of Picross and stuff like that but thats more like numbers i guess. Went through Myst and lots of Adventure games as a kid, too, but the Witness is definitely my kryptonite
They're not, you see some of them partially carved in the quarry.
Well he says world puzzles were harder, I agree with him that all the grid ones apart from aren't too hard as long as you're aware of the concepts in play. Some of the tetris ones are the only ones I had to resort to pen and paper to get my head around.
I never managed to beat the timed, randomized puzzles. I even got to the very last one in the sequence a couple of times, but those pillars are brutal.
I also had to cheat to figure out the triangles.
The statues in the quarry are no human sized. The entire thing is metaphorical, it's not useful to visualize it as some kind of reality as in most fiction.
You haven't beaten the secret cave area. It features a sort of final boss and is the proper way to unlock the infamous FMV ending
We are just too dumb
>those Tetris puzzles
I still don't quite understand how they work
If you didn't get the second/final achievement you didn't play the best part of the game yet. If you enjoyed the game up until you got the "normal" ending, it's worth going back just for the postgame bonuses.
Are they not? Oh fair enough then.
Pls motivate me to go back to the final boss puzzle, the one with the music. It burnt me out.
Pretty much the same here, I didn't think any of the "main" puzzles were all that difficult. There were a couple that definitely took me longer than 5 minutes, for example the ship one or when I was just being a complete retard on easy shit for no reason, but overall they were all easily doable.
Doesn't help that I played Stephen's Sausage Roll immediately afterwards which tore me a new one, that makes The Witness look like a Nintendo game.
You don't have to start from zero, you can leave the elevator by activating two simple straight line puzzles on the door inside of it.
There is a whole new area that you haven't been to, the Cave system under the island, that has some cool stuff in it. It's definitely worth doing if you liked the game.
>Stephen's Sausage Roll
Is that good then? I completely forgot about it until now.
Everything about the island is 100% artificial. Even the statues and the tapes are just allegories to the puzzle themes nearby, just like the books in Braid.
I guess the message is to just focus on the gameplay
you don't have to start from scratch, if you load up your save you can leave the elevator.
There are a couple secrets worth finding, for example the timed challenge is pretty good, and I really enjoyed looking for the world puzzles.
I've bought the game for my friend, it almost physically hurt to watch him and his girlfriend play. Even on a puzzle that was new for me, I could see the solution in a couple of seconds, while they were struggling to solve it for minutes, and when they didn't believe me, I just showed them and it worked.
I'm just that good with visual puzzles.
On most cases, you can rule out a lot of paths instantly, then you see a couple parts where there is only one good path, and you just connect them and it's done.
The tetrominos were super easy IMO. I especially liked the one with a shitton of them, I just counted how many blocks they make up, figured only 1 should be left out, so the solution was super simple to a seemingly hard puzzle.
The only ones I considered hard were the 360 degree puzzles, those had me start solving them on paper.
That shit took me like an hour. And after solving it, I didn't feel any accomplishment, just anger. Fuck them for including that.
alright thanks doods, concise advise. gonna do it.
Yes, I liked it a lot. Some parts get pretty ridiculous but that feeling when you finally finish a puzzle you've been stuck on for hours is amazing. Probably my favorite puzzle game all around.
It's a fairly long game too, I think I took around 30-40 hours to beat it
I'll give it a try then.
I'm pretty much done with Infinifactory so I need a new game.
If you beat it you are officially smarter than 94.3% of the players and can feel good about yourself. The two biggest hurdles is learning how to quickly deduce which of the three panels is impossible at that branching section as well as solving the triangles in the maze.
For the unsolvable panels, it's easy to just look for the following pattern:
>BW
>WB
Where B is a black square and W is white. Any panel with that formation on it is unsolvabe.
the only puzzle i had difficulty with were the color ones in the greenhouse.
the only puzzle i thought were stupid/unfair were the jungle/forest ones, especially towards the end.
i still cant find the puzzle everyone talks about on the ship and havent gone into the underground yet but i had "beaten" the game.
i hear about people having to """brute force""" puzzles to the point of writing down failed attempts and just doing trial and error but i never really came to that problem.
its not like you need to be super perceptive to notice this game didnt actually need to be a game and could've been a book of puzzles like sedoku (not crossword puzzles you autistic shit (super bunny dumps.) but i always REALLY liked pretty walking simulators and the witness is probably the prettiest AND most well optimized. also having environmental puzzles makes you appreciate the detail put into the world even more.
i think its fucking GOTY no doubt and im kinda upset its niche but i expected as much.
How many worlds are there?
I had to look up the solution to THAT puzzle in world 2 and stopped playing.
It wouldn't have been nearly as good without the walking simulator aspect and the environmental puzzles though.
Plus all the people who seemed to have bought it on the basis of some pretty screenshots and then become furious that were tricked into playing a puzzle game amused the fuck out of me when it launched.
I think it was like 6 or 7? The last world in particular just has so many puzzles, it takes forever.
And yeah, the sausage tower in World 2 is the first real difficulty spike. I actually really don't like that puzzle, I think they should have taught you some of the mechanics involved in simpler ones first, but that's really the only time the game just suddenly springs something like that on you so it's forgivable in my opinion. The rest of the game is very well designed.
If you ever feel like going back to it get it in your head to not use a guide though, even if you are stuck for a couple hours. You might be thinking you are just gonna skip a puzzle or two and do the rest yourself but chances are if you skip something you are stuck on and don't go through the proper learning process for it you won't be able to do the more and more complex puzzles that use and refine the mechanics you didn't properly grasp either, that shit is very quickly going to spiral out of control.
Just take a break and go into it with a clean head and new perspective the next day, helps a lot.
Yeah, I noticed that on the unsolvable panels. Biggest chokepoint for me is the maze and then the pillars.
Can you guys give the best titles in that genre? Other the the witness, stephens sausage roll and infinifactory.
If it was just a book of puzzles, it would lose what I think is its best feature, the progression system.
It's like a Metroid game where you need to find new tools to open up different paths, but here it's you learning new puzzle rules
I want to go back and finish this but I know I'll end up trying to solve everything in MS Paint again because the game has a worse interface than a Sudoku app.
What? How?
The other Zachtronics games, including the free flash games.
I guess he means that you can't draw notes on the puzzle panels.
Personally I never felt the need for a feature like that though
If you've figured out that a particular segment must or can't be filled, there is no way to mark that in-game other than to remember it. This feature is in literally every other logic puzzle app.
At the very least it should let you draw individual segments instead of having to draw from the start point each time.
So do you guys think this will get robbed of its GOTY title because it was released in January? Or because XD le Doom!
...
SpaceChem especially.
It seemed to be the one that revived interest in serious puzzle games.
Blow talked about that individual segments aprt actually, he said it would ruin the theme of the game. Something about how it wouldn't flow as well.
I think I kinda agree too, I wouldn't want individual segments, it'd be really out of place. I do want to be able to retract my line after inputting a solution though instead of having to do the entire panel over again.
it will be robbed of GOTY because it is niche.
truly the la-mulana of puzzle games.
What doesn't flow well is me playing in windowed mode and making ms-paint copies of the puzzles to make up for a shoddy interface.
Someone will tell me at this point to get good, just remember these sort of things, or to just draw lines until something works, but putting interface options in a menu would alleviate 99% of the problem while preserving his artistic vision. It's just a hipster dev assuming that his work will be ruined if people try to play it differently.
Isn't that supposed to have something to do with external sounds?
I remember the smaller circles meant higher pitches, and you just had to go through them in order.
I can see it from both sides, I think I prefer that it makes you hold the entire solution in your head at once personally.
>sounds
Ah well then, no wonder I had no idea what I was supposed to do.
I don't know, I don't think there is a single puzzle that's complex enough to warrant that kind of thing. They are all fairly contained and straightforward once you figure out the single trick behind them. Maybe for something like the combined hedge-maze panel but taking screenshots is easily preferable to a note system for that.
You didn't do the puzzles in the jungle then? That's where you learn about it
Honestly don't do any of the extra stuff until you've learned all the rules
The ship isn't even mandatory at all
>preserving his artistic vision
I don't think letting you chalk all over the screen would preserve his vision at all.
All of the world puzzles rely on continuous, unbroken lines, so letting you do the panel puzzles in segments would be seriously inconsistent and purpose-defeating.
The whole point of the game is basically to see what is hiding in plain sight, and all of it at once.
I couldn't do the jungle puzzles properly, I could tell when sounds were different but not how.
It's not too hard, the game is just a hodge podge.
I don't like the world puzzles. At all.
There are too many perspectives you can take on them but only 1 is supposedly correct. I remember looking at a few from multiple angles and trying each way multiple times but only after a while it would just work and it felt like I wasn't actually supposed to do it the way I did.
Trying to draw the lines ontop of pic related is actually the worst.
>A Great Game That You Shouldn't Play
Is this guy just a retard or does have any interesting points to make. I mean, based on that title I'm already leaning to towards on of those two options.
The one you linked was really good though. You had to resolve the puzzles in different manners and look at them from various viewpoints to solve the environmental puzzles, it was fun.
I agree that sometimes the environmental puzzles are a bit finicky but a bunch of them are really cool and interesting, like the one you apparently had a lot of issues with.
He is retarded.
He basically says that the game was a waste of time, and he's right.
He seems to have felt personally insulted every time there's a part in the game that wasn't 100% obvious or required you to press on and come back later.
Seven minutes in and I can feel the anger.
All video games are a waste of time.
> watching movies while playing it.
Thats the problem right there, there's a reason the game is so quiet user, it's so that you can actually focus on what puzzle you're doing.
Also remember that usually when you see a row of puzzles it usually means that it's a tutorial, and you should complete all of them, also if you're not sure how that mechanic works just experiment with the same puzzles with different solutions, and also it's a perfectly valid strategy to go to sleep/ wait til the next day if you get stuck, it gives your brain some time to zone out while still thinking about the puzzles sub-consciously.
I recommend saving screenshots of difficult panels to your phone and looking at them during down time. I looked at one just after waking up and found the solution immediately.
Alright, so basically his main whine about the game is that some areas are gated by puzzles that you learn how to solve elsewhere. But he spends hours trying to solve puzzles he doesn't even know the rules for because well I don't know why he does that.
He's very angry about it though. And he's angry about puzzles he did solve easily because he imagines people who might have struggled with them.
I think he just hates puzzle games to be honest.
The Witness is the only long game this year that doesn't actually waste your time. It just doesn't cater to your need to be spoonfed.
Except for the sun temple puzzles; those get kinda tedious.
The biggest problem I have with it is that the game doesn't really guide you to the tutorial puzzles. You're just sort of expected to find them. So frustrating.
I still dont get the last water floor puzzle (long rectangular one). I never found a way to find the full path and I have not seen anyone explain how to find the full solution
>The biggest problem I have with it is that my burger doesn't really tell you from where to start eating it. You're just sort of expected to find out. So frustrating.
I hate puzzles that actively troll you. One of the treehouse bridges give you several intermediate/hard puzzles before the tutorial puzzles. Easy or not that was an intentional "fuck you" of a design
>It's good but is it really worth all of this?
if you're even asking that question I can tell you unequivocally that it is not. You see, there is nothing at the bottom of the rabbit hole. Nothing at all. The game is only those puzzles.
The game has its own parody of the tutorial panels by having the series for one of the more esoteric symbols split up across the island in hidden spots.
I'm pretty sure I figured out some logic sets before encountering the tutorials for them.
What do you normally get at the end of playing a game.
>I hate puzzles that actively troll you
Those are the best ones.
Did you know that in the Greenhouse (don't read if you haven't solved this area), the final puzzle is the exact same as the last tutorial puzzle beneath it?
it unlocks a video that is complete fucking bullshit anyways
I think the true ending and the profoundly simple way it is unlocked (albeit I spoiled it for myself, regrettably) is a wonderful payoff.
I expected it to have been more than a simulation. the game is just the puzzles, I wanted there to be more, a fleshed out story of what the island is and who the people working on it were... stuff like that. a story.
Unlike other genres puzzles games are actually good for you though. They train your logical thinking and problem solving capabilities, stuff you will need if you ever stop living in your little corner in the basement and step out into the real world.
You can't raise your IQ above what it is. Solving a lot of the puzzles in The Witness will make you better at solving those kinds of puzzles, nothing less and nothing more.
I found it extremely easy except for where the 'tutorial' puzzles were separate.
Otherwise I pretty much crushed the entire game without much effort.
I was disappointed since I brought some graph paper on Sup Forums's advice before I brought it and used 1 page of it in total, mostly for the reversing puzzles.
There is a bit more to the story than just that. Listen to the audio tapes, especially the cave ones, watch the hidden ending, and think it over again.
>They train your logical thinking and problem solving capabilities
proof pls
it's not enough to count for anything
>You can't raise your IQ above what it is
>Why even go to school
>I should just stay at home and play video games all day
>I just wasn't made to be a thinker
>I'll just go clean toilets and complain Mexicans are stealing my plumbing work so Trump can build his wall
>It can't be helped
>Not knowing what outlier means
this, i was playing it again recently and realized the game is pretty much literally a metroid game where instead of upgrades you get knowledge of the puzzles.
people that said it could've been a puzzle book instead of a videogame are fucking morons (not news though)
I haven't said or implied any of the retarded bullshit you just spouted. Feel free to work hard and play puzzle games if you find them fun, but your IQ cannot be raised above what you're born with, that is a fact.
IQ is a measure of how good you are at IQ tests, you absolutely can raise it by taking a lot of IQ tests.
And anyway, regardless of how rude he is, he's right. Exercising your brain is like any other kind of exercise, it provides benefits that go beyond increasing your proficiency in one specific task.
To be fair the fucking statues clearly depict people in terror running from a calamity like some Pompeii bullshit
Who /completed the challenge/?
There were two things that severely brought the game down for me.
1) TOO MANY FUCKING FILLER PUZZLES. The puzzles where you have to actually use the surrounding environment were fantastic, but there were so many that didn't, and seemed to only serve as padding.
2) Nothing in the game world had any greater context. For a game that (as Blowhard has gone on record saying) was made to correct the problems of the Myst games, he completely blew it on the main reason for their success: TELLING A COMPELLING STORY THROUGH THE GAME ENVIRONMENT.
>Pretentious indie games
>Not even once
youtube.com
the trick to that one is that there is no angle to see the entire solution at once, instead, you have to see small parts of the solution from different angles, and then collect all the information into one solution
what the fuck is wrong with that. cleaning work is good work, you're physically active and you work alone, no supervisor always looking over your shoulder
You do realize you just proved my point, right? The problems in IQ tests, just like the puzzles in the witness, will become easier once you've trained your brain to solve them specifically. However being good at solving IQ tests wouldn't you'd be good at solving puzzles in The Witness, nor would it mean you'd suddenly become more intelligent than you already are, because the areas in your brain the IQ test is supposed to measure when taken without prior prepare- fluid reasoning, quantitative reasoning, visual-spatial processing, and working memory cannot be improved beyond what you're born with though they can worsen with age and mental conditions.