What went wrong?

What went wrong?

nothing. it's one of the greatest puzzle games ever made.

Nothing, it set out to be a puzzle game utilizing the environment to its fullest and accomplished exactly that.

The price.

Not a damned thing, except maybe . I wouldn't even question it at $30, though.

Its thought provoking in all the right ways.

People wanted Myst and they got a placemat simulator. Only a small portion of the game delivered what would actually be considered a worthy successor to Myst. The rest was just simple mazes where the only challenge was deriving the rules

Puzzles are fantastic. But the "plot" and lore is an existential joke that doesn't make any fulfilling or gratifying sense.

You come out of the experience feeling like you learned nothing and the bonus ending is just insulting to the player for having spent so long playing and learning the tricks of the puzzles.

I think the only way you could go into this expecting something identical to Myst is if you based your assumptions of the game entirely around some screenshot like the OP's. "It didn't meet my expectations" is a personal problem.

>People wanted Myst
The game was never marketed or even described as a successor to Myst and it was made explicitly clear that this was not a Myst-like game, so I'm not sure how so many people still manage to go in expecting Myst. The only thing they have in common is the island motif, that's it.

Walking simulator with puzzles. And occasional recitations of entire chapters from The Communist Manifesto.

Low energy, sad!

the entire game should have been environmental puzzles instead of having those garbage panels

this too

Did people not like this? It was genuinely one of my favorite experiences with a video game ever. Easily worth the price.

The only thing I can think of is I guess some alt-right "everything is elitist" lord of faggots might get upset by the voice recordings, because they're all quotations and a lot of them are philosophical.

>do all obelisk puzzles
>nothing happens

well fuck you too Blow

The puzzles were all incredibly fun for me. Why are you angry about them?

What went right?

If you accidentally listened to like three minutes of the dumb lecture you were forced to sit through you would've seen that coming.

the panel ones were boring iOS tier shits, the good ones relied on the environment

what forced lecture

The game started off slow. But damn did I love the rest of it. Looking back it did an amazing job at teaching you how to do the puzzles without every explicitly telling your the rules you had to follow.

Anyone manage to solve this one on their own? It's the one in the sunken ship

Are talosfags the eternal small dick syndrome of puzzle gamers?

that kitter looks ill, always put me off buying the game

The fact that puzzles didn't have a single solution

>what forced lecture

The eclipse? If you don't know what I'm talking about you didn't do all the obelisk puzzles.

I solved every puzzle in the game without external help but this one I only managed to solve through random trial and error. Didn't realize the creeks were a several minutes long audio cue until after I finished the game and looked it up.

Yeah, that was a fucker, but once you know the rules it's just a question of figuring out what the hell sounds are tied to what.

The price (should've been $30, not $40) and the optimization (this shit should run on toasters)

I brute forced it by trying every possible combination. It's apparently based off sound, but I'm tone deaf as fuck.

pretentiousness

Just the story, especially the ending.

But the game itself was fantastic.

That one is the only stupid hard puzzle i can think of in game.
Great game especially the environmental puzzles. First one I discovered I was amazed

>another boring as shit walking simulator eith no gameplay
>what went wrong
Gee I wonder

maybe its because something not alive is petting him that he is freaked the fuck out

Not much. A solid puzzle game. I enjoyed it.

The pacing is sometimes bad. Areas have clear sections that when solved unlocked the "final boss" puzzle of that area but often times the nearer you get to what seems like the final phase, the more the puzzles would subdivide and drag on. It sometimes kills the sense of progression. Some final phases of puzzle areas could have done with a little trimming to keep the pace fun instead of being exhausting by the end.

I enjoyed that it never held my hand by the stubbornness can sometimes come off as negative, like the game it telling me to fuck off.

There are a handful of FUCK YOU JONATHAN BLOW HOW THE HELL WOULD ANYONE GUESS THAT moments. I recall a few puzzles that seemed to rely too much on player exhaustion to force you to desperately try ANYTHING.

Luckily these negatives are the exception.

It's a bunch of browser-game like puzzles on a beautiful, underutilised island. And when the island is used, it's done in either boring or annoying/obscure ways.
The visuals are great, if it had gameplay and characters to interact with, I would have loved it. But in the end it was a huge letdown, because I could feel all the work that was put in and it was wasted.

A beautiful island and what's the gameplay? Look at panels. In the end the island is just a hub for a flashgame.

this was just sloppy game design- it encouraged guessing even after you identified the 'solution'.

>puzzle solving is not gameplay
this meme needs to die

Talos Principle came out first

>get bored of reading terminal logs
>skip majority of them
>after finishing the game, check online for the story
>"wow there was a virus?"

And plays nothing like The Witness. I loved Talos Principle but its fans need to stop shoehorning it into every discussion of modern puzzle games.

all you do is line puzzles

>There are a handful of FUCK YOU JONATHAN BLOW HOW THE HELL WOULD ANYONE GUESS THAT moments. I recall a few puzzles that seemed to rely too much on player exhaustion to force you to desperately try ANYTHING.

Do you remember a specific example? My memory's kinda fuzzy on this.

What was the coolest environmental puzzle?

Holy shit this user has it all figured out.
In Street Fighter all you do is fight people. Call Kotaku!

The Witness wouldn't receive anywhere near the amount of shit that it does if it wasn't immediately preceded by a far more detailed, poignant and in-depth puzzle game made by a team of Croatians in a cave with a box of scraps. Both were trying to capitalize on being the revival of the puzzle adventure genre and TTP beat it to the punch while also being better in every conceivable way.

Whether or not you think the comparison is "fair" doesn't matter, TTP's existence undeniably had a negative impact on TW.

>The only thing I can think of is I guess some alt-right "everything is elitist"

Consider suicide

I really liked the ones that required you to solve other puzzles in different ways. The 4 on the opposite side of the castle of your screenshot as well as the underside of the giant walkway puzzle inside the mountain come to mind.

Anyone else autistically spend hours trying to beat the timed puzzle in the treehouse though sheer speed?

Anyone else solve both sides of that area thinking it was what you had to do?

The game does a bad job hinting that you can choose a side and you only need to do one.

Oh yeah the other castle one was tough. Basically solving the last 4 puzzles in a more difficult way. Cool stuff

>complete every obelisk and puzzle
>see people talking about how the "panels" were bad and the "environmental puzzles" were good
>what in the fuck? every puzzle was a panel. what environmental puzzles?
>realize they're talking about the obelisks
Are you fucking shitting me? Don't get me wrong, I had a relaxing time doing those, but only a couple had actual "solutions". so hidden-picture games are now puzzles to be compared with, you know, actual puzzles? Is Sup Forums really that retarded?

>Is Sup Forums really that retarded?
This is the board that praises Talos Principle and Portal as good puzzle games and shit on stuff like Steven's Sausage Roll, so yes.

The "puzzles" in the environment consisted of finding the circle line thing. Sometimes it was a matter of just looking at a specific angle somewhere, but a lot of the time it involved manipulating varying environmental things like the reflection of the sun

>Steven's Sausage Roll
i wanted to kill myself the first day i played that game. came back the second day and somehow breezed through the first series of puzzles in an hour or so.

i should really go back and finish the rest of it - it's very clever little game.

For a game with good looking environment, I'm disappointed that the puzzles are more or less just stare in a screen and make a line from point a to point b and with of it, you avoid the beautiful scenery most of the time because of the puzzles. The puzzles itself are challenging but it doesn't feel very varied to me.
If I want to solve these kinds of puzzles, I might as well buy me an activity book from a bookstore that costs cheaper.

But the big ultra mega secret is right at the beginning of the game and you didn't see it because you didn't know how it worked until after you finished it and that proves Jonathan Blow is the greatest genius of all time.

Until you beat this without a guide, you don't get to talk about puzzle games.

Not him, but the fucking twig on the ground jesus fucking christ. Took me like 2 hours.

Don't you have to do one side to enter the next area?

Oh yeah, I remember that. Not really relying on player exhaustion, but that was a fucker. Took me some time, too.

It gets really good towards the end. Took me ~20 hours to beat all in all, so it's not terribly bad.

Got to gate of illusion before cheating every now and again when I was fully stumped. Fantastic game, somewhat overboard with how little direction you are given though.

I have no idea why they couldn't just record all the gravestones clues for you, being forced to write tons of shit down whilst playing adds nothing to the game.