It's important to keep in mind the purpose of game reviews. In my opinion, these should be decently objective.
Sure, if I'm friends with Reviewer X, and I know we have very similar experiences when it comes to games, then it's useful to know that Reviewer X found the puzzles in Game Y to be difficult.
However, I think what's generally more important, and what is usually more desired out of a review, is a deeper thought. It's not very useful to know that Reviewer X personally had a difficult and frustrating time with the puzzles. It's much more useful to know that the puzzles are objectively well designed: that they grow in complexity, that solving a puzzle requires learning something new, that what you learned will continue to be of use in future puzzles, that these lessons build on one another, etc.; or that these puzzles are objectively poorly designed: they are arbitrarily complicated, solving a puzzle requires more luck than any sort of ingenuity, there's no cohesion behind the puzzles, etc. These sorts of claims can be made even by someone who's not a puzzle gamer, and had a tough and difficult time with a game.
If this is asking too much of a reviewer... well, then what are they getting paid to do then? Anyone can give their superficial experiences with a game. It takes skill and work to offer up an analysis.
I'm definitely not a puzzle person, but I greatly respect Blow's game design chops and ambitions. Not only do I want to monetarily support the guy so that one day he'll make a game more to my tastes, but I figure that if I'm going to give a go at a puzzle game, I could do no better than to do it with a game made by Blow. So I plan on buying this when it releases on PSN despite having little to negative interest in puzzle games.
As soon as I'm done with TR, I'm going all in on this. Do any of the reviews mention PS4/PC differences? If there are no notable differences, I may get it for PS4
In Braid's case I wouldn't accept the argument if you told me the game is obtuse.
However because TW is a 360 degree style 3D game I can see this being an issue. Since Braid is a sidescroller that barely extends vertically, it's much easier for the developer to control your thought process through implicit methods than it would be in a game like TW. This is the aspect I'm most curious about, to see how they handled it.
From reading pre release threads this quote:
"It trusts that you are a perceptive human being, capable of patience and critical thinking, and it rewards you for using both."
Considering the quality of The Talos Principle, which was $40 as well I believe as well, and this game, then yeah I'd say the wheels are set in motion for high quality indies being $40. Or at the very least, $40 not being a too ridiculous starting point in some gamers eyes.
If you're going for the PC version it might be cheaper to get it off of The Witness' website because it's valued in US dollars. I think people from the UK may be better off doing this. Alternatively, turn on Steam Idlemaster and sell the shit out of the cards from your backlog. I've got around 20 euros sitting in my Steam wallet from doing this that will go toward this game.
This is a puzzle game. You are on an island with ~700 puzzles to solve. The game mechanics are puzzles, and solving puzzles is the goal of the game. The island itself is one giant puzzle.
I dont see how that excuses anything. Infact that surely augments his opinion, having the player do 700 puzzles (or whatever is the endgame threshold) without anything to break the monotony of it is an absolutely valid criticism.
If you like that, then thats fine. Nothing wrong with loving a game just for its mechanics. But its not hard to imagine how some would not. And its not unfair of them to not like it. Games like Painkiller can do just what they are mechanically built to do and NOTHING else but would you feel it unfair if someone said Painkiller got boring after shooting the 3000th bad guy? I would think not. Or Hitman GO.
It feels like people come into review threads to enforce their opinions and anything that doesnt fit that narrative is immediately wrong or silly or trolling for page clicks.
The first or the second? The first one is probably that you have to draw the path to the branch where that Nut/Fruit is sitting. The second is one is probably about the broken branches but on the panel it looks like there is one main branch that isn't broken. I guess this is the "goal"
This is dangerous; there's a classic archetypal problem of adventure game design, where a puzzle that might seem perfectly clear to the author feels to the user that they're being expected to read the author's mind.
It's a very tricky balance to strike. I wrote an awful lot on this subject after playing Pneuma. Everything that I would regard as actually spoilery is spoilered, my other criticisms can, I feel, be deduced from the context.
I adore puzzles and adventures - I've written about them extensively in the past - but I think I agree with your criticisms in many cases; I think they're valid in a way beyond "the gameplay isn't to my taste"
One thing that I think is a cardinal sin in a puzzle is an unclear goal. With a clear objective the puzzle becomes 'how can I manipulate the objects at my disposal in order to achieve the goal'. With an unclear objective the puzzle is instead 'try likely suspects until you discover the solution the game decrees to be correct'. The former is a problem that can be solved - in theory, if you took all the information away from the computer, you could still derive a valid solution. The latter, however, requires constant feedback; you're not solving the puzzle, you're just flailing through the solution space until the game goes 'yep, that'll do'. There are places where there's leeway, of course; there's nothing inherently wrong with the idea of having to fiddle with something a bit first to deduce the goal rather than having it spelled out to you, but without a defined objective, the player can't solve the puzzle. They might stumble on the solution, but that's not the same thing, and from a player's perspective, it's much, much less rewarding.
The floor puzzle you mention - assuming it's the one (
Blank tiles or laurel wreaths?
) I had difficulty with, almost - in my eyes - got it right. One major flaw, I felt, was that the movement required was a bit too fiddly; it's hard to understand exactly how the tiles are behaving unless you start making moves precise enough to make it clear that how they're changing is not random, and even after you do the precision is still an issue when you are heading towards a solution.
The second major flaw - a common problem in puzzles of this nature, I think - is that there are two obvious solutions to it - mark all the tiles, or blank all the tiles. Both could concievably be valid solutions, both demonstrate sufficient mastery of the mechanics to judge the player as having solved the puzzle - but only one of them works. Fortunately it's not hard to get from the wrong solution to the right one, but without something more clearly indicating which was correct, the game really ought to have accepted either; both require demonstrations of the same basic skills to achieve the logical solution, the only real issue is whether the player makes the correct 50/50 guess at the start or not.
I'd also mention a bit of a pacing issue here, because immediately after this fiddly and flawed but ultimately logical puzzle comes a puzzle that is insultingly simple.
There's an earlier puzzle that I had a problem with, and it's an issue along similar lines; one with two panels of five buttons at opposite ends of a pond. This suffers from the fact that there is an obvious solution (which is ultimately the correct solution) - but the key mechanic in that section serves to throw problems in your way. And once again, there's a 50/50 choice, both of which might appear to be vaild, as to what the correct solution to those problems are.
I, of course, plumped for the wrong one; since everything currently had been relating to what you could see, I thought you could carefully use the pillars to manipulate the panels one square at a time and in doing so form a pattern that had some meaning - I was going for lighting all the squares.
In other words, long before the floor puzzle mentioned above, I was trying to use the same principle as a logical solution to a puzzle. But this time, it wasn't the correct basis - but, crucially, the puzzles looked fundamentally the same when broken down to the base elements
.
One other risk with puzzles is lack of feedback. In this instance, I really needed a touch more feedback to make it clear when I was on the right track to a solution. As an example, it could have made a heck of a lot of difference if they simply added a light on each panel which was lit when the panel was configured correctly - but immediately and visibly went out the moment one wasn't; set up enough information that the user can pinpoint when the problem arises, and they can start on the solution.
(As an aside, while I think this is a matter of personal taste, I'm not overjoyed that there's an RNG component to the puzzle - or rather, an RNG component to the way the puzzle goes wrong. Many players will try to ascribe a pattern to that and think that the solution may be behind deducing how the pattern works out. Another way I'd modify the puzzle is that I'd take out the RNG, and instead make the puzzle 'go wrong' in a way that is consistently the exact opposite from the player's goal. That should reduce the risk of the player looking for patterns, because it behaves consistently from the same start state - and, from a malicious point of view, will probably feel more like the game is mocking you!
The totem pole was a bizarre puzzle, because the actual solvable puzzle was, I'd argue, insultingly simple. The premise of "Here are a number of switchable objects with three states. Get them all to state 0, Certain objects will in turn influence others" is a common and valid puzzle type, and one I have no objection to - but it doesn't work as a puzzle when only two of the objects have any knock-on effect on any others, with the other three all being entirely independent of one another. Here's something I mentioned a little while ago:
One of the things that's bothered me for a while is how *bad* many game designers of mainstream games are at making puzzles. It's like... they've looked at them, they know what a puzzle *should* look like, but they don't learn much about the tricks and methodology to make one good.
(I talk more about general puzzle subjects using the context of text adventure mazes, before concluding
All-too-often, then, people have designed text adventures using this puzzle directly because they've seen it and know it works, without realising that any well-read gamer will have encountered the problem before. For those gamers, it's a dull bit of busywork with no actual interest. The designer has seen a maze, and without understanding why it was originally interesting, ripped it out and placed it directly in their product - but without any distinguishing features, it's just more tedium.
The totem puzzle, for me, feels like the designer had seen a puzzle of the aforementioned form, and without understanding why it was originally interesting, ripped it out and placed it directly in their product. Unlike the maze example where the puzzle was dropped in verbatim, though, the lack of understanding was at a level that extended to actually stripping out the elements that make it an interesting puzzle!
(This next section is specific to Pneuma, but the general theme is that if you want a player to understand a cause-and-effect early on then use it in a more advanced way layer, you must be very careful to make the cause-and-effect apparent in that early puzzle because the player won't return to poke around it any more)
You may be surprised after all these criticisms, but I do have to add that when the puzzles were good, I thought they were very good. That doesn't necessarily mean difficult; there's a fairly simple puzzle taking as its premise rearranging parts of a three-dimensional maze, and that's not particularly difficult - but it's got a clear objective, the internal mechanisms make a lot of sense, and it's a puzzle that can be solved. The sundial problem was a similar type of problem to the one I detailed earlier, but the consistent nature of the feedback made it easier to deduce the intention of the puzzle. Oh, and there's one other puzzle I had difficulty with - the two rooms of 4x4 tiles - but I will accept that the correct solution (not either of the onese that I assumed at first!) was adequately clued (and very nicely, too,
with the corners being subtly different between the mural on the wall and the tiles on the floor of the room
); I simply missed them. That's when the puzzle genuinely beat me, and I didn't feel in any way 'cheated' by the fact.
Wow, reviews are great. I have a feeling this will drop in price quickly, and I have lots of games in my PS Plus backlog to play. But I'm VERY tempted to buy it anyway. One of my most anticipated PS4 games. I'm not sure why, but it just appeals to me. I'm not really all that into puzzle adventure games, but I loved the first Myst and this is looking similar.
Is it releasing today? I actually have some gaming time for once today, so if that's the case it's already fucking sold
It's important to keep in mind the purpose of game reviews. In my opinion, these should be decently objective.
Sure, if I'm friends with Reviewer X, and I know we have very similar experiences when it comes to games, then it's useful to know that Reviewer X found the puzzles in Game Y to be difficult.
However, I think what's generally more important, and what is usually more desired out of a review, is a deeper thought. It's not very useful to know that Reviewer X personally had a difficult and frustrating time with the puzzles. It's much more useful to know that the puzzles are objectively well designed: that they grow in complexity, that solving a puzzle requires learning something new, that what you learned will continue to be of use in future puzzles, that these lessons build on one another, etc.; or that these puzzles are objectively poorly designed: they are arbitrarily complicated, solving a puzzle requires more luck than any sort of ingenuity, there's no cohesion behind the puzzles, etc. These sorts of claims can be made even by someone who's not a puzzle gamer, and had a tough and difficult time with a game.
If this is asking too much of a reviewer... well, then what are they getting paid to do then? Anyone can give their superficial experiences with a game. It takes skill and work to offer up an analysis.
Reviews can't be objective. One person might think the puzzles are well designed while another will not. There is no absolute truths here, it's all opinions.
Anyone know if this game is going live at 6PM GMT tomorrow across the board for both PS4 and Steam? Or will it launch at midnight for PS4 and possibly Humble DRM Free?
The first or the second? The first one is probably that you have to draw the path to the branch where that Nut/Fruit is sitting. The second is one is probably about the broken branches but on the panel it looks like there is one main branch that isn't broken. I guess this is the "goal"
This is where I get confused, though. And yeah, I mean that first puzzle with the two images where the reviewer asks you to try and solve it.
this probably indicates I'm just fundamentally not understanding how puzzles work in the game but what's to stop you from just drawing that line? Is there something about tilting the perspective? What's the actual puzzle mechanic?
Sorry to be so dense about this. 😅 thanks for your help!
I dont see how that excuses anything. Infact that surely augments his opinion, having the player do 700 puzzles (or whatever is the endgame threshold) without anything to break the monotony of it is an absolutely valid criticism.
If you like that, then thats fine. Nothing wrong with loving a game just for its mechanics. But its not hard to imagine how some would not. And its not unfair of them to not like it. Games like Painkiller can do just what they are mechanically built to do and NOTHING else but would you feel it unfair if someone said Painkiller got boring after shooting the 3000th bad guy? I would think not. Or Hitman GO.
It feels like people come into review threads to enforce their opinions and anything that doesnt fit that narrative is immediately wrong or silly or trolling for page clicks.
I mean, then you start getting into the issue of what constitutes a puzzle? Is every single puzzle solved in the same manner? Is determining how to traverse the area a puzzle? Is filling in the mazes the only sort of puzzle?
Some of this can straight up go into spoiler territory from what I've heard about The Witness and it's all very, very difficult to define.
It's important to keep in mind the purpose of game reviews. In my opinion, these should be decently objective.
Sure, if I'm friends with Reviewer X, and I know we have very similar experiences when it comes to games, then it's useful to know that Reviewer X found the puzzles in Game Y to be difficult.
However, I think what's generally more important, and what is usually more desired out of a review, is a deeper thought. It's not very useful to know that Reviewer X personally had a difficult and frustrating time with the puzzles. It's much more useful to know that the puzzles are objectively well designed: that they grow in complexity, that solving a puzzle requires learning something new, that what you learned will continue to be of use in future puzzles, that these lessons build on one another, etc.; or that these puzzles are objectively poorly designed: they are arbitrarily complicated, solving a puzzle requires more luck than any sort of ingenuity, there's no cohesion behind the puzzles, etc. These sorts of claims can be made even by someone who's not a puzzle gamer, and had a tough and difficult time with a game.
If this is asking too much of a reviewer... well, then what are they getting paid to do then? Anyone can give their superficial experiences with a game. It takes skill and work to offer up an analysis.
I'm definitely not a puzzle person, but I greatly respect Blow's game design chops and ambitions. Not only do I want to monetarily support the guy so that one day he'll make a game more to my tastes, but I figure that if I'm going to give a go at a puzzle game, I could do no better than to do it with a game made by Blow. So I plan on buying this when it releases on PSN despite having little to negative interest in puzzle games.
I'm confused about the points you're trying to make--and by the end of your post it sounds like you think people should just give money to Blow based on his reputation and past games, which goes against the whole objectivity thing because some people feel very differently about Braid and don't respect it whatsoever.
A puzzle is such a loose word that it can mean anything, and trying to break it down into it's component pieces is 100% missing the point. Is a jigsaw puzzle the same thing as a word puzzle? Is a word puzzle the same thing as a math puzzle? Are any of these things like programming, which is often equated to a puzzle? You cannot be objective when the definition of something isn't objective in and of itself. Objectivity is looking at a piece of chicken that's raw and saying, "That's raw chicken!" It has a state of being raw that is firmly defined.
Wasn't planning on getting this due to the pricing, but it will be hard to pass on. I think I'll first finish some games in my backlog, and then pull the trigger.
This is dangerous; there's a classic archetypal problem of adventure game design, where a puzzle that might seem perfectly clear to the author feels to the user that they're being expected to read the author's mind.
It's a very tricky balance to strike. I wrote an awful lot on this subject after playing Pneuma:
...yes, I write far too much when I talk about puzzles. Sorry!
All this is not necessarily anything to do with The Witness, but it does highlight the context I'll be appreciating it in!
Blow actually brought this up in a Giant Bomb interview, where the infamous cat hair mustache puzzle was brought up as an example where the author isn't looking at puzzles from the player's perspective
Obtuse is fine IMO if there's guidance and context. The Witness seems to have both, going by examples given in the IGN review and the other early footage I've seen. Puzzles teaching you rules for other puzzles, things in the environment providing clues and solutions, and so on. The open world goes hand in hand with that obtuseness because the context for one puzzle may be found elsewhere in your travels. The pacing isn't to pound your head against a puzzle but to move on and come back later with new knowledge.
I mean, depends on the genre? I for one would have zero interest on reading a review of a strategy/RTS game by someone who has zero experience or knowledge about the genre. That wouldn't be a review worth reading.
Metro review saying some of the puzzles are not "fun". I dont think Blow wanted to make a "fun" game though
And I cant believe people level criticism like "I dont want to do 100s of the same puzzle" or "I dont want to do 100 sudoku puzzles"
Such an unfair criticism towards the genre when that can be applied to any other genre. What do people want?
Portal or Talos Principle are must plays tonat least understand what these story puzzle games are about. Have they not seen how some simple mechanics can grow in complexity and how these games make exploration and storytelling so involved in the gamers head?
That quote from the Sims is damn excellent. It singlehandedly has me most excited
I mean, then you start getting into the issue of what constitutes a puzzle? Is every single puzzle solved in the same manner? Is determining how to traverse the area a puzzle? Is filling in the mazes the only sort of puzzle?
Some of this can straight up go into spoiler territory from what I've heard about The Witness and it's all very, very difficult to define.
The Giantbomb quicklook showed a "load game" screen and it seems to count solved panels. So I guess that means there are around 700 panels in the game and stuff like the row of panels after the intro area counts as 10 separate "puzzles".
I dont see how that excuses anything. Infact that surely augments his opinion, having the player do 700 puzzles (or whatever is the endgame threshold) without anything to break the monotony of it is an absolutely valid criticism.
If you like that, then thats fine. Nothing wrong with loving a game just for its mechanics. But its not hard to imagine how some would not. And its not unfair of them to not like it. Games like Painkiller can do just what they are mechanically built to do and NOTHING else but would you feel it unfair if someone said Painkiller got boring after shooting the 3000th bad guy? I would think not. Or Hitman GO.
It feels like people come into review threads to enforce their opinions and anything that doesnt fit that narrative is immediately wrong or silly or trolling for page clicks.
I think you are misunderstanding what people are saying about that particular review. It amounted to criticizing a racing game for "the constant need to run the next race". It was a critique of what the game was about, rather than how it was about it.
Metro review saying some of the puzzles are not "fun". I dont think Blow wanted to make a "fun" game though
And I cant believe people level criticism like "I dont want to do 100s of the same puzzle" or "I dont want to do 100 sudoku puzzles"
Such an unfair criticism towards the genre when that can be applied to any other genre. What do people want?
Portal or Talos Principle are must plays tonat least understand what these story puzzle games are about. Have they not seen how some simple mechanics can grow in complexity and how these games make exploration and storytelling so involved in the gamers head?
That quote from the Sims is damn excellent. It singlehandedly has me most excited
Can't wait to listen to the Giant Bombcast tomorrow. Hopefully they can share their impressions without spoiling too much. Brad is usually good about spoiler watch for new games.
