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Jonathan Blow's new game, The Witness, is out

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Re: Jonathan Blow's new game, The Witness, is out

#201

Post by eridius »

webkike wrote: post #112

One of the things I did not like is the sometimes incredibly obfuscated association of symbols with mechanics. For example, the panels with sun symbols. [Spoilers] It didn't take me incredibly long to figure out that they needed to be grouped in twos, but it did take me longer to figure out than to solve the first ~8 introductory panels. And the worst part, how is a star in any way connected with grouping by twos????

Please please please do NOT PUT SPOILERS INTO THE SECOND COMMENT IN THE THREAD. That's incredibly rude. At the very least, if you're going to do something like that, rot13 it, because people like me will see the spoiler before they read the word "[Spoilers]".

Re: Jonathan Blow's new game, The Witness, is out

#202

Post by iandanforth »

I was going to buy this game until I read the steam reviews. If you're considering this purchase I highly recommend reading the top-rated helpful reviews. They changed my mind, they might change yours.

TLDR for the reviews - Only buy this if you like puzzles for individual puzzle's sake, not as means to unlocking a larger story.

Re: Jonathan Blow's new game, The Witness, is out

#204

Post by jcl »

hbex5 wrote: post #45

And it is wonderful . It's one of those games that manages to push buttons in your brain you never knew you had, and make you feel like a genius when something finally clicks. And it does all this without ever needing to explain anything. Jonathan Blow's enigma variations. A meandering meditation on the means by which humans gain knowledge and understanding of the world, by standing on the shoulders of a hacking mini…

If anyone is interested in how the game's beautiful lighting works, Ignacio Castaño wrote several articles about his work on it:

http://www.ludicon.com/castano/blog/tag/witness/

Re: Jonathan Blow's new game, The Witness, is out

#205

Post by alowe »

dharma1 wrote: post #62
hurricaneSlider wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm 100% sure Jonathan Blow can install Ubuntu. He is writing his own programming language. For a game like that, it just isn't economically feasible to develop for Linux. Especially since the engine was written from scratch. He spent more or less all of the profits on his previous release on this new game. From the videos I've watched about the dev, he is somewhat of a perfectionist. It would likely rankle him to re…

I had a quick look at the trailer and it looked to me like it could have been built with Unity or Unreal Engine... wondering why own engine, given the effort to then port the game to other platforms?

The trailer is intentionally vague to avoid spoilers. I thought the same thing playing through the game for the first hour or so until I got to a puzzle that made me realize why they built their own engine.

MINOR SPOILERS: Some of the later puzzle mechanics rely on playing with lighting and perspective in a way that seems to me would be difficult to implement in a stock engine.

Re: Jonathan Blow's new game, The Witness, is out

#207

Post by joshschreuder »

archagon wrote: post #190

(SPOILERS, obviously. Mostly surface-level.) I absolutely love the game, but for the sake of discussion, I have to admit that I'm slightly disappointed by the puzzle-paneliness of it all. I didn't read many spoilers over the 8 years of its development, but Jonathan Blow always made a point to emphasize the epiphany-based nature of the game. I took this to mean that as you gain knowledge from the panels, you slowly be…

I can kind of see where you're coming from. I think it might be because the puzzles don't seem to produce much if any overall progress and there's no real indicator of the bigger picture you're trying to achieve (though in some ways you may argue this is also one of its strengths).

Look at a title like Talos Principle for example, which while not a like for like comparison has a quite clear sense of an overarching story and progression.

Interesting that you mention Super Metroid - I have some of my strongest and fondest memories with the things you mentioned, the wall jumps, blowing up the glass with the Power Bomb, etc. Things that felt surprising, not like deus ex machina, but which felt like genuine discoveries that made sense.

I think the Witness has these, but at a much smaller level. Discovering the rules for a particular puzzle gives that huge rush for me, but I haven't seen it translate to the game as a whole.

Re: Jonathan Blow's new game, The Witness, is out

#208

Post by darklajid »

I've gotta be honest. I have no idea who Jonathan Blow is. I checked the Steam Store page and it seems .. to be not my thing.

That said, I recently found, bought and played 'Pony Island' (if you don't know what that is: Do NOT watch videos. Think '6th Sense' - you'll ruin the game). That wouldn't have caught my eye based on random videos/screenshots either and it's right now my 'best game ever'.

Can someone explain why 'The Witness' is interesting? Why would it trend here? What's the relation between HN and Jonathan or this game?

Re: Jonathan Blow's new game, The Witness, is out

#209

Post by hibikir »

amichail wrote: post #50
hbex5 wrote: post #45

And it is wonderful . It's one of those games that manages to push buttons in your brain you never knew you had, and make you feel like a genius when something finally clicks. And it does all this without ever needing to explain anything. Jonathan Blow's enigma variations. A meandering meditation on the means by which humans gain knowledge and understanding of the world, by standing on the shoulders of a hacking mini…

Isn't it like those ill-defined puzzles where you need to say what number comes next? Any number can come next.

There are two major kinds of puzzles:

1)Puzzles about getting a solution that follows a set of rules, which can be deduced, and are reused from puzzle to puzzle. The game just checks that the rules are followed, so there is more than one valid solution sometimes. The different solutions might even have different effects.

2)Environmental puzzles, where the right solution is indicated by the environment. Without giving too much away, imagine that there's a line near the puzzle, matching the puzzle's grid, and the solution is just to trace that same line in the puzzle.

So there's never an arbitrary rule that you can't figure out. That said, a part that is difficult for some people is that they make assumptions about what the rules of the puzzles are, and the assumptions might be incomplete, or outright wrong. There's typically simple puzzles that are trying to teach you the rules. Part of the game's progression is to find those tutorial puzzles.

Re: Jonathan Blow's new game, The Witness, is out

#210

Post by ACow_Adonis »

samatman wrote: post #160
nwhitehead wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with sequence A096774 (numbers with 9*10^n+7 prime)? Why is sequence A000027 (numbers starting at 1 increasing by 1 each time) better? Because it comes earlier in the encyclopedia of sequences?

A000027 almost certainly has a lower Kolmogorov complexity. Nothing wrong with the other sequence, per se... the maxim "When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras" appiles.

Unless you're in Africa?

By which I mean, I think it's a common misconception amongst those that argue this is a common misconception that the knowledge which they possess and view as straightforward, natural and obvious, is neither straightforward, natural, or obvious.

Common sense is really just another phrase for popular bias...

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