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The Witness |OT|
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LegendofLex
Member
That's not what I mean when I say it's a perfect tutorial.
I simply mean that it offers the player exposure to lots of different concepts that will resurface later in the game, all in the very first level, without having to resort to any direct explanation.
And most players figure out how to negotiate the level - that is, get to the end - without needing any direct instruction. (Even if they die once or twice against the first Goomba, or get a Game Over or two.)
That doesn't mean they find everything or get all the tricks down on the first or even twentieth try - I didn't know about the hidden 1up until I was an adult! But it means that the game manages to put a lot of stuff out there in the first level (including secrets!) without relying on hand-holding for the player to gain exposure to any of the included concepts. They're all there, to be discovered (or not!) - and that's no different than what you'll find throughout the entire rest of the game.
And I'd say it's actually better than the tutorials in The Witness because SMB never needs to dedicate a level to any one particular fundamental of the gameplay. It just gives you a microcosm for the entire game and lets you go right from the start.
There are all kinds of things that most players will never discover in basically every game. Very few of them give you access to so much of that discovery literally right from the get-go. They'll usually remain tightly linear and scripted until they've exposed you to every possible concept. That's not true of SMB.
I'm a big fan of text adventures, which are still being made and getting increasingly interestingly experimental. One from the early days of the renaissance was The Edifice, a game that's about human evolution through charting a few achievements of mankind. The first chapter is about the discovery of fire, the last is putting together the first principles of farming, but it's the second chapter that many people think is notable for being a genuinely brilliant puzzle, both conceptually and through implementation.
The premise of the second chapter: your son is sick, and you know that feverleaf can cure him, but you don't have any. In your exploration, you meet a Stranger; another prehistoric man. He knows where to find Feverleaf... but he doesn't speak your language. And so, through various attempts to communicate, through experimentation and discovery, and towards the end actually using his language for yourself... you have to simply work out how to ask him a question.
It's a superb puzzle. The language is fairly comprehensive, you'll have to discuss over a few tangents to reach the goal, and occasionally you'll make a wrong assumption about words and have to reconsider what they mean. And it's in that where I think it's leads back to The Witness; the way it's actually quite an open-ended puzzle, where solutions aren't really tied to the player's actions but instead through exploring a space of information to piece together sufficient to make it through the challenges ahead of you.
Jonathan Blow is The Stranger, and we can learn his language.
While I broadly agree with you, I feel obliged to point out 4-4, which may well catch a player out when they first encounter it.
Stumpokapow
listen to the mad man
I figured out you could
use the cursor when not on a puzzle panel
the puzzles could involve this
Well yeah, I am merely nitpicking. Technically, it would be slightly better design to introduce the player to jumping with something that can't kill them. That would decrease the chance of players simply running into the goomba and dying instantly. But it's a very minor thing.
It seems to be a trend among "high-brow" games criticism to make everything about race, class, gender etc... That silly Order: 1886 article did the same thing. They're important issues, but it can come off as "Look at me, look at me, I'm socially conscious!"
Anyway, the Challenge is busting my balls. Hopefully I'll do better after sleeping.
toythatkills
Member
Like I say though, none of that is really any different to most of its peers, yet for some reason 1-1 is held in much higher esteem.
It's a good training level, I won't dispute that, but I think it gets more credit than it deserves simply for being easy to analyse, and popular. Play almost any 2D platformer from the mid-1980s and the first level will teach you all you need to know without text.
Family Fry
Member
When I left the starting area, if you turn right there's a small overview of the dock.
I spotted a massive O------ My first thought was like cool another line puzzle. Pressed the X on it and it made a crazy noise, I crapped myself as I had headphones on and up loud. I then started seeing them everywhere.
The only mechanic that was horrendously explained and I wanted to punch my TV because of was that Tetrominos
. There was just no intuitive lead up to it and no reason to think something like that would be allowed. Ended up guessing it and then reverse engineering my guess. That or I missed something.
could be swapped in space
Remembrance
Member
It's always a watershed moment when an adventure game, text or graphical, is able to create a puzzle that works on a system of some kind. It's the very same problem Blow was trying to solve - most adventure games are so open-ended that there is no guarantee at any given time that you will know what you have to do.
Can't discuss this topic in this thread without mentioning Andrew Plotkin's games; he's been very consistent in making text adventures where you can learn a single system that governs all the puzzles. Hadean Lands and its alchemy system came close to some of the kinds of moments of revelation in The Witness, I think.
The one limitation of text is that there is mostly no real way to hide a clue in "plain sight", as The Witness does. Sometimes you have to resort to wordplay to make something non-obvious, which is less elegant.
I think this falls under challenging your assumptions. Why did you assume they couldn't? You'd already - by this point - seen puzzles that required you to understand that you could join the pieces into a whole, which informs you that you're not strictly outlining each individual piece - that's led you to the perception that it's the total outlined space that's critical.
I think it could have been made more explicit, certainly (I can imagine a puzzle that very simply outlines that premise). I'm not entirely sure it should have; it's one of the points in the game which out-and-out states: "Your assumption is incorrect. Figure out how."
There are examples of things that could be made more clear later in the game (I maintain a key rule about the tetris blocks was not well communicated), but for the instances we're talking about, I don't think it's really subjective, because the game is doing something very simple. In a game about jumping, you learn how to jump by jumping. You need to know what button to press, and then get placed into contexts in which you learn how to jump.
The Witness is about observation and non-verbal learning. It places you into situations where you are required to observe and learn from what you see nearby. Just like you gotta jump to learn how to jump, you need to observe to learn what to observe. Rules like cords connecting series of panels, which you follow to the next as they light up, don't need text boxes to tell you to do that. A door you cannot open having the tutorial placed a stone's throw away does not need a sign to tell you that you should keep exploring when you find a door you can't open. That's effective design.
You are asking for things that would fundamentally alter what the Witness is about, on every level. Which is fine - but that is saying you want the Witness to be something different, rather than The Witness not succeeding in what it attempts to succeed at.
hydrophilic attack
Member
I don't even mind that as a trend. These are important issues, and they need to be pointed out. In this particular case though, it felt more like an ad hominem against Blow personally. She stopped critiquing his game, and started critiquing him and the phenomenon which is his popularity and success. It just left a really bad taste in my mouth, which was a shame considering how thoughtful the critique was up until that point.
My very favourite puzzles - are those where the revelation comes from having a moment of realisation about the nature of the world itself. Sometimes that might even mean that the fact that there's a puzzle there at all is obscured (I can think of one secret passage in Graham Nelson's "Curses" - for instance - where finding the passage has very little to do with actions in the game and everything to do with realising the significance in backstory terms of a random paperback found in the attic), or the solution requires you to heavily reappraise any assumptions you may have casually made about the game world (Plotkin's own Spider and Web is an excellent example, there)
I'd say The Witness has very good implementations of both of those types of puzzle, along with great examples of the systemic puzzles you're describing.
Edit: Actually, I'm going to spoiler this, because there's some implications about The Witness you can read into my commentary.
SmiteOfHand
Member
I think she was struggling with trying to critique other write ups on the game, the game itself, and Blow as a person, as well as few other topics like 'indie games'. Probably would have benefited from focusing on smaller set of points, but I can't fault her too much for it.
LegendofLex
Member
I'd go so far as to say that I flat-out disagree that this was an unfair step. You needed to be able to realize that your initial assumption (
that each tetromino symbol had to be included in the specific shape drawn by the line enclosing it
a line enclosing one or more tetromino symbols must be drawn so that it includes all of the corresponding shapes
It's the way that
two tetromino symbols behave when paired together
I think a better example of a poorly explained rule was that
using a blue square to cancel out part of a shape actually allows an adjacent tetromino shapes to overlap on squares that are canceled
attempting to overlap tetromino shapes would have previously resulted in failure without that added condition
Again, I think I'd peg that as also challenging your assumptions.
Beforehand you weren't allowed solutions with overlapping pieces, but the assumption we'd made about them at that point was the idea that that was because overlapping wasn't allowed - which is challenged. It's not that overlapping isn't allowed, it's that the final answer must only have one 'layer'. Prior to the blue squares, however, there was no way to subtract a layer, so - yep - overlapping was perceived as not being allowed.
It probably helped me a lot that pretty much as soon as the blue squares appeared I was regarding them as "-1" while the yellow ones were "+1".; that was a convenient interpretation for me. I think if you're too attached at that point to the idea of physical placement of pieces, you'll find that assumption harder to challenge
To swap to coding talk for a moment, I strongly suspect that the internal implementation of the puzzle checker uses the +1/-1 implementation.
It probably helped me a lot that pretty much as soon as the blue squares appeared I was regarding them as "-1" while the yellow ones were "+1".; that was a convenient interpretation for me. I think if you're too attached at that point to the idea of physical placement of pieces, you'll find that assumption harder to challenge
To swap to coding talk for a moment, I strongly suspect that the internal implementation of the puzzle checker uses the +1/-1 implementation.
My mom actually played this level for the first time with me last weekend. It did not go well for her. She couldn't beat it. (But she was so cute trying to do it and had a blast running into gombas and falling in pits).
LegendofLex
Member
It's all ultimately about challenging your assumptions.
I guess I'm surprised more people were thrown by that particular one (
how tetromino combinations can be drawn
introducing an exception condition to configurations that previously would actually have yielded false results
I don't think it's fair to say that the idea that "overlapping tetrominos isn't allowed" is actually a false assumption. It's definitely true - blue squares simply interact with tetrominos in a way that renders the rule no longer true under specific conditions (when the overlapping squares are negated with a blue square).
Even your interpretation of +1s and -1s doesn't actually solve that issue, because you need the blue -1 to actually become a -2 (or a zero multiplier) to negate multiple +1s that are overlapping, or else you need to deduce that +1s don't stack when they overlap and are negated by a -1 (which still requires you to realize that the -1/zero multiplier removes all the pieces of the stack and thus permits them to overlap where they couldn't have prior).
I think the problem is really that it's difficult to deduce what the blue squares allow you to do without reaching the conclusion that it lets you do something that was actually invalid for previous puzzles. No one's going to look back and say "oh, this rule actually applies to the puzzles that don't involve a blue square, too" like they can with the valid tetromino representations one, which actually apply to every tetromino puzzle.
Even your interpretation of +1s and -1s doesn't actually solve that issue, because you need the blue -1 to actually become a -2 (or a zero multiplier) to negate multiple +1s that are overlapping, or else you need to deduce that +1s don't stack when they overlap and are negated by a -1 (which still requires you to realize that the -1/zero multiplier removes all the pieces of the stack and thus permits them to overlap where they couldn't have prior).
I think the problem is really that it's difficult to deduce what the blue squares allow you to do without reaching the conclusion that it lets you do something that was actually invalid for previous puzzles. No one's going to look back and say "oh, this rule actually applies to the puzzles that don't involve a blue square, too" like they can with the valid tetromino representations one, which actually apply to every tetromino puzzle.
I don't mind walking back the idea that it's poorly explained, but it's definitely the more devious of the assumption-tests in that area.
I'd assumed they couldn't because every other symbol mechanic was explained through tutorials that intuitively showed you how the mechanics gradually got more complex by puzzles that forcefully led you to those conclusions. The mechanic was fine once learnt, but they strayed from the fact that every other symbol mechanic was forcefully taught through puzzles. They made a pretty big jump with that one, it was just a bad puzzle. "Challenging your assumptions," is such a dumb saying to me, the game practically reinforces to you that you can rely on it to tell you the mechanics through the tutorial puzzles. Environment based puzzles are a different story, but every single symbol puzzle mechanic was taught to you in a methodical and logical way.
LegendofLex
Member
Yeah, for sure those two rules are among the only ones in the game that didn't have an accompanying "simple tutorial." It's really easy to imagine how that tutorial might look, too.
I don't think this is a flaw with the game, though. It's just a case where the game adds more friction to assumption-testing than it typically does in other cases.
I don't think this is a flaw with the game, though. It's just a case where the game adds more friction to assumption-testing than it typically does in other cases.
I have another one that wasn't quite clear to me, but maybe because of the way I played (Treehouse section):
In the treehouse section, the combination of stars with squares when there is only one star on the board. I believe you first come upon it after a series of 2-star puzzles along with more squares and they all involve keeping the stars in pairs as usual. Then you get a board with one white star, 4 black squares on the left, and 4 white squares on the right.
What indicated the rule up to that point? Did I miss something?
What indicated the rule up to that point? Did I miss something?
Remembrance
Member
That is the first time you are supposed to see that.
It's one of the times when you have to realize that the rule you learned up to that point was not the complete rule.
Right, but
we could always combine two stars + multiple squares with no issue, and at that point you need a square to combine with a star -- but only those two, IIRC.
You are right, it is a twist on the rule. We go from:
"Stars should always be paired. When paired, they can also go together with any other shape"
to
"If a star is alone, it must be paired with a shape of the same color. However, it now cannot be paired with other shapes of the same color"
You are right, it is a twist on the rule. We go from:
"Stars should always be paired. When paired, they can also go together with any other shape"
to
"If a star is alone, it must be paired with a shape of the same color. However, it now cannot be paired with other shapes of the same color"
See what I mean? I may be misremembering the exact rule, but it feels like more of a left-field"takeback" on the ruleset than even the
blue tetramino
Remembrance
Member
The key is that
other shapes of the same color never appeared with the stars until that point.
So the rule changes from:
"A star must be paired with exactly one other star of the same color, with no regard for any other shapes of different colors"
to
"A star must be paired with exactly one other shape of the same color, with no regard for any other shapes of different colors"
So the rule changes from:
"A star must be paired with exactly one other star of the same color, with no regard for any other shapes of different colors"
to
"A star must be paired with exactly one other shape of the same color, with no regard for any other shapes of different colors"
Aaahh, good point, you are right.
It's not as much of a stretch because we had never had that particular similar configuration before. Awesome
Zomba13
Member
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheWitness/comments/45csiv/i_believe_the_player_model_is_a_homage_to_carl/
(possible spoilers)
fake-edit: well damn.
As far as being modeled after Sagan, that was denied by Blow.
From the ama
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comme...n_blow_game_development_person_ask_me/czxvt56
Oh THAT's how that one puzzle worked.
My theory was that the pieces were placed next to each other off the grid, the 2x2 square deleted, then the remaining parts placed separately on the grid... hope you know the puzzle I mean. This presumed mechanic seemed clunky but my method of considering shapes to be placed consecutively and always deleting any 'blocking' squares before placing a shape where it would overlap was never challenged by another puzzle in the entire game, so I never put the idea to the test (though I've done so just now, and of course it doesn't work at all).
lol yea i dont know why im always forgetting the share button ..even in the coming pictures @@
i will put some photos to the place im stuck in (i checked double and third time that i completed all the puzzles in the region)
http://i.imgur.com/yzHQo9q.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/L5kMVBm.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/mLXyl7s.jpg
btw, this is for me the best puzzle in the whole game, so much fun and creativity in it (huge spoilers) :
http://i.imgur.com/UWcYuKx.jpg
SmiteOfHand
Member
^^ Late game spoilers.
H...have you walked through here? There is more stuff beyond that screenshot.
I speel my dreenk
Member
I was one of the (un)lucky(???) & unlikely folks who stumbled upon
the gate puzzle immediately - so I saw the credits area right off the bat. I watched the final video and had the game close itself afterwards, leaving me thinking I'd totally fucked up and seen something that I shouldn't have. It turned out not to matter too much, and allowed me to search for +'s the entire time
You must feel like the king of some sort of mountain right about now!
D
Deleted member 30609
Unconfirmed Member
this has probably been posted, but I liked this video of Casey Muratori explaining the boat glitch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwF7PJMB2ck
You're literally at the entrance to the challenge then!
focus less on those three puzzles and look around more, past the maze area.
Remembrance
Member
By the way, I just saw this for the first time and it's an amazing run as a whole.
I can't believe
he figures out the tetris rules from seeing them for the first time in the Town.
I've seen people saying that a lot but it is simply not true! There's a tutorial panel specifically dedicated to that rule. It's not the game fault if you didn't understand it and moved on
I did this too by the way. But the first time I was blocked by a tetrominos puzzle I remembered it, came by to it and immediately understood what it was saying.
Belgian Dude
Member
I've seen people saying that a lot but it is simply not true! There's a tutorial panel specifically dedicated to that rule. It's not the game fault if you didn't understand it and moved on
I did this too by the way. But the first time I was blocked by a tetrominos puzzle I remembered it, came by to it and immediately understood what it was saying.
If I'm not mistaken it's a sequence with 3 puzzles about one 2x2 square and one 1x2 piece. You need to move them around to get past them after the first one of the three.
I thought to myself "I never turned around and looked behind me at the very start. I bet there's something there. Wandered back down into the cave, saw the o-- line up and said out loud "you have got to be fucking kidding me". *Fizzle* *Whomp-woosh* - Felt good man
I finally completed the game last night. Truth be told, it feels like an enormous achievement having managed to reach the end without any external guidance , but I can't really say I enjoyed the experience as thoroughly as I'd hoped to when I started. I was particularly disappointed that (mild endgame spoilers)
. Does completing more puzzles significantly alter this experience?
the final puzzles revealed nothing in particular of note about the story or setting
Did you unlock all the lasers?
dammit, blow did a great job to hide some turns in this game @@
did some tries in the challenge, the last part need so much luck to find the puzzles :/
I've seen people saying that a lot but it is simply not true! There's a tutorial panel specifically dedicated to that rule. It's not the game fault if you didn't understand it and moved on
I did this too by the way. But the first time I was blocked by a tetrominos puzzle I remembered it, came by to it and immediately understood what it was saying.
yep lol
i dont think there's a single concept in the game that's not fully explained via tutorial panels
everyone that says otherwise obviously looked up or brute forced the solution(s) and didnt look at the solution and realize what it was showing them, moved on, and eventually hit harder puzzles where they didn't know what to do because of it
It put you back at the start for a new game didn't it? Have a look around a new game with more experienced eyes...
asker
Member
Achieved
last night, so far without any external help. Two things I wanna bounce around with you guys:
1.
by assuming
2.
in the desert temple
The Challenge
1.
Unlocked the boat vault
I need each line to touch only one color dots and/or black dots, and no line can pick up two equal-sized dots in sequence (this is the clue I got from the sounds). Did anyone find out or confirm the "actual" rules to this puzzle?
2.
In the second to last room
, there is a floating panel in the water. I can't for the life of me figure out what the point of this panel is. Anyone got any idea? Also, I embarrassingly brute forced the door opening puzzle in the same room (only time I felt I cheated a puzzle) Is there a proper way to catch a glare on the left side of that panel?
I was on the boat going going back around the mountain. I had seen a couple of things that resembled the puzzles, but I just dismissed their importance as following a motif for the island. When I went around the mountain while on the boat and saw the yellow pipe and trail, I did a double take and my jaw dropped; eyes widened.
"This changes everything!"
"This changes everything!"