The island is packed with purpose and filled with teases: desert ruins that appear to have broken puzzle panels on them, seemingly unreachable rooftops that have puzzles that surely you're supposed to be able to access, puzzles on beaches and in jungles, stuff in the town that seems to have to do with stuff in the forest or the temple. Sometimes you'll solve a puzzle and have a eureka moment about a totally different puzzle, halfway across the island. They soon evolve into hour-long stumpers marked with esoteric symbols, governed by hidden rules that must be discovered by solving other puzzles. The Witness's early puzzles are barely tougher than connect-the-dots. That's one of The Witness's greatest successes: It creates a wonderfully adversarial contest between its designer and its players. I was proud to have figured it out, and to not let Blow get one over on me. He didn't say it, but I guess there's something that happens in your brain when you ask for help you reassemble the problem and see it from a new angle. Man."īlow replied quickly, chuckling that that kind of thing happens to him with puzzle games, too. I spent so much time on that one-and way less on the way more complex propellor-symbol puzzles. Three minutes after hitting send, I sent a follow-up: "Never mind. Right after I sent it, I tried the puzzle again and immediately solved it. I just wanted to know if I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. That e-mail to Blow had been a qualified surrender. That sounds really simple, but trust me, it's not. In the puzzle above, you just need to draw a line from a circle to a nub. You walk up to the puzzle, then press a button, which locks you in place and produces a small cursor on the screen. Nearly all of them (maybe all of them?) involve drawing lines.
The island is densely packed with puzzles, some propped up for you to solve, many others masterfully hidden. You come upon them by wandering, in a first-person perspective, through the most beautiful island I've ever been to in a video game.
They're grids, seldom larger than six by six squares. "It's this one," I wrote in my e-mail to Blow, "which seems so simple, and yet." I attached a photo.Ī lot of puzzles in The Witness look like that. You know in the back of your mind that it isn't, and you're just a failure. It's the thing you do when you've tried everything else and are considering, hubristically, that maybe the problem is with the game. I view this sort of thing-e-mailing a game developer questions about his difficult game-as a last resort. I'm wondering if you can tell me if I should be able to solve it or if it is dependent on me doing something else in the game first." "One puzzle, though, is really vexing me," I continued, "I'm not sure if I should be able to solve it yet. I needed him to know that I hadn't buckled early. "I've solved a LOT of puzzles." I listed my accomplishments in the game so far. "I've been playing for much of the day and am having a good time," I wrote. I feared that Blow's magnificent new puzzle game had deadended my ability to reach a solution. While playing The Witness for this review, I wrote an email to its lead creator, Jonathan Blow.
0 kommentar(er)
