i might get back to wow when or if the workload drops
also Ive tried The Witness last night and ouch, my brain. it's a puzzle game, like literally you jjump from puzzle to puzzle. it's WAY more inventive than you'd be lead to believe looking at gameplay footage.
the main gimmick is the sort of "maze" puzzle where you draw a line on a grid through the right path start to finish. all puzzles are like this and they inrease in complexity and difficulty. it's a 3d first person game, beautiful graphics btw, you're stuck on an island and you explore it. everything is very abstract. there's no "story" in the traditional sense. there are statues of people laying about, i think you're supposed to interpret their positioning and symbolism, but so far everything is going over my head.
you discover small audio logs consisting of voice recordings, a man and a woman reading quotes. there's also an easter egg room where you unlock videos of people giving speeches. both the quotes and the speeches, so far, adress the path of rationality and science as a human drive to mental clarity, and also existential considerations on life, death, etc. I'm thinking that there's no correlation between the different soundbites, rather they build ambience and introspection, almost as if the game were about logic (in solving puzzles) and spirituality (in immersing yourself in this ficional world).
as for the puzzles, you'd be surprised. I thought that the gimmick would run old fast, but man do these people think outside the box. like, I have literally no idea as to what the solution of many of these are, and I'm lead to believe that you're meant to deduce it from the environment. which is NOT clearly explained at all. Is the solution nearby, or on the other side of the island? how would you correlate the two?
this is the one thing that I'm struggling with in the game. I understand that the point of it all is to just wander about solving what puzzles you can solve, and leaving the tougher ones to a later stage. still, the pacing is unintuitive (which I strongly believe is purposeful). for example, there are symbols sometimes on the grid that mean the rules under which the puzzle should be solved. one such case is white and black dots: you need to isolate the white from the black in order for the solution to be valid.
yet as you walk from a location to another you will suddenly face puzzles with symbols you don't recognize. now there are tutorial segments in the game to guide you through new rulesets, but one of these is literally on the other side of the island, far far away from the point where you started. i didnt know if this was the case or if i had to decipher the symbols - and i tried to do that, failed. it was a little bit frustrating.
maybe though i just wasn't mindful of how the game plays out. a lot of these games can only be played if you start "thinking like the game", and that takes time.
either way, it's really cool
also Ive tried The Witness last night and ouch, my brain. it's a puzzle game, like literally you jjump from puzzle to puzzle. it's WAY more inventive than you'd be lead to believe looking at gameplay footage.
the main gimmick is the sort of "maze" puzzle where you draw a line on a grid through the right path start to finish. all puzzles are like this and they inrease in complexity and difficulty. it's a 3d first person game, beautiful graphics btw, you're stuck on an island and you explore it. everything is very abstract. there's no "story" in the traditional sense. there are statues of people laying about, i think you're supposed to interpret their positioning and symbolism, but so far everything is going over my head.
you discover small audio logs consisting of voice recordings, a man and a woman reading quotes. there's also an easter egg room where you unlock videos of people giving speeches. both the quotes and the speeches, so far, adress the path of rationality and science as a human drive to mental clarity, and also existential considerations on life, death, etc. I'm thinking that there's no correlation between the different soundbites, rather they build ambience and introspection, almost as if the game were about logic (in solving puzzles) and spirituality (in immersing yourself in this ficional world).
as for the puzzles, you'd be surprised. I thought that the gimmick would run old fast, but man do these people think outside the box. like, I have literally no idea as to what the solution of many of these are, and I'm lead to believe that you're meant to deduce it from the environment. which is NOT clearly explained at all. Is the solution nearby, or on the other side of the island? how would you correlate the two?
this is the one thing that I'm struggling with in the game. I understand that the point of it all is to just wander about solving what puzzles you can solve, and leaving the tougher ones to a later stage. still, the pacing is unintuitive (which I strongly believe is purposeful). for example, there are symbols sometimes on the grid that mean the rules under which the puzzle should be solved. one such case is white and black dots: you need to isolate the white from the black in order for the solution to be valid.
yet as you walk from a location to another you will suddenly face puzzles with symbols you don't recognize. now there are tutorial segments in the game to guide you through new rulesets, but one of these is literally on the other side of the island, far far away from the point where you started. i didnt know if this was the case or if i had to decipher the symbols - and i tried to do that, failed. it was a little bit frustrating.
maybe though i just wasn't mindful of how the game plays out. a lot of these games can only be played if you start "thinking like the game", and that takes time.
either way, it's really cool
![[Image: iPJsc4U.png]](https://i.imgur.com/iPJsc4U.png)