The Witness

Mr E

The hype is starting to build for this one. See this article on Wired about how The Witness might be your next puzzle obsession.

Interesting to note that this game is going to be 100 hours long for some people.
For an RPG or MMO, that's fine. For a puzzle game with finite mechanics, is 100 hours too long?

Out January 26th on PC and PS4.

tok9

Mr E wrote: »

The hype is starting to build for this one. See this article on Wired about how The Witness might be your next puzzle obsession.

Interesting to note that this game is going to be 100 hours long for some people.
For an RPG or MMO, that's fine. For a puzzle game with finite mechanics, is 100 hours too long?

Out January 26th on PC and PS4.

From looking at the trailer, it does look like the puzzles vary. There is one part where you seem to be guiding a boat around so I'd be interested to see if there are a lot of these types of puzzles.

Either way, it's a game I'd definitely be into.

Xenji

Mr E wrote: »

The hype is starting to build for this one. See this article on Wired about how The Witness might be your next puzzle obsession.

Interesting to note that this game is going to be 100 hours long for some people.
For an RPG or MMO, that's fine. For a puzzle game with finite mechanics, is 100 hours too long?

Out January 26th on PC and PS4.

The game is meant to have over 650 puzzles with more possible before release, hopefully they are well varied, if the game is anywhere near as good as Braid I will be quite happy with it.

Fakman87

Lads this is coming out next week. So excited for it. I never ever buy games on release but I'd easily pay 100 quid for this, Jonathan Blow is that impressive to me. He said he'd happily lose all of his Braid money making this, once it's a good game. That kind of sentiment is so rare these days.

gizmo

Getting pretty excited for it alright. Edmund McMillen (Super Meat Boy, Binding of Issac) tweeted these this morning too.

https://twitter.com/edmundmcmillen/status/691344659033911296

https://twitter.com/edmundmcmillen/status/691366038093475840

https://twitter.com/edmundmcmillen/status/691366202409484288

Mr E

A 10/10 masterpiece, according to IGN.
http://ie.ign.com/articles/2016/01/25/the-witness-review

Looking forward to giving it a good crack at the weekend.

johnny_ultimate

It's been a long goddamn wait for this. I'd still consider Braid one of the most important artistic (and indeed commercial) paradigm shifts in gaming history. As lengthy as the wait has been, I can't help but be even more excited that a creator with a genuinely intellectually, philosophically and formally robust engagement with the medium has taken his time to make his follow-up. I expect nothing but the best things here, which is potentially a gateway to disappointment, but if anybody can follow through on their promises...

https://killscreen.com/articles/the-witness-is-videogames-long-take/

If what creative lead Jonathan Blow says is true about the enduring faith that The Witness asks of its players (80+ hours of time/very small percentage of players will complete every puzzle) then it’s sort of the ultimate videogame-as-long take—a long take being when a film doesn’t cut away to a new shot for minutes on end. And I’m not talking about the Alfonso Cuaron kind of long take where there’s all sorts of high stakes suspense—like spinning space stations and last child to be born on Earth kind of tension. No, The Witness is more like a Bela Tarr or Andrei Tarkovsky long take.

tok9

I've already heard enough anyway.

I've finally got a PS4 now too.. all I need is a tv and i can play it! :pac:

Captain Chaos

Is this out for all PSN regions tonight or just the US. I can't see any other release dates than the 26th so I'm hoping it going live shortly.

GhostInTheRuins

I can't wait for this. I really love first person puzzle games and have been playing a lot of them lately, Talos Principle, Qube, Attractio and this looks great too.

The graphics look amazing, but the one thing I'm worried about is the puzzles, apparently all the puzzles are those maze puzzles so I'm curious to see how they can hold your interest all the way through. All the reviews sound very promising.

super_furry

5/5 from Giantbomb - http://www.giantbomb.com/reviews/the-witness-review/1900-730/

Think I'll be downloading it this week. Been a real long time since there's been a game like this.

DeSelby83

Its up on the US store for anyone who wants it. No sign on EU store yet but its supposed to be around this time too

EDIT: Its up on both stores now. 7gb download apparently

Otacon

Now we wait for the work day to finish.

Duggy747

This has been on my watchlist for years.

I ended up forgetting about it and now I realise it's out today, excellent surprise! :pac:

johnny_ultimate

Steam version sitting in my library, teasing me, taunting me, singing out of key...

Battleflag

Been off all day and the steam version doesn't unlock until 6pm! This is so unfair - can't wait to play it!

johnny_ultimate

Steam version is a go!

johnny_ultimate

Played a few hours there. Utterly engrossing, beautiful, enigmatic, intelligent.

This is about as pure as game design gets. No extraneous nonsense. No overly complicated systems, menus etc... Just a simple puzzle mechanic constantly subverted and expanded. I'm only 120 minutes in or so, but there's already been some inspired moments that completely throw you for a loop, or add ingenious new twists to trip you just when you think you've got the hang of a particular mechanic. There was one part involving a

suddenly invisible line in a 'symmetry puzzle'

that made me laugh aloud as it was such an unexpectedly brilliant flourish.

It's an incredible feat how everything is communicated here. No tutorials, no UI, no hints - simply an easy to understand central premise that is constantly built upon through environmental and gameplay guidance. I reckon if you want to teach game design students how to make a tutorial, the opening hours here are what you'd point to.

What a world it is too. I don't know if I've ever played a game with such vivid colour - really a feast for the eyes. Runs like a dream on PC (constant frame rate in the 100s with V-Sync off). It already seems jam-packed with mysteries and secrets - every stray path or point of interest I've found so far has led to something substantial and meaningful (well, if it's not locked behind a particularly baffling puzzle :pac:). I've only encountered one audio log so far, but the way the environment, art design and mechanics coalesce with each other means there's always narrative and thematic intrigue ticking away in the background.

I'm playing Xenoblade Chronicles X at the moment, a game which unquestionably has its pleasures. But it's an ungodly mess too - with half-baked systems that are both simplistic and weirdly convoluted, huge amounts of padding, painful exposition dumps, a UI and design that seems to actively want to pull you out of the world. The Witness, despite also being 'open' is the exact opposite, a masterpiece of minimalism and controlled communication. It has reinvented and surprised me several more times in two hours than Xenoblade has managed in ten. After a 2015 that offered a seemingly endless parade of bloated (if often enjoyable) open world games, The Witness at once seems like a critique and response to the prevalent mode of game design. The first two hours of this game were masterful and engrossing - here's to a few dozen more.

ShaneU

Haven't felt this stupid playing a game since Braid. Felt pretty clever figuring out one of the early tree puzzles though

so for those who have bought the game is it solving one line-board puzzle and then go the next one? so the island itself is just a conduit between puzzles?

johnny_ultimate

glasso wrote: »

so for those who have bought the game is it solving one line-board puzzle and then go the next one? so the island itself is just a conduit between puzzles?

They complement each other quite a bit. While obviously the puzzles are the core of the game, the island is a fascinating place to explore in itself and in some cases enhances the meaning and context of the puzzles. Without going into specifics, there was one series of puzzles I solved the opened up an area that recontextualised the mechanic that had just been explored, and fed into the game's overall narrative themes - and that's just through a small little area of environmental objects, without a word said

kearneybobs

glasso wrote: »

so for those who have bought the game is it solving one line-board puzzle and then go the next one? so the island itself is just a conduit between puzzles?

Almost, but not quit. It's hard to talk about the game without spoiling the stuff that you discover as you go along.

Walked myself into a corner I think last night and I'm not sure how to go on. Mostly since how thought I was actually understanding how the particular puzzle was solved I hit a wall on the last puzzle on the boards that progressively get harder. It's the one where you

have to solve the puzzles with the yellow block shapes and incorporate the shapes into the solution.

It's a head scratcher. Might just have to sit there and brute force it.... Had to take out the pen and paper last night to solve ones involving

colour changes in a greenhouse

VinLieger

Im hearing pretty positive stuff so far and really want to give this a go, but have a question for those who have played, do you think this would fit in well as a couch game with the GF? Ive seen 1 or 2 people saying it would but just looking for more opinions

kearneybobs

Got myself out of the corner I thought I was stuck in. Ended up realising that

to get back out and move the platform back to the other side you needed to draw it out on the puzzle that got you over there

. didn't realise it was a puzzle that had two answers. The answers being

a depiction of what you want the platform to do.

johnny_ultimate

May have audibly yelped when I solved this ****er:



And of course given the series of increasingly more difficult series of puzzles that followed, it now seems almost trivially easy :pac:

Interested Observer

Downloading as we speak for the PS4, can't wait to get into it. Will report back!

kearneybobs

Got a 1GB update on PC this morning. Not sure what that was about.

Mr E

I heard there were some complaints about some people getting motion sickness and Blow was working on a fix. Didn't think it would be out so quick though...

Interesting to see the number of negative reviews (and that they're the ones being shown first on the product page).
I guess this game isn't for everyone.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/210970/

strelok

I actually jumped out of my chair and started clapping when I solved a particular puzzle

disgusted with myself

johnny_ultimate

After making some very good progress today (including increasing my tape recorder count by 300% in the space of ten minutes :pac:) my mind has just become frazzled by a

shadow

puzzle. Hopefully the shape will be clearer with a refreshed pair of eyes

I played a bit last night. I absolutely loved braid so I had to get this. It's good but definitely overrated IMO. I don't think I've played as far as you guys but I've found the puzzles repetitive already. Same things with a slight twist. Is there any narrative at all? I don't like that it's first person either.