LogFAQs > #933412522

#4





Years of release: 2016 (PC/PS4/XB1), 2017 (iOS/...what in the FUCK is an Nvidia Shield, wikipedia?)
Beaten?: 100%

I am in absolute awe of The Witness and what I think it accomplished to a degree that it is difficult to talk about this game without going into superlatives and pretentiousness, and yet somehow I only ranked this game #4. #4! It's an insult to a game that I loved so much that I don't know if I'll ever love a puzzle game this much again.

I have a lot of puzzle games on this list, and I think the reason is that I love those "a-ha" moments. They're everywhere in games, not just puzzle games; moments when you realize a new strategy that can be employed, moments when you find the last collectable you were looking for, moments when you finally get the hang of some skill or move that you couldn't pull off, those are all "a-ha" moments to me and they're the sort of things I live for in video games. But puzzle games in particular deliver some of the most truly breathtaking a-ha moments for me, the ones where you sit and look at a puzzle for a while, not understanding, not figuring out the key behind it, and then when it all clicks together, that satisfaction of suddenly seeing what you weren't able to see before. It's something that games like Baba Is You and Portal excel at, and I think The Witness delivered this for me more than most games I've ever played.

It's kinda hard to talk about The Witness in words, because the game certainly doesn't use any, and the things I could describe could potentially ruin the experience of seeing them for the first time and having to reckon with them yourself, which I think is a really critical element of this game, even if it's not the sort of game that could traditionally be "spoiled." But also, if I were to describe it in the most basic words possible, it would sound really basic. You wake up on a beautiful, deserted island and there's mazelike puzzles everywhere that you can solve. There are no explanations. Not your reason for being there, and not for how any of the puzzles work. That's the beauty of this game - the only way you can learn the rules of the puzzles is by playing them and trying to understand the way the puzzles are teaching you how to do them.

It's a simple enough concept but the way the puzzles build on themselves, adding new elements to the core basics and previously-understood rules, playing with the different possible ways that you could solve these puzzles, that's what led to all these a-ha moments for me - there's a great deal of satisfaction in coming to understand, without being told, how to solve a new type of puzzle element, simply through inferrence, by testing what works and what doesn't. It's all very simple and intuitive and the end but the journey of getting there isn't simple, and the various different ways the game introduces new challenges to its puzzles are consistently surprising right to the very end.

I played this game over screenshare with Dels, who I hope won't be too annoyed that I shouted him out again - we play a lot of games co-op together. I think that playing this game with an engaged co-op partner really added a lot to this experience for me - the two of us were able to act as two pairs of eyes and two brains, looking for things the other missed, bouncing ideas around that the other didn't think of, and when one of us got tired or frustrated, the other one could instantly take over and have a crack at it, totally fresh. I do think it's important to mention this, because it made me realize that I might have had a different experience playing it alone, and others migth have had a VERY different experience playing it alone - this is why this list is my list! Even working at it together the game was not easy; wouldn't call it one of the world's hardest puzzle games, it seems designed to be relatively intuitive (I'd put it roughly on the level of a Baba Is You but FIRMLY below The Fool And His Money or the horrifying abomination that is Snakebird), but it was challenging, and for me just the right level of a brain workout. I liked the variety - some puzzles require you to think out of the box and examine new possibilities, while others are just the type where you need to crunch to find the answer. I like both, and the game swapped between the two styles pleasingly often. That's about the most that I'm willing to say about how this game operates.

Also, I just adore how this game looks. The world is nothing short of gorgeous to look at, and similar to how I was talking about how much I love the outdoors in my Firewatch writeup (remember like three weeks ago? jeez I've been putting these last writeups off because I didn't have the words for them) I found myself just kind of wishing I could find a hammock in this game and chill out in it. There's no music (not much, anyway), just a lot of very pleasing ambiance and the occasional sound effect when you activate a puzzle, and the soothing atmosphere really enhanced the experience of walking around, exploring, deciding which puzzles to do next. Puzzle games have a slight tendency to be clinical and dry, so I found the warmth of this one welcoming.

A lot of people on the internet seem to prefer to talk about this game's themes and what it all means, and while I certainly think there are interesting philosophical topics to plumb here, that conversation doesn't interest me too much, not with this game - I don't think there's that much here. But this game as an instruction on game design is a topic I could talk about pretty much forever. I've always been fascinated by how puzzle games are designed and this along with Baba are maybe the two I find the absolute most fascinating - trying to imagine how this game was built kind of blows my mind, and trying to imagine how carefully it was fine-tuned blows my mind twice over. It all comes together so ridiculously seamlessly that I'm not sure how this game could ever be repeated, and I feel a great urge to celebrate it while I can. I can't believe I only ranked this game #4 but here we are, games are really good nowadays I guess.

This was the last unpredictable game on my list by the way. Anyone who's read my list so far, even if they don't know me, could infer the top 3 games - they're all easy.