LogFAQs > #967000031

#23: Understand

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/1/1/AAA-H0AADhE3.jpg

The Witness is, in my opinion, one of the greatest puzzle games ever made. Possibly the greatest. It annoys me to say that, because it can only stroke Jonathan Blow's enormous ego, and he's kind of a dick, but it's simply the truth - he made a masterpiece. Outer Wilds, Baba Is You, and Retrun of the Obra Dinn are all in that mix for me as well, but The Witness came out first, it's the one I played first, and it truly and properly blew my mind. There's a lot of things I like about it - its clever, out-of-the-box problem solving, its focus on being attentive and catching little details, the way in which you have to put everything together piece by piece to understand the game in full. But the best aspect of The Witness is the way in which it teaches the player. The puzzles have rules, but there is no explanation for the rules; the player is simply left to intuit the answers by themselves, by following the game's examples, and figuring out how the puzzles work. Many of my favorite moments in The Witness were going "aha!" at a puzzle after having figured out how it worked.

Understand takes that part of The Witness and makes an entire game out of it. Understand is not as good as The Witness; if The Witness was on this list it'd be my #2 or #3 game. Don't go into this expecting The Witness; this game is a small, simple little puzzle game with no frills. But it does have quite a bit of depth and challenge, and it does make for a really excellent companion piece - a game that's clearly taking after The Witness's mechanics and ideas and adding its own little twist to it.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/1/2/AAA-H0AADhE4.png

I don't want to overexplain Understand. This a game, after all, about Understanding, and that should be left for you to do on your own. This game has no text, and offers no hints at all; you simply have to start playing and figure out for yourself what you need to do. So if the concept interests you, I would play it without looking up too much more about it.

If you want to know a little bit more still, then I'll explain the very basics of the game. Much like The Witness, you need to draw a single line that cannot overlap itself, on a grid that has symbols on it. There's sets of puzzles, and each set of puzzles has its own 'rules' that need to be followed. Figuring out those rules for each set of puzzles is its own new challenge of deduction - the game starts out by giving you some puzzles that help show you the solution, then requires you to figure out what's going on.

One of the things I always expected to see in The Witness that it never really does is having puzzle rules that trick you into thinking you understand them, but it turns out that you had it wrong the whole time. Understand seizes on this - some sets of puzzles make you think that you understand the rules correctly, but there'll be some twist where it was actually some other rule that you didn't know you were fulfilling correctly, and suddenly it doesn't work like it should. There's so much creative puzzle work like this in Understand and it makes it a real joy to see what each new set of puzzles is going to bring.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/9/1/3/AAA-H0AADhE5.png

I have yet to beat Understand. It's an extremely hard game; I've probably completed something like 75% of the game's puzzles, but I've gotten kind of stymied on the rest. The game really asks a lot of you - the game's 'rules' can get quite complex or difficult to figure out, more than you would expect, and devising a way to solve them takes a lot of brainpower. But it's fun as hell. I'm completely content to let this game sit uncompleted - looking up the answers to a puzzle game would sort of defeat the point. If I never complete the game, that's fine - I can always come back to it someday and try again.

Understand's not for everyone - it's a dry puzzle game with simple graphics and no music. But it is for me! It's a pretty cheap game so I'd recommend it to anyone who really liked the puzzles in The Witness. It's not as good, but nothing is. At the very least, this goes into my pantheon of cool puzzle games to check out; even if it takes a lot of ideas from The Witness, it's got its own ideas as well, and a creative puzzle game like this one isn't something that comes around all that often.

Next up: I already talked about this game's imitator, but it's got nothing on the real thing.