As I mentioned in the Steam summer sale 2017 thread, I picked up a copy of “The Witness”. Spice Weasel is also playing, and suggested opening a thread so we can discuss as we play through. Mahaloth was also interested in hearing our thoughts as we played through, since he has played the game before. So as to not hijack the Steam thread any further, here is the thread for “The Witness”.
As I mentioned in the Steam thread: first impressions are that it reminds me very much of Myst. You’re alone on a deserted island, which has obviously been previously inhabited, and you have to solve puzzles to get access to various locations and also to figure out the underlying mystery.
I’m about four hours in so far. Some of the puzzles have been pretty easy to figure out, some took a little more thinking, and several have me absolutely stumped at this point. I did see where there was a “puzzle guide” available that doesn’t provide the solution to any particular puzzle but does cover the mechanics of the various puzzle types. I’m not sure this is spoiler-worthy but I’ll spoiler it anyway just in case: the guide says that
for each type of puzzle, there is a “tutorial” area somewhere on the island where you should be able to figure out for yourself how that type of puzzle works. The trick, I suppose, is finding the tutorial area for each type before you come across the harder puzzles of that type.
And one definitely spoiler-worthy thing: I have found
Yes, I’ve run into one of those. It seems kind of pointless, you’ve already solved that puzzle, why keep making you go back?
Some of the puzzles I’m hung up on at the moment:
[ul]
[li] The ones with the Tetris-like shapes. I figured out how to solve those when the pieces are along the edges, but have run into a few with a shape in the middle of the grid, which have me baffled for the moment.[/li][li] The ones where there is a break in the grid right where you need to go. In fact there is one I’m stuck on that is a 2x2 grid, you’d think something that small I could just brute force the solution, but I’ve tried everything and still can’t seem to get past it.[/li][li] There are a few where I have completed an entire series except for the last one, which doesn’t seem to follow the rules of the previous puzzles in the set. But I’m sure I am just not seeing something obvious if I’ve gotten that far.[/li][/ul]
I’m trying desperately not to hit any hint pages, I really want to try to work these out on my own. A question for anyone who has already played – should I be taking notes as I go along?
I can tell you that I already wish, at least once, I had taken a screenshot of a certain clue.
Notes seem like a good idea.
We’re still trying to figure out the tetris pieces. It’s gotten to where the landscape is so huge it’s difficult to determine how everything is related. Monitors and cables everywhere.
Am I the only one a little bit creeped out by this game? Creepy statues, creepy voice recordings, and occasionally you catch a glimpse of your own shadow.
I didn’t take notes and I should have. I definitely have used hints websites just to remind myself of the rules for the symbols. (I always forget how the sunsets work!)
For the tetris pieces, you can stick them together as long as you keep the symbols inside the shape and that often will make a large enough shape that it touches a side.
You should take notes. In many ways(and this is not my idea originally), The Witness is an example of how to educate people with zero language. You are learning, learning as you go. As the game progresses, you will need the information you learned before.
Never look up anything unless you have been busting your brain for days. You will regret it. All solutions and explanations are online, but so are huge spoilers. Huge.
Sounds like you are doing well. You have not yet discovered the greatest secrets, including some things that will make your jaw drop.
It’s a great game with one of my favorite “oh shit” moments. That being said, I think I gave up after about 20 hours. It just became too damn hard for me. Even after looking at walkthroughs to understand the rules, I still just couldn’t grasp some of the puzzles.
Now I’m wondering if I should start over and start taking notes from the beginning. I’m only about 6-7 hours in, it’s not like I have that much time invested up to this point.
I think the “oh shit” jawdropper is one of my favorite moments in gaming, but everyone’s experience will vary.
My wife and I are hardly expert puzzlers and we made it through, doing everything except for a bonus thingy.
We found that having a paper notebook with notes about how things worked helped. Also, my wife made cut out, physical models of the “tetris” puzzles and maybe a couple other types.
No, I think you can go back and look around if you need to walk back and look at older puzzles or something, that should be fine.
I’m glad I’m not sitting next to a new player. I would not be able to contain myself from screaming hints.
I just started up the game today. Nice and relaxing. I typically don’t have much patience for puzzles in, say, RPG games - usually because they’re either tedious or poorly designed or both, but I’ve been enjoying these so far. Kinda neat how the puzzles build up and teach you as you go.
I’ve been approaching the game pretty methodically, checking nooks and crannies, and making sure I’m covering each region before moving on, to the extent that I can - there’s a lot of spots where you need to come back to a puzzle for various reasons, but so far I haven’t had to travel more than a dozen paces away to do a thing that lets me finish a puzzle.
I’ve only jotted down on thing so far. the line drawn on hex paper you find in a box behind the door in the hill just after the first area. I hope I don’t regret not listing all of the rules I’ve learned so far.
I’m sure I’ll break and look up puzzle solutions online, probably sooner than most here, but so far I’ve been able to keep up with the game.
So, after I made my last post, the next area I went to was a sort of eqyptian archeological dig kinda place. Cue three hours of swearing and sweating and looking at guides.
[spoiler] Took me quite a long time of wandering around and trying to interact with inactive decor before I broke and found a hint telling me to use the Sun’s glare on the puzzles to see the scratches.
Turns out, the game doesn’t play well with my monitor. I can’t see the scratches. I can’t even see them very well on the guides. It’s a nice, new monitor, too. I dunno what’s wrong. I had to compare and contrast between two guides just to make out partial answers to each puzzle and guess the rest. Cheating with the guide on this section was harder, by far, than figuring out all of the previous puzzles on my own.[/spoiler]
I’ll stick with the game a bit further, but if I run into any more areas like the dig site, I’m done.
You might want to check your monitor’s gamma setting or check if the dynamic range is set to limited (16-235) or full (0-255). I recently started using a tv as my monitor and had to change Nvidia control panel to limited range to get the correct gamma.
Thanks for the suggestion. It turns out the dynamic range is set to full, which I believe is correct for PC monitors. After checking that I swallowed my mild technophobia and futzed around a bit more with my other monitor and display settings. Calibrating didn’t make any difference, but then I noticed an odd feature on my monitor settings (which I haven’t messed with since I first set it up), and switched it from the default to “graphics”. Oh my god.
I thought my monitor was nice before, but I just loaded up Andromeda multiplayer and played a game (happened to put me in the new Aqua map, night version). It’s freakin’ gorgeous! The colors are so bright, everything is sharper, and the enemies that were distant and/or in shadow were very distinct compared to how it was earlier. I’m puking a rainbow right now.
I imagine I should have no further troubles, visually, with The Witness from this point.
I’ve been plugging away at the game still, and enjoying the puzzles for the most part (no more visual difficulties). I usually just use guides for puzzles in most games because they’re often so poorly designed and/or ruin the flow of the gameplay, but in this game the puzzles mostly make sense and build upon one another in a way that is fun and engaging, and makes me feel smart for completing them.
But I have been cheating a bit. Maybe about half the time when coming across a new kind of puzzle I look up a hint (IGN’s walkthrough is good for providing a slight initial hint without spoiling everything) because I get so lost trying to guess what new thing I’m supposed to know to start the puzzle. I’m also getting lazy/impatient for the payoff, so I often cheat the last puzzle, or two, sometimes, of a series rather than taking the time to sort it out myself.
Sometimes I feel that I’ve only cheated myself when I do that, but when the puzzle solution would involve extensive note-taking and drawing, not so much.
I think I’m nearing the end, but
I did notice something about “environmental puzzles” and “tunnels” on the guide sites, and I haven’t even begun to have an inkling as to how to figure those out, aside from occasionally seeing catwalks I can’t get to or obelisks that seem like they must mean something but don’t respond to anything I’ve tried.
I also
have found and played 2 of the videos under the windmill. Very strange and interesting. I’ve only found one more vault door… if I could remember where it is I might be able to open it now, so I believe I’m missing 4 more videos. For that matter, I have a feeling I’m finding only a portion of the recordings scattered around the island, despite looking in every nook and cranny I can.
So I’m thinking I should probably try to finish up that stuff before the end game, but I don’t have the patience for it. I wanna know what the “oh shit” moment is!
I was stuck on that one for over an hour, looking around all over the place looking for visual clues. I accidentally solved the second one, and was trying to work out what kind of logic it was following. When I finally realized the birds were singing the solutions to me my jaw dropped.
That one was pretty cool. That was one where I looked at the hint pretty early on, and then I felt like I shouldn’t have because the puzzle looks like a sine wave. But there’s no way to know how long I would’ve taken to get it on my own.
I’m hoping/expecting something cool and relevetory at the end. People have been so delightfully/infuriatingly vague about it, from what little commentary I’ve risked reading. Maybe it’s not going to be much after all. Still a decent game, but there’s definitely a sense that something cool should come out of this, what with the recordings and all.
The Witness was a favorite of mine. For some puzzles, I needed not just a pen and paper, but also (very vague hint, but in the interests of no spoilers)The video function on my cell phone. I won’t elaborate further, but some stuff moved quickly enough that I needed to capture a particular static image in an animation.By the end, my desk looked like the stereotypical obsessed detective/serial murderer/crazed fan, with Post-It notes everywhere with weird scribblings, circlings, etc.
You definitely want to explore in a “breadth first” fashion. If you get stuck, try something else. Don’t bang your head on one puzzle for too long; chances are, you’ll learn what to do in another location.
As for the jungle puzzle:I agree, that was a great one. I recall sitting back, thinking about it, listening to the background sounds… until finally the solution hit me. A nice moment of revelation, and a reminder that sometimes you need to “defocus” a bit to make progress on a problem.
