Yep, it’s probably a throwback to the puzzle in Braid of a similar kind.
But in Braid, it made more sense as it was a game about time, plus you could walk away for most of it. In The Witness, the structure of the puzzle is such that you need to come back every few minutes or you’ll need to start over.
Yeah it’s not a high point.
If you’re basically done with the game, I’d recommend just looking up the solutions for the last environmental puzzles, because some of the hardest ones to find are actually the most epic.
I watched a speed-run after I quit trying to find them all. I had only found one out of like 5 or 6 that involved the videos. Then mostly negative space ones. The only one in particular that sticks out that I should have figured out was the one that you need to shoot the black cloud with the laser.
Man, this game has a serious “just one more” factor to it. Last night, I meant to just finish off the castle, and call it a night. But the castle turned out to have more subtleties to it than I thought, and then from the castle I noticed that the clouds were close to right, and so I set off chasing that, which took me to the vicinity of the mountain, so I figured I’d go to the mountaintop again just to verify the results of finishing the castle, and then in the view from the mountaintop, I noticed an area of the island that didn’t look familiar, so I headed towards that, and on the way I passed the shrine, and noticed the front door, and so I went inside the shrine to see if there were any more inside, and noticed the bonsai tree that I hadn’t noticed before, and so naturally that led to doing a bunch of shrine puzzles, and next thing I knew, over three hours had passed, my bedtime alarm was going off, and I never even did find the clouds or that unfamiliar area I saw.
Following this thread has gotten me to start playing the game again this weekend. Last time I played was probably five, six years ago, maybe more. I finished the main game back then but reading through this thread it seems like there was so much that I either didn’t finish or didn’t even start. I think part of it is, like with a lot of games, I’m in a hurry to get to the end, so this time I’m playing at a more leisurely pace (i.e. it’s about the journey, not the destination). There are a few places where I’ve hit a roadblock, but instead of immediately seeking out hints or solutions online, I just mark it in my notes as “unsolved” and move off to another area, figuring I’ll come back at some point with hopefully more information.
@Chronos I don’t really think this is a spoiler at all. Doesn’t have to do with puzzles or anything, but I’ll spoiler just in case Have you found audio files? If so, thoughts?
Same. As I said earlier, I am finding the puzzles a lot easier this time around, not wasting as much time being frustrated and discouraged. I’ve got ten lasers up, I think, and just have the treehouses to go, a really tricky and time consuming area.
I found not only audio, but video. A couple of places, I’ve found papers with what look like puzzle solutions on them. Well, if you go to the windmill, there’s a sub-basement underneath it with a little theater, and a puzzle that those solutions fit. Each one plays a video clip. The two I found are James Burke saying that knowledge is power, and pondering how to make sure that, in the Information Age, knowledge is everyone’s, and a blond lady who I don’t recognize and who looked like she was drunk talking about how we already are everything we want to be, and that it’s therefore unnecessary to try to be more.
As for what I thought, it seemed kind of trite to me. But there’s a part of me that suspects that those videos were why the game was created, because the creator was a True Believer in them, and wanted to witness about them to others.
I did also find one sound-based puzzle, but it wasn’t in an area with other sound-based puzzles. Wherever that is, it’s someplace I haven’t found yet.
Yesterday I was visiting a friend. He lives on a cul-de-sac street, with a turnaround circle at the end…
Oh, one other question: Behind the castle, on the way towards the shipwreck, there’s a couch looking out over the ocean. Just offshore from there, there’s a couple of bits of wreckage from the ship that, when viewed from the right angle, form a circle with a path leading off of it. But I can’t even get a spark from it. And there’s no other possible vantage that those two bits of wreckage are even visible from, certainly none other that they line up from. Was that put there just to taunt us, or am I missing something to make it work?
And as soon as I post that, it occurs to me…
It’s probably possible to send the boat off without actually being on it. Send it from far enough away, slow enough, and you might be able to beat it to that spot, and see it float past… Maybe that does it.
OK, so I’m stuck on one of the shrine puzzles, so I decided to just put it on my “come back to” list, and went to that unfamiliar area. Turns out it’s the starting area, that I just hadn’t stumbled back upon since I started. And of course I found a few things there. Then I went back to the castle, and discovered that the monoliths don’t actually record everything that they’re supposed to record: I found seven of one group, of which the monolith shows five. And that was right next to the treehouse area, which has been a bugaboo for me for a while, with that timed puzzle… And I solved it! The key is that some of the extendible platforms can be solved in more than one direction, to extend the bridges off in crazy directions. Configure them right, and you can create another, much shorter, path from the timer switch to the door that it opens. And as expected, that led me to the laser for that area, which was my seventh! Eagerly, I went up to the mountaintop, to discover yet another puzzle, on the top of that silo-door thing, that two statues are very impolitely standing on top of. I did one of the three parts of that, and got frustrated with the other two, and so moved on… and found the sound puzzles (which I had found before but not realized, of course). One of which I’m now stuck on: I think I know what the path needs to do, but can’t figure out how to make it do it.
Oh, and I also tried the thing that occurred to me in the previous post, and it is possible, but I haven’t yet tried to do anything with it.
And now that I am where I am, are any of the spoilers safe to read now? It’s frustrating to see so much discussion in the thread that I can’t read. The seven lasers I have are the symmetry area, the colorful plant nursery, the quarry, the desert reflected off of a mirror in the village, the shadow mazes, the castle, and the treehouse.
Without knowing exactly what situation you’re in, I can say that the grouping is not perfect. The extras may appear on one of the adjacent faces of the monolith.
I don’t want to spoil anything you haven’t figured out so far, but if you tell us what you know of the monoliths, perhaps we can help. That said, I haven’t finished them all either, so there may be things I’m missing myself…
There are four pressure-plate mazes. When viewed from the top of the tower, unsurprisingly, those become environment puzzles. But some of the pressure-plate puzzles, the easiest solution turns out to not be a valid environment puzzle, and so you have to go back down and redo them a different way. And two of them can be done in multiple ways, that each produces a different environment puzzle. The lower-right and upper-left one (as viewed from the tower) can each only be solved one way, I think. But the one in the upper right can be solved two ways, and the one in the bottom-left can be solved in three ways. So that’s seven total environmental puzzles in that area. But the castle monolith (near the gate between the castle and the treehouse) only shows five, and yes, I did check other faces of the monolith.
@Snarky_Kong , are those the posts starting with post 42, labeled “Not for Chronos”?
If you look closely at the glyphs, you’ll see a round start point and one or more end points that are slightly brighter than the rest of the carving (whether pre- or post- completion). Any solutions that fit this pattern will count as one.
So for the dig site, the first three have just a single start and end point, and so count for one each. The final symmetry puzzle has two different start points, corresponding to different glyphs, and so those count separately. But if there were multiple solutions even beyond that, they still only count for two. Five total.
There are some later puzzles with one start point and multiple end points. These also only count for one each, even though there are several (maybe dozens) of possible solutions.
Earlier today I was waiting near a lamppost when I noticed some bird shit near the base. The bird had managed to shit exactly on the edge of the base plate, so that half of it was on the cement pad and the other half was about an inch higher. So, looking from an angle, the two halves were offset from one another.
After checking that the bird was gone, I instinctually moved to look at it from directly above so that the two halves of the shit splat lined up into one unified whole. Nothing cool happened, though.
Ah, yes. My reaction was a bit understated because, at the time, I thought that it was just those specific ones. I didn’t (yet) realize that there were more of those, all over the place. I don’t think you realize that until you find one somewhere else (in my case, in the quarry, though it could be any of them), and then you start looking everywhere.
One thing that isn’t really a spoiler for anything but is a huge hint for the game as a whole: Conservation of detail is vigorously enforced in this game. Absolutely everything that exists in the game, exists for a reason. If you ever find, well, anything, start looking around for a reason for it.
Yes. I probably missed some, but off the top of my head, I did find the koi pond, the pathway right after the garden gate, and the tunnel you start in right at moment 0 of the game.
