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Comment by kibibu

19 hours ago

No "The Witness"? Not incredibly challenging, but I very much enjoyed its blend of puzzling and aesthetic.

15 comments

kibibu

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deng  10 hours ago

"The Witness" was fine but I found its overly pompous philosophizing unbearable and pretentious. Rather play "Taiji" instead, which is clearly inspired by TW, but without the grandstanding, and at least IMHO, the puzzles are also better.

  • coldpie  3 hours ago

    The Witness is one of my favorite games of all time, but yeah the first thing I say to anyone thinking of playing it is to skip all the audio logs. Those things are straight up embarrassing trash and I can understand anyone unfortunate enough to click on them dropping the game down into "don't recommend" territory. Also, given his extremely stinky personality, I probably won't be buying any future games by Blow.

    Haven't played Taiji, I'll give it a shot.

VorpalWay  19 hours ago

Personally, I had wanted a new Myst, and The Witness wasn't that, and so I was a bit disappointed. Obduction was released a year or two later and it was similar to the Myst I remember from my childhood and it was also a good game. I strongly recommend it.

That said, The Witness isn't a bad game as such, though the puzzles do get a bit repetitive in my opinion. I prefer more variety rather than hyper focus on one type of puzzles.

  • Waterluvian  18 hours ago

    For me, Outer Wilds finally got the Myst feel right.

    • VorpalWay  18 hours ago

      Interesting, I had passed it by when I heard it had a time limit and reset mechanic (not unlike Zelda Majora's Mask). I hated that mechanic in Majora's Mask (and I never finished that game), it made the game feel stressful to me.

      I prefer games where I can play slow and deliberate. If there is a time mechanic it should be turn based, not real time. (Or it should be a very short time based system such as "run across the room to hit the other button, the cost of failing is 10 seconds of trying again, not 10 minutes".)

      3 replies →

  • OkayPhysicist  18 hours ago

    Try the RHEM series. It's Myst, but harder, complete with slideshow of late 90's 3D graphics environment. I liked Obduction, but I found it a bit too easy.

    • throwaway219450  4 hours ago

      The remakes of Myst and Riven are beautiful. I don’t play many AAA games nowadays and my expectation of photorealism is about 10 years old. I was surprised at how well it runs on an M1.

  • cableshaft  18 hours ago

    Have you tried Blue Prince? It's got some similarities (it's basically Myst + a spatial puzzle + modern drafting/resource management board game).

    And you don't have the time element of Outer Wilds (Outer Wilds is brilliant though, and it kinda needs that time element to work properly).

    I mean technically it does in that you only have so many steps in a day, but you only spend a step moving from one room to another, so you can take your time in any given room, and you have ways to increase those steps.

    Also you're more likely to block yourself off with your room layout for the day than you are to run out of steps, at least once you start getting better at the game (it can happen though).