Gadgetory

it's been eight years since Jonathan Blow released popular puzzle platformer braid on the xbox live arcade since then he's been working nonstop on his second game the witness which was recently released in January on the 26th so what is the witness well first of all we have a full review on the website if you hit the link in the description below that will take you to the review but judging from screenshots alone it would look like a combination of missed with some team fortress 2 ish art style thrown in in reality it's less missed and more Rubik's Cube the player starts in an underground tunnel which then emerges onto a colourful island filled with mysterious buildings and machinery in order to activate the machinery however various puzzles must be solved so it is sticking true to the puzzle element of Jonathan blows games there are an impressive 650 of these puzzles in the game at least and in each one the player is required to trace a path across the screen usually through an obstacle filled grid a big chunk of gameplay however is just figuring out how these obstacles work using clues from the environment and from other puzzles in fact it's difficult to describe the game's mechanics without spoiling the game but for example the player might have to separate some colored squares while outlining specific shapes simple ideas like this are combined to become increasingly complex throughout the game and sort of per mutated on top of itself becomes more and more complex as you go in spite of this the game's greatest strength is that it's practically impossible to become one hundred percent stuck the majority of puzzles are optional since only a certain number of areas need to be completed to reach the home stretch and our reviewer Patrick lathan had a total count of only 369 puzzles by the end of the game so that's a bit over half of what's in there clearly a lot of effort was put into making the witness challenging enough to be fun but not so much to encourage cheating and that's a good thing too since cheating would turn the whole experience into a 30 minute stroll around a pretty island and instead of googling for an answer the best solution is to find a simpler puzzle that explains the rules of the more complex one they sort of build on each other in this way and that is very solid game design that we think underscores the value of a good well designed puzzle game Jonathan Blow estimates it would take about 80 hours to solve all of the puzzles honestly with no cheating and that's probably conservative considering he made them the ha moment of finally solving a tough logic puzzle is the game's primary reward and it's in a similar sense to coding or plain su doku there are a few hidden gems to be discovered but puzzles are really designed to be solved for their own sake and it's worth mentioning that all the gameplay is made up of these puzzles for those who don't enjoy them if you don't like puzzle games and don't even buy it it's not the right game for you what lies beyond the puzzles is really a matter of opinion anyone who's played braid will be familiar with Jonathan blows method of storytelling which leaves plenty of room for audience speculation in the witness the bits of story that are revealed to the player are never direct instead they're delivered as sort of snippets of philosophy Jonathan Blow even chose to not include music in the game and instead decided to create the perfect atmosphere for the mildly sinister deserted puzzle island without music the downside is that anyone who found braid sort of quoted what pretentious or boring will probably think that the witness is ten times worse so that's just the downside of that the one it should run okay at minimum specs thanks to the new engine that Jonathan Blow created and it uses a nifty dynamic resolution feature which scales resolution to down class for lighter weight hardware like idps but it is continuing to get regular updates with patch notes like quote graphics drivers are the worst thing in the world so I don't know that I totally disagree with that sentiment either I can totally understand why developers would struggle with graphics drivers because they are a mess we are ourselves experience with problems with AMD display drivers in this game particularly the r9 285 but hopefully that'll be taken care of soon the witness is available now for the fairly modest price of forty dollars it's on Steam and elsewhere and has already far outperformed braids first year of release in just a single week so it's certainly worth looking into if you do like these kinds of challenging games that is all for this coverage of the witness check the article link the description below for more information and hit that patreon link in the post roll video if you want to help directly subscribe as always thanks for watching I'll see you all next time