Why I Can't Like The Witness
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- čas přidán 29. 06. 2024
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Over the last 8 years, there has been a game that I can honestly say I disliked more than any other. A game that I've played through multiple times, trying to enjoy it, but ultimately not enjoyed. No matter how many times I've come back to it, I haven't been able to get anything from it.
That game is, of course, The Witness. I've wanted to like it, since it's one of the most beloved puzzle games out there, but why don't I? What stands in my way from being able to enjoy a game like this?
It's a long story...
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0:00:00 - Intro
0:04:16 - What Is This? Some Kind of The Witness?
0:17:30 - The Game Takes Shape(s)
0:29:08 - Nature Will Never Fail You (Or Will It?)
0:37:51 - I See Fields Of...Green?
0:54:16 - It's Called the Endgame Because It's The End of The Game
1:02:36 - What Else is Else?
1:09:45 - Pretentious / Jonathan Blow? Uh Yeah, I Sure Hope It Does
1:25:29 - It's The End Of The Witness As We Know It
JJJreact - Hry
For anyone curious, here's a list of all the games I brought up in the video, with links:
Toki Tori 2: store.steampowered.com/app/201420/Toki_Tori_2/
Understand: store.steampowered.com/app/1299400/Understand/
Taiji: store.steampowered.com/app/1141580/Taiji/
Celeste: store.steampowered.com/app/504230/Celeste/
Can of Wormholes: store.steampowered.com/app/1295320/Can_of_Wormholes/
Braid: store.steampowered.com/app/26800/Braid/
"i'm gonna go witness some bitches" is the best possible way this video could have ended. that boat audio log had irreversible effects
Personally, I think the colored squares section could have some kind of color-blindness setting, but it would take quite a bit of effort, especially when the colors *change* depending on the lighting. Put numbers into the squares, and maybe some kind of addition cheatsheet with paint buckets outside of the colored lighting, or in the pause menu when in the greenhouse.
For example, the three primary colors (Red, blue, yellow) could be 1, 3, and 5, since when added with *another* odd number, you get an even number, which could be 4, 6, 8 (purple, orange, and green)
1 plus 3 is 4 (Red + Blue = Purple) you get the idea.
So, *hopefully* when a colorblind person sees a number 8, they will see it as a combination of 3 and 5. The difficult part would be trying to make the puzzle minimize the amount of colors it uses, and to have the numbers *change* depending on the lighting. Give people a telescope button to try and help out if the numbers are too small to read.
Keep in mind that (To my knowledge) I don't have colorblindness myself, so this may or may not work. I think I got the idea from this FNAF Help Wanted 2 minigame, where you color an art project according to the instructions on a screen, and the colors / paint cans have numbers on them so you can try and do quick math if you are colorblind.
Genuinely brilliant. Great job breaking this down in every way imaginable - your efforts made for a fantastic watch. I already knew a fair bit about this game, but you shed a lot of light about certain parts I hadn’t thought of.
For one, you’re spot on about clarity of whether puzzles should be solvable yet. There’s this cool feature in Return of the Obra Dinn, a great puzzle game by Lucas Pope, the developer of Papers, Please, where if you simply don’t have enough information about a character to identify them, they show up with smudged faces in your in-game notebook. I can only help but wonder how The Witness would change if it put a bright red border around panels you didn’t know enough about. But I guess the game wasn’t really invested in being understood to begin with.
Big points on the accessibility bit, too. I’m very passionate on game accessibility, and this game absolutely astounds me with how little it cares - puzzle games have a responsibility, I feel, to be accessible to people, more so than most other genres. Beyond one option to let you exchange typical movement for a classic “Click to Move” system from older Adventure games, this game does nothing for accessibility, let alone the problems it creates. Just… ugh.
Just an excellent video through and through. Nice little sequence with the courtroom scene and the red lighting, too - adored those a ton!
I haven't gotten through much of this video, but honestly the stuff i've enjoyed the most in the Witness so far are just the environmental puzzles, where you have to painstakingly draw a line through parts of the environment and hope you've got the right angle and speed. They're far more rewarding than any of the board puzzles and the treehouse section is my worst enemy. When the game isn't rewarding, it's super tiring to figure out. I feel stupid every time I go to a walkthrough just to see that I should have been standing 2 centimetres to the left for the light to reflect properly. I have not completed the game and I haven't touched it in months.
update: i decided to boot the game back up with this video playing in the back. i don't like being in the mountain.
omg no fucking way the channel that made nsmb tierlist video is suddenly talking about my favorite game of all time, my mind is blown
ok so naturally i'm going to have a lot of thoughts about this as the video goes on, i'm gonna try and compile them under this comment if i feel like they are worth mentioning
first things first i find your point about the sudoku guy being able to solve the vault door without having to play the tutorial really strange, like, not only does this occurence seem to me like an extreme edge case scenario, considering the guy literally solves puzzles for a living, so it's not like this sequence has "broken" game design because one highly trained individual was able to crack it (get it?) but also he just seemed to have a lot of fun solving it that way and the realization that there were much easier puzzles right besides him that whole time is just kind of a uniquely beautiful and personal moment that can only be achieved by this sort of non-linear design. this was not an oversight by the developers, they knew that sequence breaking is technically possible. that's not a bug that's a feature :)
24:22 lmao thanks for this
43:22 yes, they kinda did tho... these puzzles are completely based around the different ways colors interact with one another and although it sucks that some players can't solve them because of factors outside their control it feels wrong to say they shouldn't have been included because of it. the game could have instead chosen to put some sort of warning in the steam page or something like that as you have pointed out but maybe that would have turned people off from playing it for what is essentially a completely skipable portion of the game. it really sucks because as far as i'm aware there is no easy way out of this situation, considering there is a lot more to worry about than could be solved by just implementing different colorblind filters, but even then i still find it really unjust of you to say this sequence (43:52) was poorly planned because of this unfortunate condition. these three puzzles that require the use of colored glass are really elegantly designed just in the insane amount of variables it needs to account to all at once, i can't really imagine how this would realistically be able to do all that and also work for different types of colorblind people on top of that. and again to reiterate the fact these are impossible to some people does suck very hard but there isn't really a be-all end-all solution to this issue, and the game is not subtle at all in its presentation that this area is about color, so theoretically if you are colorblind and have a hard time with these pannels you will probably know why and either 1) leave, 2) look up the solution on the internet or 3) ask for help from a friend
54:25 what do you mean by that? they are new puzzles, they use concepts introduced in other parts of the island, sure, but they are still new puzzles and more evolved ideas of the ones you played previously. even the pannel you are showing at that very moment is an interesting iteration on two mechanics that up until this point you won't have seen combined many times, the puzzle itself is really fun and that's not even mentioning the way you use this door to solve the star puzzle right besides it. other than that the apple puzzle here is extremely novel, and so is the one with three different solutions, as well as the maze with the purple pillars. there are also the tetris pannels with dots on every vertex and the ones that combine symetry with the black and white squares, and altough these aren''t the most jaw dropping combination in the world the actual pannels themselves are really good and well designed. considering you praised taiji for recontextualising its mechanics in the late game i don't see what the problem with the ones in the town is
Great video Amber. The Witness has been one of my favourite games for some time now, but I've often had to speak about it with an asterisk. I think this video perfectly encapsulates those asterisks I've tried to condense into a couple of sentences, especially Jonathan Blow's ick public statements about a variety of different things (especially those surrounding accessibility). He seem like the kind of guy who complains about the Spiel De Jahres winners because he dismisses that one of the main judging criteria is accessibility.
When I played the game I think I intuitively understood just how hostile the game was to the player when it came to obfuscation and frustration. I took that to be part of the design and saw the times I was frustrated (see the colour changing puzzle, the jungle, etc.) as psychological challenges to overcome. Could I be patient enough to fail several times at one slow moving environmental puzzle in the swamp and still continue? Could I push through my rising heartrate and quell that mini-tantrum? Could I seek out how the game was cruelly messing with me and change my perspective on the puzzle? For me I found a lot of tricks in the game more playful but it's clear in the years past that a lot of people felt more cheated than challenged.
If the game really was intended to be as hostile as it is, which I kinda believe based on the themes of the videos and audio recordings, then I feel that J. Blow has a lot of cognitive dissonance surrounding his design philosophies. He wants to hold in his mind that these are high quality fair puzzles then pull the bullshit that he does. It would feel more intellectually honest to say "yeah, there are some obscure, potentially manipulative puzzle here and that's the intention of the challenge". I think he's so good at predicting how the player may think about a puzzle, how they may act and the lines of logic that lead to wrong solutions, the things they miss and how to guide them to those solutions. Where I think he fails is understanding when to stop that player manipulation or what dismissing their experiences as invalid. Having had time to reflect on the game, I genuinely can't tell if I'm excited for his next game or not. The Witness did so much that didn't just feel like "sokoban, but..." or "abstract puzzle rules on a grid" that so many other well acclaimed titles fall prey to and that's one of the reasons I like it so much. But I think his next game is sokoban-related anyway, so it's kinda a moot point 😐
The Witness is one of my favourite games of all time and this is now one of my favourite videos on the game. Each point is very well thought out and its the best analysis of why this game doesn't work for some people, honestly better presented and makes more sense than a lot of conversations praising this game.
I don't agree with everything you disliked but that's just cause I personally love the game. However I completely support the accessibility issue. The game offers no support for the puzzles that require good colour and sound perception and it's irresponsible to not mention that a pretty substantial part of the game leans on this on the store page. I personally enjoyed the colour puzzles, the one in the village being one of my favourite puzzles in the game, but the game could easily offer an alternative way to see these puzzles. I struggled a bit with the sound panels and got through it eventually but I can't imaging how annoying and stressful this section can be for people who struggle to hear or find it difficult to deal with audio like this. This is exclusionary design and there is no good excuse for it. Things like Celeste's assist mode are perfect models on how games can strive to let people just enjoy them. I think Blow has a great way of looking at video games as an art form some of the time and he really seems to focus on how players can experience games in interesting ways, while failing to consider how his design choices can negatively and unfairly impact players too, even while they may genuinely enjoy the rest of the game.
Explaining why I like this game is difficult, the best part of it for me was the themes of secret searching I found throughout the logs, lines and videos, and how that linked back to me playing through and searching for secrets in the game. But that's not the only reason to love this game and not a reason why everyone should love it. I see the game as a good example of what feelings games can express that are unique to the medium while also being an example of a game that is clearly off-putting, pretty flawed and can feel kinda elitist sometimes. I think you expressed these ideas perfectly while understanding how others can feel about it. Thanks for this video, really really good.
Every criticism until 40:00 misses me copletely. I have no issues with any of it. All the counterexamples so far strike me not as "how that game did this thing better", but as "here is a different game". This game, in my opinion, would not be better if the areas were clearly laid out with a suggested difficulty order.
The colorblindness section is one of the coolest puzzle experiences i've ever had. I'm not sure it's possible to tweak it in any real way to lose that problem. But it does absolutely need to have a clearly telegraphed warning and/or escape route. Damn the minimalism, there needs to be an unmissable sign, or a recording of some scientist philosophising on the topic of colorblindness laying right across the entrance so you can know to walk away.
The bird sound area was the least fun for me personally, but it was short and not that hard. You're probably right that the speakers need to be a little more prominent.
Endgame: the "hard to see" puzzles i agree, are not very good design. The flashing though, while way too extreme, had quite alright puzzle idea at the core.
I feel like you have a bit of a set view of what "a puzzle" "should" be. Tests of finding the right perspective like the Desert Temple or Mountain Statues are not lame "just because". Figuring out the proper color of the flashing section's symbols is a valid bit of brain gymnastics. The Shipwreck being an obtuse mismash that only 2% of players will find, let alone, complete - is fine. This game has over 600 "puzzles", and i feel like it should be commended for squeezing so many different ways of using your brain into the act of drawing a line on a grid. And this game is certainly not meant to be """completed""" by most people.
The timewasting slow enviro-puzzles are a bit annoying, but aside from that last one they didn't bother me, and the movie is honestly a pretty good bit of trolling that i can respect just like you respect the 2-hour cloud in Braid. I don't like it, but i respect it.
Overall i walk away mostly disagreeing with your sentiments. The accessibility is a problem, yeah, but that's already been discussed ad nauseam. And the rest? Sure, maybe a few little improvements here and there would hit the spot, but i still really love this game as is. And you have the sovereign right not to :)
Checkpoints for those who don't want to spend 1.5 hours of their time and may only be interested in parts (the timelapses on the video itself are pretty ambiguos)
0:00-40:00 - Opinions (what Amber expected a puzzle to be vs what a puzzle is in the witness (with the result being Amber not liking these puzzles))
40:00 - 54:00 - Accessibility issues
54:00 - 1:02:30 - Endgame and bonus content
1:02:30 - 1:09:40 - Shipwreck puzzle, environment puzzles (and specifically time-based environment puzzles)
1:09:40 - 1:25:20 - "What was the idea J. Blow's tried to communicate with Witness" + Demonstration of a good communication of an idea in his previous work, Brade
1:25:20 - end - Conclusion
So, you likely don't know me. I know you - I live in your CZcams walls (blame Spicy / Grunkle). I'm a videogame designer and a fucking nerd. This video was honestly one of the most interesting viewings of my life.
I have enjoyed The Witness (I think the first... 50% of it?), but that came with privilege - I had perfect hearing / vision and am generally fine with any amount of image processing. I also allowed myself to cheat constantly, because I was 12. However, as I began to learn game design, I really began to focus in on accessibility and meaning. And... some of these things you talked about in terms of accessibility ARE easy fixes. It's kinda infuriating.
For example: take the color-separating puzzles. You COULD replace each color with a letter and the puzzle does not change. Make them distinct by concept (ex: A, C, E, I are near impossible to mix with each other in my eyes) / in a dyslexic-friendly font and you have a puzzle accessible by everyone. Symbols don't work as well due to the other symbols, and patterns COULD get lost - although both are also possible.
Next: take the sound-based bird puzzles. You COULD have a setting within the opening of the game where you mark if you have any issues (hearing, visual, processing, etc.) and the game manually assists you with any puzzle you wouldn't be able to naturally solve (ex: putting subtitles in of [BIRD: ^ ^ v v ^] for sound puzzles - yes, it makes the puzzle very easy, but it's that or impossible so). Celeste is the key example of this and doing this is like... the best ever done.
However, there is always a philosophy with puzzles that I take when designing. It's formalized in this by Design Delve: czcams.com/video/42SDc2Fhkm8/video.html - but simply put, if the point of the puzzle is to solely determine its solution, not deal with any skill expression, then submitting the solution shouldn't be more than 15-20 seconds MAX. The puzzles that showcase in 55:55 on are literally prime examples of what NOT TO FUCKING DO because the only issue is, as you've said, visual clarity of ENTERING the solution. Same idea with the overlapping sounds of the various sound puzzles. This, as you said, is artificial difficulty - The Witness is not a game made to inspire rage in the player, but literally what OTHER mechanic is derived from that?
I can see a mild argument against this in one context - a puzzle for multiple people to solve. I'm gonna take puzzlehunting as a baseline here - context for the uninitiated, it's a bunch of puzzles with the goal to essentially reach the "end" by solving enough of them to discern a final answer. If the game had social elements to where it's expected you work with others to discern these solutions, then maybe I could argue against some of this as okay if questionable (fuck the blinking lights tho). The Witness is not built like this. This is built as a "you are alone on an island - you have all the tools to solve this yourself" type of experience, and there's really zero excuse to not have some sort of accessibility to give everyone a fair shake.
And as they proved, they COULD expand on the puzzles and provide interesting cases for everything - the multi-solution that keeps adding on new things to contend with is an amazing ending. But the amount of filler they put in to potentially justify some bogus solutions is incredibly sad, seeing how well the game was up until it essentially tripped over itself by locking the gates behind accessibility.
That... is a lot of words to say this: video games don't have to be art. They don't have to be good at all. I think I could insert Meatball's "Protect Bad Queer Art" sign here but write over it with "Protect Bad Videogames" (and holy god I mean bad in design, not bad as in prejudiced / harmful don't get it twisted). But at a goddamn minimum, they should try, if possible, to be able to be enjoyed to some degree by everyone regardless of who they are. Note some wording - TO BE ABLE TO be enjoyed - not every game SHOULD appeal to every person, but every game SHOULD be able to be played by everyone. Disregarding that shrinks your playerbase and people who COULD enjoy your game, and I genuinely can't ever find a reason why that is worthwhile.
god I hope this video blows up so this 1000 word essay was worth my tiny little brain's time. amazing job on the video
one thing that really stood out with your comment is the idea of replacing colours with letters to make them more distinct
honestly, not only is that a good idea that'd make things a lot easier for people who can't see the full spectrum of colour, but even the greenhouse could still function with a change like this. instead of the tinted glass adjusting your view of the panels in the second room, there could be scratches or marks on the glass that, when viewed from the right angle, make the letters look like other letters, allowing you to see what the game wants you to see. Admittedly that's a similar concept to the Monastery but it still would've made a lot more sense for the game if it was so intent on functioning like this.
there was definitely a lot that the game could've done to be a lot better, which feels a bit weird to say about a game that took around 8 years to be made, but flaws like this just feel worse as a result
I remember playing this as a kid it was very hard
Very interesting video
The Witness definitely has some good elements but my god I cannot understand why people love it so much(not that I don't get liking the game, just that I don't understand why so many people seem to have a high opinion of it). It's a game I want to love but a word you used perfectly fit how this game was for me: Tedious.
Great video!