Are you enjoying the puzzles at the end of the game? (spoilers)

The Witness for me has been a rollercoaster of feelings. Disliked it at first, then loved it and after getting to the final mountain area I strongly dislike it again and decided to never play it again (watched video of ending; no regrets on that).

I'm curious if it's just me who had such a strong reaction to the puzzles in the mountain (strobe light effects, spinning, obfuscated panels, etc.)?

It highlights everything I dislike about the game: Blow testing the player's resolve rather than intellect. It would be like if Uncharted had an enemy you have to shoot at for 30 minutes with little threat: Sure, it's not difficult but do you have the focus and patience to do it again and again?

I want to love the game and in many ways I do (the world, the art, the message, the good puzzles, the secrets) but the majority of my playthrough was feeling miserable and fatigued from no-brainer, trial-and-error puzzles that became only worse at the end by intentionally being annoying in order to increase difficulty. I noticed this trend first in the tropical area where the last puzzle lays the sound clips on top of each other so you can't easily read the puzzle which is bad design. Because the solution isn't complicated and the rules aren't complicated, but Blow tries to make reading the puzzles complicated. It's like if Tetris on high difficulties blacked out half the screen to increase the challenge. Challenge shouldn't come from readability. It should come from not knowing the rules or not knowing how to apply them.

I'm just ranting my frustration but I'm curious whether other people honestly enjoyed this kind of thing? The only defense I saw on Reddit was along the lines of "Hey, it makes the puzzles different!" (which again I go back to that Uncharted example, in that case would a new different enemy like that be good?)

I didn't love the ones on the top floor (the moving ones, strobe lights, etc) but they didn't really bother me. The strobe light one was annoying but other than that they were fine. Probably some of the weaker concepts in the game, but I found adding a layer of interference outside of the puzzle kind of interesting. If it went on any longer I probably would have gotten more pissed off, but doing the two series on the top floor only took me a couple minutes - thank god the puzzles themselves were simple.

I really enjoyed the rest of the mountain though. The puzzle on the ground floor of the mountain was actually one of my favorites in the game.

Also I'm curious what you consider no-brainer, trial and error puzzles? I can only think of a few in the whole game that came across that way to me.

I thought the cylindrical puzzles were a pretty awesome twist on the idea.

That, and the puzzle that you had to solve the same way like 7 times too me so long, but it was a huge victory when I got it done.

Yep, those test chamber puzzles did leave a pretty bad taste in my mouth. How could you possibly think a puzzle with constantly cycling colours or puzzles where the image keeps moving all over the place is a good idea? Those things don't make the puzzle-solving more challenging, they just make the process more frustrating :( It really does seem like there's a lot of things in this game that deliberately test your patience. Remember that one puzzle piece in Braid that took an hour+ to get.... :|

The cylinders were pretty all right though.

Yep. I have the same sour taste after the sequences of puzzles in the mountain, especially those color rotating and the green flickering ones because my eyes literally teared up after staring at them for half a minute. And just like you said what makes them more infuriating is that I know they are the exact same puzzles/rules as before but now you have to solve them while your annoying little brother keep pointing a laser in your face. The two bridge thing is kind of clever but the rest of them in those two floors are lazy and bad design to me.

I haven't been able to get past the cycling colors. I started to feel sick after looking at it for so long so I'm considering to look up solutions for them.

I thought those and the two timed puzzles at the end were super good. All extensions on the stuff you've been learning, but you need to extend your own capabilities. As a whole, I loved the whole mountain part. If you want to make the cycling colors ones easier, take a picture and look at that.

@urbansanta: Here's a static image of the puzzle:

@beachthunder: There is an environmental puzzle in this game that takes like an hour. At least that's more optional.

@nime: o_o now I'm just trying to think how that's possible. Does it involve using the boat? I can't think of how else something could take an hour. Although I think I've done / have seen where all the boat + puzzles are. Maybe.

I thought the 6 puzzles you had to solve simultaneously and the floor puzzle at the bottom were really cool, but the obscuring view, moving puzzles, and color changing ones seemed a little lackluster compared to the creativity that went into the puzzles in the rest of the game.

@beachthunder: the fourth video.

There should be a warning that the game may cause epileptic seizures.

@nime: I still can't even find the blueprint for the fourth video. Could you maybe point me in the right direction of where to look.

@beachthunder: Once you find it you won't miss it. It requires all 11 lasers.

@nime: Hm, I have all 11 already. Do I need to travel into the mountain to get it? Also, I'm sure this all leads to a cave area, right. There's footage of a cave/underground area on the TVs in the mountain and there's a couple of doors that are locked from the outside. Also, there's the walkway above the video room. I just can't piece it all together though D:

Remember when people who decided to not finish video games couldn't see the parts they didn't play either?

@nime: Do you have to sit through the whole thing and be solving the puzzle the whole time? Because you can scrub through the videos using the control panel where the game stores which videos you've unlocked.

@sgtsphynx: you have to be in "draw mode" for the whole hour so you can't manipulate the video controls. But you can leave it and go do other stuff (in real life) since no input is needed for most of it. Have to be sure to be standing in roughly the right place though (scrubbing to the end of the video is useful to figure out positioning).

@sgtsphynx: As Quantris said, I believe it literally requires the whole video. I haven't done it so I'm not positive but I believe it requires the beginning to start the puzzle and the end to end it. So you can afk the whole time but you do need it and can't scrub.

@beachthunder: Go back to the top of the mountain and think about what the lasers accomplished, and what might have changed after getting more. Trying not to give too much away - let me know how many hints you want :P

PS. I find it hilarious The Witness has spawned entire threads of nothing but @s and spoiler text.

@nime: OH FUCK :O Thanks, you're a good hint giver.

I just found the videos today. First one I unlocked was the 6th with the lady speaking about whatever and I couldn't even stand watching that because her mic was picking up every breath and smack of her lips. Couldn't stand it. Also I hate the pretentious larger than life philosphy shit this game has, should've been prepared for it more I guess but fuck listening to 8 minutes of some quote from an astronaut that's being read by some woman who's sounding like she's trying way too hard to be inspiring. Hearing there's an hour long video I would need to sit through is making me hate this game even more.

I had a really great run at the start of the game and was really enjoying it for the first 10h, couldn't wait till I got from work to do some more puzzling but then I got to the mountain, the stuff inside (where I took a break out of frustration and came outside again), finished the jungle (had A LOT of trouble with the tones, not a musical person, had to look things up), did some perspective puzzles (fucking hate those, so finicky). Everything I did after I got to the mountain and came out was the worst shit. I guess I shouldn't be too upset because I got inside the mountain doing things I was enjoying and I guess everything beyond that is optional but fuck if it isn't a bummer that the puzzle design is so all over the place.

I Got 300 something puzzles on my own and now I don't even care, I just want to be done with the game so I don't have to ever touch it again.

Antichamber still the best first-person puzzle game by a mile.

Edit: And now I just got to the puzzle inside the mountain with the timer that resets the unfinished puzzle. Fuck this!

Edit2: Fuck the ending too! I didn't expect much but come on!

@xmrsunshine: I had the EXACT same feelings about both of your edits.

@nime: @quantris: fuck that noise.

@xmrsunshine: I love the first half of Antichamber to death but felt like it kind of lost itself as the game went on. I didn't like some of the later gun abilities at all. I played Infinifactory recently and really fucking loved it - that is really high on my list of puzzle games now, although that's a different kind of puzzle game (individual puzzles, not a puzzle adventure). Highly highly recommend it though if you think you might like it. I guess I should really do Talos next.

The colors and obfuscation were a bit shit, but I really liked the double bridges, the rotating columns and absolutely loved the incremental requirements puzzle and the nested four puzzles inside the symmetry puzzle (actually two of my favorites in the whole game).

I hated the color puzzles from the start - once it went past look through this glass to see the actual colors and wanted you to figure out what color a square would be in a certain colored light if it is this color right now, I checked out. I just wasn't feeling it - I'm really bad with colors anyway and still couldn't tell you what color you get by mixing this and that color. Not to mention looking at the rooms with colored lighting actually made me feel somewhat uncomfortable.

The puzzles that frustrated me the most were probably the desert ones. The glare puzzles. As far as I could tell, the tutorial had at least 2 panels in it that were largely covered by shadows - so you could only figure out a part of the puzzle and rest you had to brute force. And every failure reset the panel. Ugh. And once you got inside...the game chugged pretty badly on my PC, even at Default settings and if you're not using High quality, the water reflections are muddy. Good luck trying to tell what the actual pattern is when the reflected pattern you see is blurry and the water keeps rising/lowering. Spent so much time fucking around with those...

And yeah, the jungle puzzles were not great either. I don't have a very good hearing in the first place and I have never really been able to tell differences in pitch and shit all that well. They were fine until the other noise joined in to just make it unpleasant to listen to. Figuring the puzzle out wasn't hard, but actually distinguishing the notes and their order was super hard for me.

For the puzzles at the end - I didn't feel too bad about them, aside from, again, the color ones. The 360° puzzles were probably the hardest - they were really disorienting and I had to graph those onto paper to figure them out. The moving/obscured ones weren't very hard, so they didn't bother me.

I think the symmetry and black dot ones were my favorite puzzles overall. They were kind of easy to solve, often taking just a few seconds, but I still found it satisfying to do them.

I flat out hated the puzzles at the end, with the exception of the the twin bridge puzzle, the cylinders, and (sort of) the set that had you building on previous solutions.

It took all of the rules I had been learning for 25-30 hours and put a layer of garbage on top of them. They didn't force you to learn anything new, there were no "Ah ha!" moments. They just arbitrarily made the rules harder to execute on. I wasn't a fan of the perspective based puzzles from earlier in the game since I feel like it was too hard to maneuver into the right spot with a controller, so of course there were more of those. And as others have said the color changing puzzles especially annoyed me and gave me an actual headache to look at.

The Witness is such a great game and I was sad to see it fall apart at the end.

Nah, they're a bit shit. It's like the devs ran out of actual challenging ideas so decided to just obfuscate the puzzles instead. I got to the room with the puzzles on the tilted screens on one side, the black bars on the other, and the mess in the middle and decided I'd seen the best the game had to offer and continuing on would just sour my prior experiences with the game. I was already getting a bit fed up during the ones where the shadows of the trees spell the solution out for you but force you to do a bunch of them long past their novelty wore off. Don't really intend to go back.