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?)
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