Anyone else not feeling this game?

Let me clarify that. It's not that I'm not impressed, it's just that The Witness made some specific design choices that detract from my experience. For one, the open environment is hurting the game more than anything else for me. I think the game looks pretty and so I liked walking around for 30 minutes taking it all in, but then I wanted to get to work.

Now... where is the next puzzle I'm supposed to do?
-Well, you can do any of them!
-Yeah, but not really. I'm missing the learning process to solve most of these so I'm looking for the next puzzle I already possess the knowledge of to figure out.
-Just walk around and try out all the puzzles and if you can't complete it come back later!
-Yeah, no, that's not what I'm asking. I spent enough time walking around, I just want to play the game now.

It's not fun. I guess it's possible my attention span is messed up, but I honestly don't like walking around for an hour just to find the next place to be.

The other thing is that for some puzzles, which are the ones I can complete now, figuring out how to solve it takes far less time than inputting the correct pattern. I suppose this is a thing the game is being praised for, but figuring out the solution and then having to actually input that solution by taking screenshots/drawing notes is not fun. I know the answer, I figured it out. When I do, I want to proceed. Not having to do, what honestly feels like work, before I can move along.

That said, I may just not be in the mood for The Witness right now. I'll try to chip away at it here and there, but it might be better if I return later this year. Anyone else in the same boat?

Sounds like maybe it's just not your thing!

Maybe start considering exploration of the island as part of the experience, rather as a sub task to do in between doing puzzles. It might help you enjoy it more. There's lots of cool stuff I've seen, finding it has been a big part of the fun for me.

How long have you been playing? In all honesty, the first couple hours were a little rough for me, for the same reasons you are describing, I kept running into puzzles that were above my skill level as soon as I left the tutorial area, but once i got to know my way around the game and found some of those "beginner" puzzles it got a lot more fun. In retrospect this game would not be the same without that sense of discovery of the open world. That said if you are five or six hours in and still not enjoying it, it probably isn't the game for you, I really enjoy this game now but i can recognize that it isn't for everybody

I've never been one for puzzle games but took a chance on The Witness purely because I'm a sucker for Bradhype.

It's impressing me hugely but I know I'm constantly close to uninstalling the entire thing.

These are the exact sentiments that I was worried I was going to have before starting the game.

My patience with most puzzle heavy games is pretty bad, but The Witness is presented so well, and the puzzles designed so devilishly designed that it's grabbed me straight away.

I agree that at points it can be frustrating not knowing how to complete a puzzle, and not knowing where to learn the solution. However, that has just made the world more intriguing to me. Maybe it's because you explored it all first that you are reluctant to keep exploring?

I'm enjoying the game but there's also a lot of frustration involved. At times it feels like the critical path puzzles are too difficult which leads to you wandering around in search of something you can handle. It gets irritating when all you can find are puzzles with unfamiliar mechanics rather than the tutorials that might actually equip you to progress.

With that being said, making the game any easier would detract from the satisfaction that comes with solving the puzzles, and that struggle I think is core to the overall tone and theme of the game.

A hint system of some kind would be nice for the times when you're way overmatched but don't want to completely crime your way through by going to YouTube.

Maybe. I just spend more time trying to find a suitable puzzle at this point than actually playing it. Once I did find one I could complete, it just felt like I had to do a whole bunch of work to actually complete it, even though I figured out the solution already. I just don't think having to make notes makes a game good in its own right. That stuff has to be fun and right now it feels more like work.

I'd argue that walking around the island, from puzzle to puzzle, is just as integral to The Witness as all of the individual puzzle panels.

I think the game is paced deliberately a little slow. It wants you to take it all in, like a deep inhale. Mindfulness seems to be an important concept in this game. I think the most important thing I could tell someone starting to play this game is to NOT run around the island all the time and instead take it in at a leisurely stroll.

So I can absolutely see why the game can push someone away. I wasn't entirely sold on the game being "fun" until my first "Holy shit!" moment. I literally exclaimed "Holy shit" out loud in an empty house to no one else.

I'd implore you, duder, to give it a little bit of time.

At least until you find some "+" puzzles. I was hooked after that!

I've put around 3 hours into it and I just can't find the motivation to pick it back up.

The pacing is just not very rewarding. You're working out these tricky puzzles (Very fun puzzles, I'll admit), solving a group of them, and opening up a path to even more difficult puzzles. Like, I get that it's the point, but after a time I just feel exhausted. The audio logs are pretty lame so far as well so they don't serve as a good break from all the puzzles.

Also, I doubt I'll ever get into the late game considering that notes seem to be a required thing and at my age i'm done taking notes for games. Cool for those who want to put in that energy into a game, but I do not have the time for it.

@bigmess: I'll stick with it here and there for a little bit. I know I might just not be in the mood for something like this right now. But it is very hard for me to believe you wouldn't have that exact 'holy shit' moment if the game showed you nearby tutorial panels, or nudged you in a suggested direction if you wander around not solving any puzzles for 30 min.

I think that stuff could've been done better.

I agree with the pacing issues brought up so far. With such an open design, it's naturally difficult to setup the puzzles in a way to flow together. I've had the same problems early on as well. I'd find some new location and work through the puzzles as far as I can. When/if I get stuck I just wander off to another area with another set of puzzles. It can be difficult to tell whether or not the information you need to learn for the puzzle is in the area or not.

While playing I actually put up a video on my second monitor to help alleviate the slow pacing of the game.

@zevvion: I'd agree with that. It's very easy to stumble into an area that the player is totally unprepared for.

It actually reminds me a lot of Dark Souls in that way. Anyone who played that game at launch without information probably had a similar experience if they went to the graveyard first rather than the Undead Burg: the skeleton enemies there are way past the player's level and therefore pushes them in a different direction or away from the game entirely.

I think some people will end up really appreciating that aspect of The Witness, while others (understandably) may end up being turned off by it.

Also my revelatory "holy shit" moment had nothing to with the main puzzles. I just noticed a little something in the world, tried something, and kept the "+" puzzles rolling. I'd say more on what those entail but I feel like the surprise of what those are is worth not spoiling.

Have fun!

I'm definitely enjoying it but I agree with some of the walking around. It is beautiful and there seems to be plenty of secrets to find, but backtracking at a slower, plodding pace kind of sucks.

I purposefully play this game in very small spurts. I'll solve as many puzzles as I can and after spending more than 10 minutes thinking about one, I'll walk away from the game for a bit and come back.

@zevvion I saw someone in a different comments section call The Witness "The dark souls of puzzle games" which I think is not exactly correct but kind amuses me in your case, considering the lengthy exchange we had with you tutoring me on how to get started on souls games at one point.

I do think the game requires a fairly fine tuned sense of knowing when to walk away from a puzzle. The difference between there being something you are missing and there being something you don't know is huge. I've even walked away from areas not because I couldn't complete the puzzles but because I didn't understand why I was completing them.

It really does require running around, seeing buildings with cords leading out of them, following them to see if you find a fresh starter terminal for an area, hitting roadblocks, running around to look for other terminals, wondering what the hell that sound was, etc.

If you aren't in the mood to be running all over the island trying to get a better understanding of the mechanics then it's either not the right moment or the right game for you. In that way I think some of the souls parallels do apply.

One note [super minor spoiler about the existence of something that is shown in trailers] on the boat there is a map and it has little hand drawn notations near the locations that communicate the basic gist of the puzzles in that area, and that can help in planing where you want to go. For instance "I really need to figure out the tetrominos so I'm going to go here" or "oh god fuck, fuck, no, no tetrominos, I'm never going there ever".

All the areas are pretty distinct and there's only one, maybe two, that really require that you've completed another area to understand. I found it to be pretty linear. Go to an area, follow the cables, light the laser. I didn't really need to do any wandering around.

I mostly agree with this statement. Theres kind of a progression of levels in terms of difficulty.of areas. Once you know what the black and white dots do (which is right near the starting area), you're free to do at least 5 of the areas if i remember correctly. You may have to stop halfway through if they throw a mechanic at you that you haven't seen but you have plenty of areas that you can totally complete from the get-go.

"Oh, great, this one has a tetris piece. Time to find a new area."

The island is separated into very unique, discreet areas. In every area you learn a new mechanic. They basically start you off in each location with tutorial panels. There is not really any guessing on where you need to go next. You just go wherever and learn stuff when you get there.

I don't think I really understand what you're getting at here. Surely the notes and screenshots are used to *figure out* the solution in the first place, what busy work are you doing after you already know the answer? If you know the solution, just draw the line?

The first two or three hours of The Witness are some of the most frustrating hours you'll ever spend in a video game, but that is by design to some extent. You are meant to feel like a science experiment trying to fit square pegs into round holes. If you can manage to make it just a biiiit further, it'll all fall into place and you'll make some serious headway. I went from no lasers activated in the first probably 8 hours of my playthrough, to activating every single one of them over the span of a few hours. The fact that you can drop everything and leave an area with no commitment really helped me, because I found my technique would start to diminish if I focused on one mechanic for too long.

I've actually been thinking that the new Steam refund policy is extremely dangerous for a game like this because of the fact that the first two hours are quite arduous to get through.

THIS IS SO TRUE

The entire ending section ruined the game for me. Puzzles just become arbitrarily difficult.

@bushpusherr: I understand where he's coming from on that point. For instance, the tetris puzzles: after I saw the first few tutorial panels I knew precisely what the concept was and what the area was asking of me, figuring out that much is simple. The hard part is actually mentally visualizing and plotting out the correct path. I actually found it next to impossible to work out in my head, and it took dozens of tries on each individual panel to agonizingly tease out the solutions. That so far has been the one area and concept where I felt definite, sustained frustration at knowing what to do but being unable to do it. In the end it took me somewhere in the neighborhood of 4-5 hours to solve that one area, and I needed to make a large set of physical props (grids, tetromino cutouts) to do so. It's easy to see why some people would find this difficult to tolerate.

For the record, I do like this game quite a bit despite all that.

The Swamp and The Green House (the house with flowers in it on a cliff) are good areas to go to, both have tutorial like puzzles

@ktargo: I honestly don't understand why some feel so aimless at the start of the game. Sure the game doesn't really point you in a particular direction, but all of the areas around the beginning with the exception of the town aren't too bad and are totally self contained. If you look at trophies, 96% of people have finished Symmetry (it was like 80% on day one) and the next highest being the desert, so clearly people are finding their direction.

I do think the town really frustrates people though by being thrust on you so early, but even then you can do the apple trees and the windmill from the get go.

*numbers from a trophy tracker site so not purely accurate, but all sites seem to have the same trends. People are doing Symmetry first, then desert and the keep.

i figured out a couple tiny things today that are helping me keep going, but some of these puzzles are so frustrating especially knowing they can be solved and the answer is probably staring me right in the face. also there's a bunch where i feel i missed some tutorial or other. i went through all the tetromino stuff i think but the red colored puzzles after it (in what i think is the swamp area with the red water) i just can't figure out for the life of me. and there's another somewhere else where i'm sure i'm doing it right but it just doesn't go.

one puzzle had me stumped for like an hour yesterday and i solved it in 30 seconds today so that felt really good.

i also felt good about finally making the connection with the windmill and some random note i found somewhere else. FMV! D:

so yeah i'm feeling it but only as far as my horrible simian brain clanks into place now and then. it's kind of a drip feed. i feel i'm doing quite a bit better than i expected myself to, though (still not great).

I've had a vastly different experience. It's quite the opposite for me. There are a couple area's that I could figure out, but most of them had at least one if not two mechanics that I hadn't seen before.

I do get the comparison to Dark Souls @excitable_misunderstood_genius and @bigmess but I think it compares poorly for the purpose. In Dark Souls, you could go in three directions. Two of which were 'too hard' to tackle. That is different from this, because when you move from one area to another, your damage output and the damage you take immediately communicate to you if you are in a fair area. In The Witness you're doing puzzles, solving them without really knowing why and then find out you're in the wrong area and can't progress. You look for a new one, but instead of 3 directions, there are... I don't even know how many directions to go to.

Perhaps I messed up by immediately exploring the island, but the place where I had to be felt pretty off to the side. If you started the game, solved the tutorial area, and then the next area to go to was next to you, that would've been better. But to me it felt like it was on the other side of the island.

I think the area right next to the very first tutorial sequences (about white/black boxes and black dots) is perhaps the easiest area. It's the one Jeff got to before Brad took over in the quick look.

i'm also probably way way stupider than most of you so that isn't helping my confidence either. meh.

It is? If you follow the road from the beginning of the game you go through the dots and black/ white tutorial, and then if you keep following the road you are at the first zone. From the end of the first zone you can clearly see the second zone. Etc. Obviously you could wander off in any direction, but I think the beginning guides you pretty well.

There was a point in the game near the very start where I walked for like 45 minutes without finding the next set of tutorials for any given area and just kept wandering around the entire island. What I did to set myself right was go back to the starting area and follow the paths on the ground. I stuck close to the tutorial area and found the puzzle strings with tutorials at the start.

Every new concept starts with a tutorial string. There are many places on the island that have combination panels with things that may not be familiar to you. Avoid those. Go to new areas and find the tutorial puzzle strings. That will set you right.

I did the black and white one, but what is the second zone you talk about? I have only seen one set of tutorial terminals, but I have completed other puzzles in the process. All seem pretty far away from the beginning area. Maybe I missed something?

@zevvion: If you follow the path at the beginning past a rock wall you'll find a house with 6 coloured vases in it. As near as I can tell this is the closest there is to an intended first zone.

They do the initial panel in that area in the quick look if you need a reference point to get back there.

The area Jeff got to in the quick look with the vases on pedestals.

Well, right, what you are saying makes sense, and for some of the larger tetromino ones i absolutely did the same. But visualizing and plotting out the correct path *is* the puzzle. The visual aids and notebooks are there to help you tease out that process and find the solution. The OP was saying that they knew the solution already and then had to mess with graphs and pictures. That is what doesn't make sense to me. Maybe instead of "I know the solution" the OP actually meant "I understand the rules." Those are two very different things in this context

I think the core puzzle-solving gameplay is fine. The farther I get though, the more I'm annoyed by some of the peripheral stuff.

For example, the overall slow pace of movement, even when running. The lack of an effective fast travel option other than the slow-as-fuck boat. The inability to walk over anything more than the height of a low curb, etc.

I mean, I get why the game is designed that way. You can't walk off low edges because forced perspective is a big thing. The slow pace plays into that so that you actually take the time to notice that stuff rather than blowing by it, etc.

It's just that, the later you get in the game the more you kind of get it, so to speak, so all that teaching-via-design stuff becomes unnecessary. In other words, I understand that certain puzzles require a certain perspective to solve, and that I need deliberate movement to get myself there. But I don't want to do that right now. Right now, I want to go back to that puzzle that was giving me problems earlier and I now think I know how to solve. Except that the puzzle is halfway across the damn island past a bunch of panels I've already solved. So there's nothing for me to do except walk or boat (slowly, ever so slowly) back across the island.

The game is definitely unapologetically non-hand holdy and video-game conveniency. It's cool in a way, but I also think it might have been a better game if it had compromised a little more on some of that stuff.

I dunno, I'm rambling. I still think its a really good game. I just can't play it in big chunks.

@bushpusherr: Hmm you're definitely right about the phrasing, I must not have read the OP carefully enough. Though I can still understand the mindset that conflates knowing the rules with knowing the solution, especially in a moment of frustration. It's not a logical conclusion to come to but its one I can still relate to.

@nime: I imagine it has something to do with the notion that the game space is so small and nothing is locked to you, so most people might inclined to just explore in the beginning. Exploring can be dangerous though, because as you said, there are some areas such as symmetry that are intuitive from the moment you finish the intro sequence, but others I'd argue are very unforgiving because you do not know the extent to which the game rewards thinking outside the box. On the surface, there are basic maze puzzles, but then there are areas such as the desert or hedge maze section of the castle that are asking you to do things you haven't even considered as a possibility yet, therefore discouraging you when you cannot figure out what it is the game is asking you to do. Even areas like the swamp ramp up in difficulty very quickly. The way I played it allowed me to piece bits of information learned from each zone together until I had a cohesive whole, but I can easily see how others would take that as a sign of failure - my puzzle completion versus puzzles left incomplete ratio was probably about 1 solved for every 10 discovered in the first few hours.

I am feeling the witness more than any other game I've ever played in my entire life. It's burrowed its way deep into my puzzle solving synapses. I didn't understand why Jeff said the game made him feel crazy, but now I totally understand. It's gotten to the point where I'm seeing puzzle related patterns outside of the game. It's nothing short of a masterpiece.

Yes, you can't do any puzzle at any time if you don't have the right information. That's why exploration is a huge part of this game. You explore until you find a puzzle you can wrap your head around, and once youve don't that youve learned something that will help you with other puzzles.

@lawgamer: I really don't think the movement is as slow as you're making it seem. Yes the boat felt slower and I never used it, but you can run from one end of the island to the other in under five minutes*. Sure that's not like fast travel kinds of fast, but not enough that it ever really annoyed me.

*I was curious so I actually timed it - it takes a minute and a half to run from the desert to the bunker, which are two of the furthest points.

@nime: if anything, the movement is too fast. It feels like doom when you're sprinting. And the boat is,basically, a speed boat when you put it to the highest speed.

I think I'm missing something then. I 'finished' that puzzle. It opened up the door to the sea, and I couldn't go anywhere from there, so I backtracked I tried to find an alternate route. Is there more to that area that I'm missing?

@bushpusherr there was a puzzle that had me fill in the correct answer by the maze I walked through to get there. The solution is the maze is the answer. Actually drawing a map of said maze so I could input the answer is not what I would categorize as a puzzle. It's more like work. That said, like I said before, I may just not be in the mood to be bothered doing stuff like that right now. So far, The Witness walks a fine line between interesting puzzles and inelegant execution for me.

@zevvion: When the door to the sea opened it should have also lit up a cable in the house. Follow that cable.

@zevvion: If I remember correctly the house itself is a tutorial for the segment proper, which you can find by following the cable that lights up when enough of the houses puzzles are completed.

Thanks, this actually helped. I've been solving puzzles on literally the other side of the island for a while now. I went back here, but the puzzles here are ridiculously easy by comparison. I guess the game makes me feel smart for skipping all the intended area's and still being able to solve puzzles (and stupid for not seeing the cable light up in the area I was supposed to be in, but let's not focus on that).

@zevvion: The map on the boat shows where each new puzzle type is learned on the island. That may be useful in trying to figure out where to go next. Also, some places can only be reached first on the boat.

Very minor details about the island layout above.

It's really pretty and it seems very well made.

But "Hey man just go solve some puzzles" cannot hold my attention. This group of them lit up some cool lights leading somewhere what's over there oh it's like a dozen more puzzles.. I.. I gotta go.