The Witness (by Braid creator Jonathan Blow)

The inspiration seems to be Myst,Myst and more Myst, though with a much more intuitive interface. It will be a timed exclusive for PS 4, Blow explained that this is because he's enjoyed a healthy relationship with Sony and somewhat less than so with Microsoft. Emphasis on consoles, as it will be released for PC and iOS at the same time, Xbox being the only one getting shafted here, really.

Release date, somewhere around the PS 4 launch.

Coming to Xbox One too.

I completely forgot I made this thread. The whole thing kinda left my mind entirely, I had no idea it'd gotten delayed for this long. It's been in development since 2008, I think?

Almost.

[1]

$40 for The Witness? No fucking way.

...seriously? People are actually getting angry at this? The guy has promised a puzzle game reaching 100 hours! The Talos Principle is around 20-25 and sells at the same price! Or are people going "Braid was cheap so this should be as well!" Jeez.

Edit: wow, I was so taken aback by the "surprise and disappointment" line that I didn't even notice that the article itself mentioned Talos. Great minds think alike.

edited 19th Jan '16 3:34:52 PM by Psyclone

Actually, people thought Braid was too expensive at $20.

But not $40 for a puzzle game. No.

If the content is anywhere near as sizeable as Blow claims it to be I honestly don't see the issue with it either, it's not like there haven't been triple A puzzle/adventure games like this before.
I do assume he's crediting at least some of that playtime to puzzles of the intensely obscure post-endgame sort like the stars in Braid or those last cubes in Fez, though, I wonder what they'll be like.

Forty dollars sounds fairly standard for a normal-budget adventure game.

The review embargo is up and it's looking pretty good, perfect 10s from Destructoid, Giant Bomb and IGN

I have nuffink but contempt for Braid, but this here looks pretty damn nice. Helps that Blow kept his mouth shut and simply focused on making the game, rather than engaging in premature self-adulation. Definitely gonna give it a go.

I think Blow would be extremely pleased if he knew how much I've been cursing him out the past hour.

"Hey, this one isn't so bad"
"...um why is the yellow line going invisib-"
"..."
"Oh, fuck you"

-~-
But yup, if you enjoy puzzles and exploration games this is very much your deal, it's a very nice companion piece to The Talos Principle.

That space monologue on top of the mountain really went on for a bit, though

edit: So after making my way through four hedge-mazes and up the staircase they led to, the puzzle at the top expects me to have memorized the correct routes to all four of them.
Ai.

edited 26th Jan '16 6:38:15 PM by LE0Night

I just finished after completing 10 out of 11 areas (the puzzles in the town were very hard, I'll try to get those later), and I have to say I felt pretty satisfied overall. Even the puzzles where I got stuck felt pretty fair after I finally figured out or looked up the solutions.

OK, time to try to figure out the symbolism. The island represents... The human mind? A human life? Art in general? Help me out here.

Blow's ego ?

The mystery is solved, the game is a self-parody of Blow's mind and how he tries to get better.

Proof: Blow telling people to not call this "Jonathan's game" as it undermines the other who worked on the game with him.

This game is killing me I'm enjoying it overall, but a twice now I've run into a panel that I just cannot figure out, feeling like I've tried everything, but clearly I haven't. I stared at one of them for about an hour before eventually leaving the game for a while. Solved it accidentally five minutes after I next started playing though.

I think the current one I'm stuck on has stumped me even more. I know I must be making a wrong assumption somewhere, but it's hard to get past it.

I really don't want to have to look up the solutions. No-one ever makes guides with just hints for things like this. Sometimes I'd like just a nudge in the right direction, not to be flat out shown the solution.

Edit - This is starting to make me worry for my mental health. If someone could give me just a tiny hint, if possible, for this panel◊, you could be responsible for saving my sanity. I just cannot find a way to fit those three yellow shapes into the grid while also having their symbols contained within the shapes.

edited 30th Jan '16 1:11:19 PM by artfulscruff

Double post because I'm mad.

That last puzzle, I ended up looking at a guide trying to only see part of the image to give myself a clue, but accidentally saw the whole thing. Now, can someone explain how this actually works to me, because I cannot fucking understand it, and no guide I've looked at actually explains it.

The panel◊ The solution◊ The only way I can make the shapes fit◊, putting all the yellow pieces together before subtracting the blue square. As you can see, that means rotating two of the shapes, which is something I didn't think you were allowed to do. As I understand it, the blue subtraction squares must also be kept in that 2x2 formation, so you can't break them apart to subtract individual squares.

I'm almost sure I must be wrong, because otherwise all of the puzzles have been fair. I solved all the ones following this in minutes too, because the rules were clear and allowed me to work out what to do with relative ease. Just this one puzzle makes no damn sense to me.

Please, please, someone show me how it works.

edited 30th Jan '16 4:04:39 PM by artfulscruff

I think it might be an oversight of sorts. There is one type of puzzle along those lines where the tetronimos are at a funny angle, which means the shape can be rotated. Maybe it was supposed to be one of those?

Have you tried making sacrifices to the Gods?

I thought that too, but none of the other puzzles in the sequence have the angled shapes.

I did the Bunker, that was a fun set of panels.

I did end up cutting out shapes and arranging them on a grid I'd drawn to solve one puzzle. I'd been trying to figure it out for 5-10 minutes before that, then ten minutes making the shapes, then it took me all of 15 seconds to solve using the cut-out shapes.

edited 31st Jan '16 9:15:25 AM by artfulscruff

I've been stuck on that same puzzle for like two days now. It took me awhile to realize this, but the four blue squares that are removed do not have to be in that square shape. You also don't have to put down all the shapes before removing the blue square, so I think the solution is you put down two, remove four squares, and then put down the third. I still haven't gotten the exact solution yet though.

So I broke down and looked at the solution, and it looks like what's happening is the vertical piece goes in the top right, the bottom left piece goes on the bottom left. Remove the bottom square from the vertical piece, the two on the bottom middle, and the one right above the bottom left. Then just put the remaining piece in the bottom right.

edited 31st Jan '16 12:56:12 PM by Crowfall

Yeah, I'd also come to the conclusion that the blue squares don't have to retain their shape. I still call bullshit, because none of the other puzzles with the blue squares demonstrated that.

edited 31st Jan '16 1:21:48 PM by artfulscruff

Yeah, I don't think the progression is very good there. Before that you only really had to deal with single blue squares, so they don't really teach you how larger groups work.

I think there were a few with two blue squares together, but, at least how I did it, they always remained in the configuration shown, so I assumed that was how they had to be.

Glad it's not just me who was stumped by this, by the way.