#niche posts

Since The Witness is a game that's impossible to really play twice (it's about learning and observation, and the save game is inside your brain), I sometimes watch Let's Plays of it for that vicarious thrill. You get to watch people figure things out! You get to see them make assumptions about how the rules work, and watch them have epiphanies!

Spoilers for The Witness follow.

Unfortunately, a lot of these people simply do not get what the game was going for. That's fine, that's how art is sometimes, and most LPs are streamed by people who are, at the very least, aware of their audience and filling air (or at worst, engaging with chat and only half paying attention).

There is, in particular, The Mountain. Through the whole game you've been completing different areas, lighting up lasers that shine up to the mountain peak, and eventually you make your way up there, and there's a beautiful puzzle that requires changing perspectives, and after that you're on your way down into the bowels of the Mountain, which it turns out contains an enormous modernist facility. There are bits and pieces of design laying around, models and diagrams showing someone going through the work of making all the things you've seen around the island.

It's not just the environment that's different, the puzzles are too. And in particular, there are a few series of puzzles that I've seen many many people think are just the stupidest trolliest shit. These are the panels that are obscured by black bars, the ones with flashing colors, the ones that are at an uncomfortable angle, the ones that twist and turn when you try to do them.

Now, is this trolly shit? Yes, absolutely. But it also has a point.

The Mountain is about constraints, and design, and how we have to work within the limits of a medium, how what was shown to you throughout the whole game was limited. The puzzles of the Mountain are in one way or another about breaking outside of the constraints, showing you the limits of the puzzle grids, all the things that weren't done. They are, in some sense, just pointing out scope and how it works.

This is the only place in the game where there are puzzles that affect each other. It's the only place where you have two lines on the same grid. It violates the rules that the game has set up, rules that you probably didn't ever think about, in the same way that you've come across a lot of rules you didn't think about in this game (and this is one of the main experiences before The Mountain, being challenged on what you think you know).

And is it irritating to have to solve a puzzle that's off-centered? That you can't see that well? That's spinning in place? Yes. But it's that way for a reason.

What's crazy to me is that I've seen so many people say "how did this make it past QA" or "this is the dumb shit you do when you're first making a game", as though it was a mistake, as though Jonathan Blow had just run out of ideas and was trying to pad the game. Or they'll say "why would you do this to me" and then not actually think about why.

The thing about The Witness is that especially in The Mountain, it's challenging game design and not taking it as gospel, and it's doing this in what I think is an interesting way. But sometimes the people playing it are so used to "good" game design and have had so many brushes with "bad" game design that they just don't even stop to question it.

And I know, I know, I'm saying that it's Bad on Purpose ... but it is! The whole area has a claustrophobic feeling to its puzzles, like you can feel yourself straining against them, and it's really wonderfully thematic, especially as the final section of the game. And I wish that I could sit down with the people playing it and have a conversation about it, what the game is trying to express, how gamers should also have reading comprehension.