NG2 sits squarely between grindhouse shlock and yukio mishima's erotic fascination with guido reni's perfectly penetrated saint sebastian, framing death as both Sick As Fuck and hypermasculine poetic climax; peerless in its ability to find perverse beauty in carnage while reveling in how cool it looks when a head goes gusher mode

for something best known for involuntary amputations, torrents of blood, and forward motion, it's surprisingly graceful and delicate. almost everything comes undone with a few swings and the aestheticization of violence is so heightened it verges on romanticism. much like its predecessor it revolves around deceptively simple movement and positioning over dazzling combo sequences, but the adventure bits have been hacked off to make room for a more laterally complex combat gauntlet where all inhabitance exists to maim and disfigure for the good of the greater limb economy

going in I thought the loss of black's circuitous world design would be a knock against it, but it wasn't. turns out you can make more linear, directed stages that aren't boring as fuck, who knew? 😲😲😲 the ghost lake with those dreamy overlaid effects, the castlevania clocktower, the coliseum, the airship; there're so many neat ideas and memorable flourishes in even the most straightforward bits. any time someone tells me 10 hours of homogeneous slop corridors is Good, Actually I'm gonna roll my eyes just a little bit harder from now on cos this shit has a werewolf kitchen

how much you enjoy it's gonna depend on your tolerance and appreciation for at least some amount of bullshit. there's no denying it's one of the all time messy bitch games that strains and grates against good taste, better judgement, and hardware itself. the infamous staircase sequence grinding and sputtering to an underwater crawl exemplifies its attitude better than any amount of polish ever could: they knew they shouldn't do it, did it anyway, and it ended up the best use of slowdown outside of STGs

on the other hand, there are some pretty big misses in the boss department, and the way it ramps up higher difficulties (mentor, master ninja) isn't gonna work for everyone. you'll know pretty fast if stuff like Incendiary Shurikens makes your hairline recede to some heretofore unknown ass norwood or inspires you to learn the tricks to deal with them, and honestly I don't think there's a wrong answer. but when you manage to chain the iframes just right to avoid the IS explosion, hit the On Landing Ultimate Technique, sequester a bunch of armless fucks on the other side of the arena, and toss their buddies into the wall so their legs blow off, it reaches a level of perfect survivalism other games haven't even considered

like, yeah, no one was sitting up all night dreaming of "the resident evil dogs but way worse", or gigadeath, or the bloom armadillos, but when it all comes together it's so good I wanna hoot and holler Team Ninja #1 with a big foam hand. I am in love with the eclipse scythe, I am starting to see humans as limb holsters. no amount of shit ass centaurs can sway me. I'm gonna bring back ratings and 5.0 is the NG2 rating. fuck itsuno's butthole tree

early on as I was running thru venetian canals, izuna dropping fiends headfirst onto the water's surface like it was concrete, I thought about how lucky everyone else was that this released hurried and unfinished. the genre dodged a real End Of History moment by the narrowest margins; another six months and this would've been untouchable. sigma could've finished the job, but Team Ninja Dog used the opportunity to backtrack on NG2's entire identity instead and then lose the source code for good measure. a fuck up so big it's still the best reason to buy an xbox in 2024

anyway, between the big gay mishima energy here and the awooga hello nurse stuff in NGB I'm claiming the ninja gaiden duology as official Bi Dude Canon, even if ryu's ass looks a lot like hank hill's sometimes

I ain't claiming the third one

i have so many things to say about SaGa Frontier 2 i barely even know where to start. i think i might start with how the series carries itself.

i see so many people, on this page even, saying that SaGa's and this game's weakest point is the combat and it makes me feel like i played a completely different game from them. if anything, SaGa always prides itself an immense amount on how intricate and how unpredictable its combat is, on how it's almost impossible to penetrate it's mechanisms aside from the most dedicated player that might be willing to spend hundreds of hours just to understand what's going on. SaGa is what i call a "guidebook series" and being unable to engage with this new paradigm is probably what keeps out most people from it.

"hold on Luci, isn't the need for a guide at all times just a sign of poor design?" you might say. i don't think so! i think complex, convoluted, pretentious, high art (these adjectives are being used as compliments, despite how people use these nowadays) games are some of the most beautiful things this medium has offered to us. SaGa does not overwhelm by a lack of finesse in presenting it's mechanics, nor is it on accident, you're simply meant to be lost, you're meant to not understand any of the complex calculations that go behind each action, its complex mechanics forever out of reach, no way of knowing that Soul Hymn, one of the best spells in the game, has a infinitely small chance of being learned with a specific character, using specific elements, late into the game. SaGa always felt like a game meant to revolve around oral tradition, you hear from someone they got this skill, or did this and that that you never saw in your game, and you tell them your story. put some nerds together and soon they'll be dissecting the game to its most basic components.

guides and decades old GameFaqs forum posts are our Library of Alexandria. an immeasurable amount of human knowledge and chronicles from a time where information needed to be shared, then compiled. of course official guides released alongside the game, be it before or post the fact, but the sheer amount of volunteer work people have contributed just so that other people could play a specific game with written help makes me think on how much would be lost if these archives ever went down. this is simply way bigger than any of us and any game, this is chronicled human history.

as for whether or not using guides suck out the fun out of games, for me it wholly depends on the type of game i'm playing. i'm not bringing out a huge guide to play a game like Final Fantasy IX, but most SaGas I will have one handy, at least for some parts and some aspects of it. for example, i like seeing skill tables and try to spark them, i think it's fun! for this one having the chronological order of events handy might have made this a bit less special (the game keeps track of what you've done or not and then show you what you did at the end) as jumping between time periods without knowing when anything is happening in the timeline sound like a fun time. but i also personally didn't want to lose on seeing any events, because i'm usually very invested in these games and this one, a surprisingly story heavy SaGa game, felt like it would benefit from seeing everything (it did!!! but i also kind regret not giving myself more freedom). i think that guides when not used in some weird FOMO manner can bring us all kinds of joys when engaging with games, it's such a unique experience to the medium and i would be narrow sighted if i ever dismissed it as something that primarily ruins an experience.

SaGa Frontier 2 is honestly way too beautiful, with stunning hand drawn backgrounds and cute sprites based on Tomomi Kobayashi's designs that make me wonder how much of this game shared its art workflow with Legend of Mana. the soundtrack is led by now famous composer Masashi Hamauzu and as much as i love Kenji Ito, what Hamauzu brings to the table is out of this world, I have no idea how this man does it but a samba inspired remix of the main battle theme is not what i expected from him at all.

SaGa Frontier 2 simply reinforced to me that even when i don't think i'll fully vibe with a SaGa game i'm always proven wrong somehow. i don't know how they kept this high consistency and quality since Romancing SaGa 2 but i just might have to admit that Akitoshi Kawazu is an incredible genius.

I spent a lot of time trying to write a long and smart intro to this kind of tying things into the current state of corporate IP crossover stuff but Final Fantasy is more of an anthology series crossing over with itself constantly so it doesn't totally work. I wanted to do a bit where I call Multiversus a knockoff of Eirgeiz: God Bless the Ring. So I'm putting that there because really that was the main reason I wanted to write it.

Seriously though, there are so many 'all the finals fantasy mashed up' games. They remade a bunch of them on GBA and added crossovers. They did Dissidia and then Theathrythm as a spinoff of Dissidia. They made FF4 the After Years and gave it like a whole plot that tries to put all of the mainline games into a shared universe. I haven't even gotten to Kingdom Hearts.

Stranger of Paradise is so many things. It's the Dark Souls ripoff Final Fantasy game. It's another attempt at putting all the mainline games in a shared universe. It's the unofficial sequel to Brave Fencer Musashi. For as svelte as the game is, there's a ton of just, SHIT in here. Ideas. You've got turning enemy attacks back at them, and hitting the button to power up your pals, and the fake devil trigger, the job system, command abilities, setting up your combo enders like mini God Hand, all kinds of stuff. I was always forgetting two or three basic mechanics and having a hard time, and I'm sure the couple of actually hard parts could have been easier if I knew something about one of the systems I didn't care to engage much with. The loot, in particular, is like come on. Fuck off with that shit I'm just hitting the auto-equip button periodically.

But other than that! Other than the loot numbers, SoP feels like a throwback to the lost days of B games. It's even in the little things, like everybody saying "Hey look, cubes" whenever you see save cubes. Or the fact that the characters seem to decide if they thought you did well or poorly in a fight based on a die roll. Or the many, many cutscenes that end with everyone walking off only to fade back into another cutscene in a slightly different location where they all resume talking about the same thing. It's so good. We should never have given them budgets to do more than this.

I basically haven't said a thing about the actual game or story or anything yet, and that's all fine. It lets you keep everything when you die so it's breezier than real Dark Souls. There's a ton of jobs to level which is always fun because I like unlocking a new one and finding out it has Runic or whatever as its ability. I was pretty firmly in team Sage by the end but there's plenty of customization even within that framework. The plot is not particularly profound but the cast is charismatic and enjoyable, with Jack fully deserving his meme status. There are scenes and bits I'm going to fondly remember for a long time to come. I'd say two bosses were a giant difficulty spike for me but that's fine. They were pretty fun. There's a bunch of DLC I have but you can only access on mega super duper secret CHAOS difficulty which is so absurdly evil I kind of respect it. So maybe I'll try it and maybe I won't I dunno. They put a Frank Sinatra song in the game for some reason.

I haven't played FF16 but I bet this is better. I bet it'll piss me off when I do play it because the FF14 people wrote it. I'm all in on Team Jack and that's that. Raises paw to the fistbump position

Longing for fulfillment all the way until the end of the world. Living in the literal day-to-day culture, with fleeting attempts to amplify their voices within the cacophony of people, trying to fill their hearts with SOMETHING and yet the only thing that matters is, did they really find what they were looking for beneath the circuitry? Everyone's answers is made for them, even the ones with the strongest Voice, usually in service of someone else's attempt. The only one that matters at the end of the day is the one who lived for compassion and love. That's what so many living figures in this world seemed to miss. The last and most central thing that exists isn't you, it's who you are with.

This game is such an interesting abstraction of the Japanese cityscape and countryside: I would say it feels most not like a central-Tokyo but like it was designed by someone who lived in one of the major cities an hour or two from central Tokyo. You get the occasional dense area with a skyscraper or two (Saffron City), dense collections of single family homes (Celadon City), but there's still the countryside running through mountains and forests, farming towns here and there.

That is easily Pokemon Blue's most interesting trait: it's a world based on reality, but not in the direction of an Earthbound that's more focused on constantly parodying America or people. Pokemon Blue is a game more interested in the idea of adding a layer of mystery (world of pokemon) and exaggeration (everyone catches pokemon!) to the mundane normal everyday life. I imagine this (and the affordances of the Game Boy and the 151 pokemon, and the marketing efforts of Nintendo) is what helped to capture the minds of the initial millions of players! I'm not sure how much of that exists today, where the series feels a bit more phoned in and calculated.

It's honestly quite disturbing the extent that Satoshi Tajiri's artistic idea become full-on media-mix/anime-ified - most symbolic of this is how sprites underwent slight revisions between the original JP red/green to US red/blue to yellow to bring things 'more in line with the anime' - a direction which, I think, informs the series direction today: something that's more interested in doing only what's necessary to keep the brand going, rather than an interest in the kind of design fundamentals Tajiri/team had that allowed them to conceive of Pokemon Blue in the first place.

The story in Blue is most interestingly not at all much of an anime story. Nobody is really fleshed out except potentially Giovanni, the game feels like a series of vignettes where the sport-like Pokemon battling at times briefly overlaps with the reality of our world. Lt. Surge fought with pokemon in a war, Mew is from South America, the moon landing happened in 1969, people are addicted to gambling, there's a crime syndicate, pokemon can die and become ghosts. There's a lot of room for your imagination to think about.

I loved the underground walkways that feel like the long, underground train station walkways in Japan, or even arguably underground shoutengai (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sh%C5%8Dtengai). How the Celadon "Mansion" is a mistranslation of the Japanese Manshon (often a 5-10 story apartment or mixed use building), how it has the Game Freak devs. The department store inspired by big Japan department stores.

I think the first 2/3 of this game (through Silph Tower) is really well paced, I love how you go between countryside exploration and weird little dungeons in urban settings or caves. The last 1/3 of the game feels a bit more out of place - the 'science' angle, while interesting, kind of starts and ends with Cinnabar island. Seafoam Island and Victory Road are fine, but they feel less connected to the whole game's sense of place compared to e.g. the rocket base or mt. moon. I don't think this detracts from the strength of the game, but the game did feel like it was dragging by that point - the fact it began doing block puzzles might be symbolic of that. (Ha ha)

An aside: The core of the "trainers are multiple pokemon, random encounters are one pokemon" is a brilliant design choice - they can express trainer personality through this, they can characterize spaces like dungeons or caves based on who is there. I actually wanted to see more of the Viridian Forest-type dungeon - where not everything is a random encounter tile.

--

After playing, it does feel like the game is at a bit of a crossroads. I think Tajiri definitely had more he wanted to do with his vision, but they may not have been in-line with the more obvious routes to 'improving' the game.

The more obvious routes, to me, neither of which interest me personally, are:

- Increasing the traditional storytelling: clear villain characters, more cutscenes, more regularly paced villain-related levels. This could help attract an audience put off by the way Pokemon Blue feels like falling into a story at times (which I personally prefer, haha). It would also increase franchise tie-in and business synergies!

- Making the battle system 'better' and not a pushover. Make the game more technical, increase training options, create harder battles or challenges - as this would be the only way to 'balance' the game from becoming too easy. This lays a lot of weird traps though, and I think pokemon's devs fell into most of them: stark divides between the 'true combat postgame', many compulsive traps around perfecting stats/builds (rather than letting you teambuild freely), etc.

Personally I would have liked it if the game went harder on the weird influences and level layouts, maybe experimenting with a smaller level range or different methods of training other than bland 'QoL' features to help even leveling... but hey! I'm not the billionaire company here...

Live on, Flame of Corruption.

Guilty Gear 2 Overture is a weird concept. A moba mixed with hack and slash with fighting game combos and some musou elements FOR THE XBOX 360 made while the franchise was in a bureaucratic hell. Even so, the game is amazing. Guilty Gear as Guilty Gear can be. Every level is unique and if you don't count just one, they are all amazingly planed and fun as hell to play. You go between a normal hack and slash arena, a lol match, a fighting game match, shoot up boss fight and a musou level in a way so smooth that is surprising. Ishiwatari proofs himself and his team as one of the best game minds we have, the way the game translates the artwork is amazing the game looks cool all the time, the soundtrack is perfect and the game have an amazing scene direction. Is no surprise that the director of Fighters Z first game is Overture he sure can make a dynamic game were you just vibe with the chaos in the action. Man, I really wish we got more stuff like this. Amazing game, way to soon for our minds and one day this gonna be a cult classic.

this is fun!! lots of really good areas added to the base game, FFXI is really good at not caring if they're repeating biomes and make them super interesting anyway (music def helps a lot). the story is super good the villains and how the 5 races came into being are super interesting, explaining how every race have each a very glaring personality flaw and how their "dark" blueprint counterparts openly represents these flaws (the Ark Angels are so cool.... even Ark EV fuck Ark EV but she's the coolest Paladin to ever grace any Final Fantasy game). cutscene direction is through the roof, i feel like if XIV dared to do these weird-ass camera angles that are probably considered "cringe" and "amateurish" nowadays we'd have much less "same-y" cutscene fatigue overall.

XI keeps being great and I'm very excited to do the extended Nation Quests and start Chains in like a billion years from now (the sub is so expensive...)

se você encaixar as peças de uma forma especifica e certinha, MMOs são a forma mais pura de turismo virtual, você pode viver de andar por aí, conhecer lugares gigantescos e com certeza tem alguém dedicado o suficiente a cada um desses lugares pra te dar um tour pelos lugares. final fantasy xi tem lugares gigantes, construções gigantes, todo mapa é uma caminhada de muitos minutos toda dungeon tem um escopo enorme. tudo isso é maravilhoso e perfeito e imaculado mas chega a ser engraçado contrastar com o fato de que fora dos passeios e fotos bonitas vana'diel também é um lugar acobertado por racismo, coisas que os humanos adoram fazer com as raças que provém dos monstros, que os elfos fazem com os humanos, que ambos fazem com os galka e assim por diante. a personificação de todos os males do mundo em final fantasy xi é canalizado e só existe por causa do racismo, ele é um ser melancólico, raivoso, arrependido, sem muitos caminhos além da destruição completa, para quê manter tudo isso né?

em qualquer história esse fenômeno seria contado como um passado distante, aqui ele aconteceu a 20 anos antes da história principal e o estado do mundo não mudou muito. finalizar a ultima dungeon e missão da história principal de final fantasy xi acaba sendo um ato de compaixão, uma promessa de tomar mais passos para novas histórias livres desses males.

na primeira expansão, rise of the zilart, o problema é estendido, não bastava a camada dos males que já permeavam vana'diel no presente, agora os fantasmas do racismo de 10.000 anos antes da história fazem parte desses males também com um desejo de superioridade, de ascensão e de destruição. sabendo disso, boa parte dessa expansão é você explorando todo santo cantinho do mundo, conhecendo tudo e todos de qualquer raça que seja. mais emblemático talvez seja a humanização de um monstro clássico de final fantasy, o tonberry, representação de uma raça que sofreu genocídio dos vilões 10.000 anos atrás. as histórias não acabam nunca, apenas tomam novas formas em novos tempos.

essa é a frase mais importante do jogo todo. "nada pode ser destruído, as coisas apenas tomam outra forma" logo após impedirmos o plano de ascensão dos vilões, quem fala isso é o espirito da raça que morreu nas mãos deles há 10.000 anos atrás, provavelmente tendo observado tudo o que aconteceu durante a história do jogo base. após a conclusão da história, nas conversas com os personagens principais e conclusão é uma só - as coisas vão continuar, as tensões entre as raças ainda não foram resolvidas e existe muita injustiça. antes disso tem uma cena personagens das raças de monstros convivendo nas cidades tendo um momento de tranquilidade, felizes, enquanto o espirito de um goblin que morreu por causa observa aquilo.

a vontade de cada era no mundo de final fantasy xi é tornar as relações entre as raças tão lindas e empáticas quanto suas paisagens e mapas gigantes, porque nenhuma história acaba, elas só tomam formas diferentes.

There’s a part of this where you can only see the boss you’re fighting through a rearview mirror and have to damage him by judging which of the three trains you’re running along the top of to decouple behind you, which is immediately followed up by having to raise a series of platforms said boss’ baby is standing on to prevent him from dipping your co-protagonist into rising lava via crane, both while dodging hails of projectiles. These just about make the top fifteen or so wildest scenarios in the game, maybe.

If Successor of the Skies (PAL supremacy) sounds crazy, that’s because it is, though it’s crazy with a purpose. Its mechanics seem straightforward enough initially: either flying or grounded, the player’s tools are exclusively shooting, charging up a more powerful shot, melee attacks or a dodge, and these are never added to from start to finish beyond minor alterations during certain setpieces. Only when you’re thrust into a genuinely overwhelming slarry of obstacles littering the screen from every angle is it that you’re driven to discover these moves’ less obvious nuances. The level I’ve referenced in the first paragraph has a great example of this, with a sequence in which enemies who are resistant to gunfire but get OHKO’d by melee attacks charge at you in such a rhythm that doing the full melee combo’s liable to get you hit (thereby teaching you that doing just its first one or two hits is sometimes preferable), but this kind of thing’s present in other areas too. A favourite of mine is how it handles parrying bosses – instead of telegraphing which attacks can be countered with a lens flare or something, as you might expect from other action games, you’re trusted to put two and two together when a boss enters the foreground and the intrusive thought of “What if I try kicking this gigantic claw swipe out of the way?” takes hold. Be it these, gauging just how much charge a shot needs to stun a given enemy or reflecting explosive projectiles back via melee, every interaction’s connected by the philosophy of nudging the player in the right direction without explicitly telling them.

How consistently intuitive it manages to be’s pretty staggering when you consider not just this hands-off approach, but also the creativity bursting out of it at every turn. As impossible as it is not to involuntarily grin at sights like a gruff military general splitting into three giant dolphins made of ink or a supersized lion wrapping a vulture around itself to become a griffon, it runs deeper than just presentational or conceptual levels. When a nominal rail shooter switches dimensions to chuck you into scenarios like a swordfight against a flying samurai lady or a fistfight in which you’re tethered to a particular spot on the floor, it’s tempting to think of these as borderline genre switches until the initial wow factor wears off and you realise that the moveset you’re utilising hasn’t really changed throughout the whole ride. As aforementioned, it’s never added to, though it is occasionally diminished to spice things up; apart from those examples, the segment following my favourite line in the game is an especially strong instance of design by subtraction, forcing you to approach familiar enemies differently both via said alien donkey/bike’s inability to fly and restricting your ability to fire if you hit the railings at each side of the screen. What gets me isn't just the fact the few tools at your disposal are versatile enough to be twisted into situations like this while never once feeling disparate from standard gameplay, it’s also that this isn’t even the only time that the borders of your screen are weaponised against you.

When the fact that you can legitimately never guess what’s up next on a minute-per-minute basis combines with the sheer amount of nonsense you have to navigate through at any given time, it’d be reasonable to worry about visual clarity becoming an issue, but it remarkably never does. There are enough actors, other interactable assets and particle effects jumping around that I frequently find myself wondering how Treasure got it running so smoothly on the Wii, although the hardware’s probably due thanks in this regard. Character models and environments being only so detailed hits a sweet spot in the same way that the visuals of the previous console generation did, teasing at realism enough to be immediately understandable while still being abstract and stylised enough to stoke the player’s imagination as to what else is out there in this bizarre vision of the future. It’d be myopic to attribute it all to working around technical limitations, though; the relatively muted palettes of levels’ backgrounds are clearly an intentional decision given just how much they help all the vital information pop out, from the seas of mooks you can’t take your eyes off of to the brightly coloured timer/score multiplier lining your peripheral vision. It’s a wonderful translation of art to game, which I think this wallpaper I can’t find the source of exemplifies pretty well (you’re welcome).

Although I like to waffle on about how much I value a game feeling focused, I’m pretty used to reading the parts of games I enjoy the most and which I couldn’t imagine them without written off by others as “bloat” or something similar to a point that my brain sometimes autotranslates it to “the fun parts.” Successor of the Skies is different to many of my favourites in that I genuinely can’t think of anything extraneous in it. So much as the file select music you hear when booting up the game is pitch perfect in terms of how well it sets the tone for what you can expect over the course of the next few hours, with all its boisterousness and excitement and undercurrents of melancholy. Don’t let how over the top it is fool you – not many games understand themselves as well as this one.

There was like a three day period where I was naive enough to think that this game maybe could have made some headway into the empathy problem shared by gamers across generations. Then I saw people being abusive about playing it and realized that they understood literally nothing about the plot and I've since stopped believing you can reach people without empathy through entertainment. In fact, it has this paradoxical effect where a lot of the games that make the biggest deal about empathy as a concept (this, Undertale, Disco Elysium for a few examples) bring out this intense toxicity and defensiveness that flies so far in the face of what those stories are trying to talk about that it's discouraging. I'm lucky none of the artforms I practice involve storytelling, cuz I would hate to be responsible for people misinterpreting my story and doing harm over it.

I also played this game at the end of the worst year of my life and it helped me deal with a lot of what I went through, so I'll always treasure my time with it because of that aspect. I just wish it went a different way with the general populace.

O momento mais simbólico de toda a filosofia de design de Morrowind se apresenta logo no começo; após encontrar Caius Cosades, o mesmo te oferece alguns recursos e diz: "Vá dar uma olhada por aí e achar alguma coisa legal pra fazer; quando quiser avançar a história, me avise". Mesmo que, como Nerevarine, sejamos parte de uma grande profecia e tenhamos um papel enorme na história do jogo, esse simples momento representa como o jogo quer ser jogado do início ao fim. Não há pressa, não há nada te empurrando. Jogue no seu tempo, faça o que quiser, vá ler livros, conhecer NPCs ou fazer missões de clã, mas lembre-se que tem sempre uma ótima história te aguardando.

The Witness Analysis
Spoilers

Concept
The Idea / The Epiphany
In a 2014 GDC talk, Yoko Taro discusses a scriptwriting technique he uses called backwards scriptwriting, which is the process of starting with the conclusion of the story and then creating a cause or reason. He also discusses starting with an emotion he wants to evoke from the player and writing the story and characters around that. This is similar to how the idea of The Witness came about, where Jonathan Blow started with the reaction of an epiphany and created the gameplay around that.

Jonathan Blow, following the release of his widely influential and catalytic indie game Braid, started development on a new game with an idea he had even before the development of Braid. Blow co-founded the Experimental Gameplay Workshop at GDC, and in a Noclip documentary, he discusses a project he made for this workshop. Inspired by games like Black & White and Arx Fatalis, which used gestural input to draw shapes and cast spells, he created a game where certain elements of the shape would control spell parameters, such as damage, range, hold time, tracking, and speed. He planned to have the player engage in combat by drawing these shapes which were more interesting to draw versus other games at the time, since the shape and spell could be different and altered every time. The player would learn new spells through normal game mechanics, such as books and NPCs; however, after the player climbs a mountain, they may or may not see that the path they just walked on is a spellcasting symbol. The player’s whole view of the world would change, as they realize that these symbols are all around them in the environment. This missable “eureka moment” is the foundation on which the game was created, and it was optimized to create “miniature epiphanies over and over again." Development began on this spellcasting game, but the team did not feel like the spellcasting was going to be executed well. Blow realized that he just needed any reason for the player to draw symbols and decided to create another puzzle game, The Witness.

The Inspiration
The Witness is a first-person, puzzle, non-linear, exploration game where you are tasked with the goal of solving puzzles on panels throughout an island. It was heavily inspired by Cyan Worlds’ games, specifically the Myst series. Although very different, similarities to this franchise can be seen throughout the entire game. The Witness was developed over the course of seven years by indie studio Thekla Inc., with a team made up of ten full time developers and eight others: Jonathan Blow as the lead designer/programmer, three programmers (Salvador Bel, Ignacio Castano, and Andrew Smith), three artists (Eric Anderson, Luis Antonio, and Orsolya Spanyol), and three architects/landscape architects (Deanna VanBuren, Digo Lima, and Nicolaus Wright). After investing $4 million of Blow’s own money made from Braid, he went into debt seeking additional funding, with total costs estimated at just under $6 million.

Introduction
The Vertical Slice / The Tutorial
The game begins in a dark tunnel, where the player can only move forward. A left analog stick or WASD icon will flash on the screen, showing the player how to move, although still non-verbally. After moving forward, they will encounter a panel puzzle of the simplest complexity with only one option of completion. The button to interact with the panel will also flash on the screen. These will be the only instructions given to the player for the entire game.This tunnel’s purpose is to give the player no freedom while teaching the player the controls, as well as give the player an idea of how the panels work.

After completion, a door is opened. Through this door is a stairwell with an exit to the outside. The first thing visible to the player is a mountain, which is the end goal of the game. Upon reaching the top of the stairwell, the first puzzle and the end goal are framed together. This outside area is small and closed off, giving the player more freedom, albeit limited. The exit of this starting area is blocked by an electric field. The panel to open this field is covered with bars that the player cannot draw through, teaching the player that physical objects in the game can obstruct panels.

The panels in the starting area slowly increase in complexity, with some panels giving the player options to start and end at multiple points. Completing these panels will open the bars, allowing the player to open the field and leave. After leaving the area, the path diverges to the left. If the player goes down this path, they are introduced to a large puzzle with two new symbols on it, which should be impossible for the player to solve. The player is forced to leave and return to the main path. There is an opening at a fallen wall, where the player can get their first real view of the island. In plain sight is an environmental puzzle; however, it is much too early for the player to form a connection with the panel puzzles and the shapes in the environment. After continuing on the path, they will encounter two types of puzzles, each with a symbol from the earlier puzzle. After completing these puzzles, the player will have the knowledge of how to complete the earlier puzzle. This design is able to teach the player about nonlinearity, and that it may be necessary to explore different areas before attempting the current area. This vertical slice shows the player the game mechanics and gives them a taste of most of the experiences the player will encounter for the rest of the game.

Gameplay
The Puzzles
Gameplay is made up of two types of puzzles: panel puzzles and the optional environmental puzzles. Panels are made up of a grid with a starting point (a circle) and an ending point (a rounded line). The player must draw a line along the grid lines, starting and ending at the designated points. For many of the puzzles, there are symbols in between the grid lines, each with their own rules. For puzzles without symbols, the environment must be used, such as light, shadow, sound, and objects in the world. For certain puzzles that have a set amount of solutions, there is also a system to disincentivize guessing; when the player enters an incorrect solution, the current panel becomes inactive and they must re-solve the last panel to reactivate it.

The puzzles are typically designed to appear to have an obvious solution, but that solution is not possible. In my opinion, this design makes for the best puzzles; the player understands everything in the puzzle and has an idea to solve it, but it doesn’t work, forcing the player to understand why it didn’t work and rethink the solution. This way, the player is always stumped, learning new concepts, and having epiphanies. Blow also states that “The clearer and simpler the puzzle is, the more beautiful and strong that feeling of epiphany can be.”

No Circles
Environmental puzzles are found in the world and follow the same rules as panel puzzles (the puzzle starts at a circle and ends at a rounded line). This concept poses a very unique and difficult challenge for the game design; there can be no unintentional circles. Their solution was to make all unintended circles and rounded edges into polygons.

The Game Design / The Gameplay Loop
There are 11 main areas in the game, each with their own theme and puzzle symbol or concept for the player to learn. Since the whole world is open to the player, excluding 2 endgame areas, progression is non-linear. The player can visit any area in the game at any time; however, certain areas will require that you’ve learned the concepts of other areas beforehand to complete them. This open world design also gives the player the freedom to leave a puzzle they’re stuck on and move to another area. This also means that the player will always have several puzzle options available to them, making it more likely for the player to make consistent progress.

When beginning an area, only one puzzle will be active for the player to interact with, and it will introduce a new symbol or idea for the player to learn. Because the game is nonverbal, it is up to the player to discern the rules of these symbols. There are two ways the game achieves this. The first is by making the starting puzzle of the simplest possible complexity with minimal options and slowly increasing the complexity. The player will be able to solve the first few puzzles unintentionally through trial and error. After having a set of solutions to examine, they will be able to formulate their own conclusions as to the rules of the symbols, similar to pattern understanding. The second is by making symbols which are violated by an incorrect solution flash red. Because of this, the player knows what specifically was wrong with their solution. Panels are connected by power cables, and completing a panel will cause the cable to light up and guide the player to the next panel. Completing all puzzles in an area will allow the player to activate a laser which points up towards a mountain, the final endgame area. This laser works similarly to the cables, both guiding the player to where they need to go. 8 lasers are needed to enter the mountain, while all 11 lasers are needed to enter a secret challenge area.

The End / The Challenge
Upon entering the mountain, everything you’ve learned is turned on its head; the environment shifts from nature to a completely artificial and clinical space, and the puzzles are now “broken” and introduce new concepts. There are TV screens piled up showing all areas in the world. Perhaps there is something deeper going on?

The player will make their way down three layers of the mountain and will reach a room with a door. This door has two panels with puzzles that are procedurally generated. The player must solve both of these panels in a set amount of time, or else the puzzle will reset with a new random puzzle, foreshadowing what is to come in the challenge area, which is hidden in this room. After opening these doors, a new type of edgeless panel is introduced – a cylinder. Upon completion, the player will reach an elevator. The elevator will fly them through the island as their work is reset, and a quote from the Diamond Sutra is spoken. The Diamond Sutra is a Mahayana Buddhist text that contains the discussion between the Buddha to his disciple Subhuti about the nature of reality, non-self, and emptiness. It’s the world oldest dated printed book, whose full Sanskrit title translates to “The Diamond That Cuts Through Illusion” or “The Perfection of Wisdom Text that Cuts Like a Thunderbolt.”

Bill Porter’s, whose pen name is Red Pine, complete Diamond Sutra quote translation is the following:
So you should view this fleeting world –
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.

The first verse is not spoken in the game, perhaps to leave the ending more open to interpretation to players not familiar with the sutra. As “A bubble in a stream” is spoken, the player flies over the river. As “A flash of lightning in a summer cloud” is spoken, the player is looking at a gray storm cloud in the sky. As “A flickering lamp” is spoken, the player flies over a flickering lantern on the lake. As “A phantom” is spoken, the white electric field is reactivated. As “A dream” is spoken, the player is returned back to the starting tunnel as the screen darkens. Was it all a dream? Is it all a dream? The only thing not shown was a star…

This is a hint for the true ending. Additionally, the panel controlling the electric field is in a unique shape – a shape made up of diamonds. The player can also find a drawing of this diamond shaped panel later in the game that contains a solution to reactivate the bright field. This is another hint that the field has a purpose while active. As the player is sent back to the beginning, the player may be armed with the knowledge of environmental puzzles. If so, they may also understand that any circle in the world must be part of a puzzle. The player may notice that the force field keeping them in the starting area looks like an environmental puzzle. The field is currently only the line portion of the environmental puzzle, but where is the circle? The sun… the sun upon the player’s awakening… a star at dawn. Solving this environmental puzzle will lead to the true ending – a first-person FMV, where a person (who is actually Blow, but represents the player) wakes up after playtesting The Witness, and tries to use the knowledge gained from the game in the real world.

To enter the challenge area, the player must first activate all lasers in the game. Similar to the force field in the starting area, activating a laser will remove a bolt obstructing a panel at the top of the mountain. Removing all of the bolts opens a new solution for the panel, which will activate a panel in the room at the bottom of the mountain. Solving this panel will open a hidden door to the challenge area. The symbols on this panel are triangles (sets of one, two, or three). These symbols are scattered all about the island, which is different and more challenging than how the game presents all of the other types of puzzles.

Eventually the player will reach a record player. Activating it will start the challenge – a timed gauntlet of procedurally generated panels which the player must also solve under the pressure of the song “In The Hall of the Mountain King.” Pausing or tabbing out of the game will reset the challenge, and inputting an incorrect solution will deactivate the current panel and generate a new puzzle. I have heard some players call this the greatest boss fight of all time.

Visuals
The Art Style / The Graphics
Art styles and graphics are typically dictated by hardware limitations, development limitations, or the tone of the game, all of which are created with the goal of looking as appealing as possible while constrained by these limitations. While this was developed by a small indie team of at most 15 members, the low poly art style and minimalist color palette plays a vital role to the gameplay. Both of these characteristics facilitate the player in easily absorbing information and distinguishing the environmental and perspective puzzles. One of the artists, Luis Antonio (who is also the developer of Twelve Minutes), gave a GDC talk about the art of The Witness and has written and been interviewed about this topic several times. He states that Jonathan Blow had clear art goals early in the development to minimize the amount of visual noise, support gameplay, and be grounded in reality, but before the team decided on an art style, everything was incoherent and highly detailed. In a Game Developer article (formerly Gamasutra) he states, "What’s the minimum amount of information we can use to tell you what you need to know about an object? Use that, and no more. That's what I learned on The Witness." Another artist, Eric Anderson, stated that their goal was “to build a game world without unnecessary visual clutter. ‘Noise’ was [their] enemy.” It’s also interesting to note that the development team was composed of three architects/landscape architects.

Sound
The Sound Design / The Music
There is next to no music or sound effects in The Witness. Because sound effects and music are used sparingly, when they are heard, the player knows they have special meaning. The most prominent example being the audio-based puzzles found in the jungle area. Here the player must determine the pitch of birds chirping to solve the puzzles. Other examples can include using the player’s footsteps or dripping water as part of the puzzle. Dialogue is only found through optional audio and video logs, as well as the ending of the game. The information heard here all helps to contribute to the game’s theme.

Theme
The Meaning
The theme of the game is attempting to understand the world. To do this, one may also have to change their perspective and view the world differently. In this quest to understand the world and the universe, their understanding of reality may be completely altered. This theme is enforced through gameplay, audio and video logs, and the metanarrative. It is enforced through gameplay from both the panel and environmental puzzles.

The player tries to understand the logic of the panel puzzle symbols, and once they come to the realization that the puzzles they’ve been solving the whole game are all around them in the environment, their whole view of the world is changed. Hidden audio logs and FMV videos express differing ideologies of science, religion, and philosophy. One of the most impactful audio logs can be found on top of the mountain. The mountain is also the point at which it is most likely for the player to discover the environmental puzzles; Blow’s “mountain path” from his original idea is showcased here in the form of the river. There is also a canvas placed directly above the river with a line in the river’s shape for additional support.

After gaining a new point-of-view of the world from this vantage point and possibly from the environmental puzzles, a quote from astronaut Russell Schweickart can be heard that expresses his new view of the world from space.

Development / Conclusion
The Engine
Thekla created their own game engine in C++, which allowed them complete control over the development. Work on this engine was very demanding and made up a large portion of the total development time of the game. The team used Subversion for version control (specifically Tortoise SVN); however, they developed their own system to prevent conflicts which were constantly happening. “Originally, the game saved all entities into one file in a binary format. This is most efficient, CPU-performance-wise, and the natural thing that most performance-minded programmers would do first. Unfortunately, though, SVN can't make sense of such a file, so if two people make edits, even to disjoint parts of the world, SVN is likely to produce a conflict; once that happens, it's basically impossible to resolve the situation without throwing away someone's changes or taking drastic data recovery steps.” Their solution was to convert all entities into files. Files include the name of the entity, a unique ID, position, orientation, entity flags, entity name, group ID, mount parent ID, mount position, and mount orientation. To preserve the exact values of floating-point numbers, they stored the variables as hexadecimals. The engine would parse and load the tens of thousands of text files every time the game started up, which didn’t have a huge effect on performance for a game of this smaller scale. This change drastically improved workflow, prevented conflicts, and allowed for conflicts to be easily resolved. Blow states that “It would be difficult to overemphasize the robustness gained. I feel that these sentences do not quite convey the subtle magic; it feels a little like the state change when a material transitions from a liquid to a solid.” Dozens more articles about the engine written by Blow, Ignacio Castaño, and Casey Muratori can be found at http://the-witness.net/news/category/engine-tech/.

The Future
While programming The Witness’ engine, Blow grew to dislike C++ and felt that it had “reached critical complexity.” He has since been creating a new language meant as a C++ replacement with game programming as its focus. Blow has given many talks on this new language, with the first on September 17, 2014. Some of the core principles of this language (codenamed JAI) are high performance, joy of programming, simplicity, low friction, designed for good programmers, and full compile-time execution. In 2017, Blow demonstrated a non-optimized compiler doing a full rebuild with an estimated 104,000 lines per second. In 2018, Blow demonstrated his next game with 80,000 lines of code (equivalent to approximately 110,000 lines of C++) compiling in 1-1.5 seconds. With this new language, the team is writing a new compiler, game engine, and game. By working on all of these projects concurrently, they are able to test and improve the language. Apart from Blow’s next Sokoban-style game, he is also working on a 20 year long project which he began in 2012 or 2013. He is rewriting it in Jai, and it will be released in installments, with each new iteration being an elaboration “on the same game over the course of 20 years, making it bigger and bigger and more complex.”