So far I’ve played about an hour each of Taiji and The Witness, and I feel like Taiji could use some additional puzzles to teach the concepts for each zone.
The Witness starts each area with tutorial stations with several basic puzzles, but it doesn’t feel like the case with Taiji. Either it seems to just throw you into the thick of things without some introductory puzzles, or you’ll be given several that seem pretty straightforward, and then all of a sudden it feels like the rules have changed and I am totally stumped. For examples, there is the large white building with the artwork where each floor appears to have a different class of puzzles, but there’s only about 3 per floor. And then there’s the area with the pylons where I went through several very quickly and then completely hit a wall near the top of the hill.
Maybe it’s because I don’t yet have the proper mindset because I have not played through all of The Witness yet. Or I am just slow and missing some obvious things.
So I came back to Taiji and stared at the pylons for a bit and noticed something extra and immediately understood. Once that clicked, I was able to solve the rest of the area very easily.
Pretty nifty, actually. But before that moment of realization, it was just pure bafflement and guesses about why certain things weren’t working and what to try next.
Time to go back to the other areas and hope for the best!
The white building is a large art gallery/mansion. There are paintings with dots on the lower floors (haven’t figured these out yet), but the artwork for the upper floors seem to be different types of puzzles (solved).
I haven’t seen the binary area or trees yet, so I’m guessing we started in different directions.
Ah, I’ll have to look for those pylons. The dots gave me similar fits where I thought I knew what they meant, then got baffled when it didn’t work, then had a lightbulb moment.
Made some progress and finished a couple of areas. So the game actually does have teaching progression for most of the zones, but figuring out where to start is sometimes the hard part.
Once I figured out the rule for a zone, the rest came pretty easy. But before that, I’m just stuck at the beginning of the area not knowing what to do. It’s pretty much all or nothing. I tried out the dots and had no clue after the first 3 puzzles, haha. I’ll try again later.
Some puzzles seem to use a combination of other area’s rules. So maybe that’s why some things looked totally obscure because I hadn’t seen those concepts yet.
I’ve been playing and enjoying Wilderplace a lot recently:
Your job as a shaman is to simply ‘balance’ each level by settling the spirits of the forest. Tree spirits want to go into saplings and become trees, stone spirits want to go into stones and become, uh, bigger stones, and so on. Spirits roam and ‘attach’ themselves to the inhabitants of the forest, including you. If you wander for too long with a spirit (three steps), they will transmute you into a tree, a stone, or whatever, so a lot of the challenge is manipulating spaces so that you don’t have to move too far. There are other wrinkles like woodsmen who chop down trees and certain items that allow you to push stones and pause time. It’s a really cool and intriguing mix of elements, and it looks and sounds lovely.
Puzzle fans! You gotta check out Akurra! It’s a world full of single-screen sokoban puzzles, with metroidvania-esque set of obstacles and an ever expanding moveset to overcome them. And it’s all in a beautiful and charming setting that is a lot more inviting than, oh say, rolling hotdogs around.
This is a demo. There’s apparently a lot more to come.
Yeah Akurra! I had to stop playing the demo because I was sold after only a few screens (and I usually hate sokoban and sokoban-likes). This felt like an adventure with exploring and its own mysteries to solve. All the pushing stuff around was clever rather than heavy. I loved the visual style too.
Yeah, my patience for sokoban is usually pretty short, too, but this is a testament to how powerful it is for a game to have a dose of color and character and exploration that most of those games shun.
Hey, if any of you puzzle game fans following this thread haven’t played SOLAS 128, you should grab it from Humble on sale right now. You won’t be disappointed!
I grabbed Puddle Knights,after reading some very heartfelt recommandations, and now that I spent my evening on it, I can say I al really loving it.
The challenge so far has been inbetween snakebird and snakebird primer: the game sorts puzzles by sublevels with particular mechanics in play, guiding the player a lot more than Snakebird, but offering quite a bit of challenge to me, although overthinking has been my worst enemy so far. I’m happy this is turning to be such a pleasant game.
It can be played with gamepad or keyboard only, another plus. And I love the looks of those aristocrats.
Golem - a cosy puzzle-adventure game and just a tiny bit underrated imho! It didn’t help that there’s another game by the name “Golem” for the PS4, which came out shortly after and is very different. It confused many folks which game is which and reviews in the main aggregators are still all over the place, obviously they found themselves unable to attribute reviews to the right game. Anyway, I’m leaving this here, because it deserves more attention from people that read puzzle game threads :-)
