@“Gaagaagiins”#p37958 I think I agree with chazumaru (||I actually don‘t know what secret they’re talking about, and that's impressive||) but I‘d say the #1 secret to enjoying The Witness (or at least my #1 tip for you, judging by the sound of your gripes) is to forget it has anything to do with “John” “Breeze”. I don’t think the video and audio clips are the only (or even the true) rewards for completing the puzzles (and would also say I don‘t think all of them are pretentious, though that’s not really something I can argue). On the other hand it‘s not worth forcing yourself through (if anything at all could be said to be worth that). If you are interested in following up on it I’d say don't feel bad about hoisting the colours and plundering some booty yo ho yo ho.
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In preparation for the [August 1st Insert Credit Reckoning](https://forums.insertcredit.com/d/923-alert-deadline-approaches-the-2021-forumsinsertcreditcom-video-game-poll) ("Insercreckoning" for short) I've been playing Metroid Prime 2, which I played only once in 2011. I remember liking it more than Prime 1 for what I thought were denser puzzles and more challenging/interesting combat (common enemies _and_ bosses).
It's also been a while since I've played Prime 1, so I can't say for sure whether these things I thought were better about 2 really are or not, but I'm enjoying myself all the same. Ten years ago I didn't really notice that Prime 2 also largely confines play to one area at a time—you can complete all of Agon Wastes without going back to Temple Grounds, and ||almost|| all of Torvus Bog without going to AW or TG. I like this quality about it, I enjoy keeping one area (and its dark world counterpart) in my head to solve as a single set of puzzles/item locations. Maybe I'm tricking myself somehow but it seems like keeping it all localized to one area allows the design to demand more mental work from the player (in a way that's not tedious), which makes it more satisfying to me. I remember (perhaps wrongly) a sense of figuring things out in Prime 1—not single-room puzzles, but like "oh, I need to go to location X to use the new item I just got so I can do Y which will allow me to access Z"—and then spending a great deal of time just going from place to place (impeded later in the game by [Chozo ghosts](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cWbLagjxbA)).
I love Prime 1, I'm talking it down to myself in order to make choosing one over the other easier.
Prime 2 isn't perfect, though. ||It does break this rule it seemingly establishes: at some point in Torvus Bog you have to get the seeker missiles, which are in... _not_ Torvus Bog! They're in Temple Grounds, and the only indication of this is that the only way to leave TB is through a super missile door (you get the super missiles about an hour into TB). But because I didn't expect I would have to leave TB, I never went and checked that out. I'd encountered basically no major amount of friction in the game up to that point, which made it more jarring, made me think I did something wrong. I putzed around TB for twenty or thirty minutes before giving up and turning on the in-game hint system (which I had been playing without), at which point it told me to go back to Temple Grounds.|| I figured it out from there, but don't know how much longer it would have taken me to investigate in that direction if I hadn't turned on hints. Feels frustrating.
EDIT Oh, and one other stupid thing: ||In the dark Torvus temple you have to scan these three locks to raise a big stone ring at the bottom of the central chamber. When you raise the third one, though, there's no way (that I could figure out) to get back to the save room up top, and I couldn't restore all my energy before fighting the Alpha Blogg boss down below. I died and lost like thirty minutes of progress. It did only take me twelve minutes to get back to where I was, but still. Annoying.||
Also the Dark Suit looks cool.
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