Braid was the game that got me into using Steam. A friend let me access their Steam account (!?) in late 2008 because I had to try this cool game. Indeed, Braid was cool. Then I got Steam for myself and never played Braid. Instead, a few months later, I would get Team Fortress 2 and spend too many hours in that game.
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imo The Witness is successful here where Braid is not because it depersonalizes the “narrative”—such as one exists in The Witness to begin with—and communicates what it wants to verbally to the player through its handful of video and audio clips. Being a collage of obviously disparate media united by a philosophical throughline rather than any explicit narrative allows the player to interact with them more on the player’s own terms. Braid is vague enough that I think there was probably a similar ethos to composing the story but where it does try to root things in the personal it stumbles pretty badly, for example in comparing the inability to take back something hurtful you said to your partner with Oppenheimer being unable to take back the atomic bomb. There’s also the overwrought prose telling you exactly what the game is supposed to mean
For me, fundamentally The Witness isn’t about a guy in a simulation or whatever people have said the ending video shows (unsatisfying). It’s much more successfully an examination of learning and methods of inquiry and the idea that you can understand many different things if you know how to ask questions about them. How you learn to ask questions is a matter of starting from “the beginning” of a given subject (the different types of puzzles in the game) and of looking at it from different angles (literally). Theoretically all puzzles games are about this insofar as they all teach you rules for which you have no context outside the game, but the value of The Witness comes through in how granularly it’s able to explore the concept of a line puzzle on a grid in 3D space, which granularity bears out this theme of investigation. It’s too bad JB doesn’t practice what his own game preaches and insists on being a jerk
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What are you thinking of here that stands opposed to The Witness? Not disagreeing, just curious.
Yes. When my child has urged me to replay The Witness (now) four times, I still get something from the experience - solid puzzles and atmosphere even after I know how the areas all fit together. The long video lectures and recordings I usually skip, and I can skip them without the sense of missing something essential.
With Braid, I would just say “no” to anyone asking me to replay it. Besides how the narrative hints are presented, the interpretive exercises of making something out of the game also burned me out. I like interpretation, but Braid left me thinking the final level was a neat trick and the previous diary entries were OK. The game set up a lot of ambiguity, sometimes clumsily. It is a very easy foundation to build an overdetermined reading on.
I was wondering if I was imagining this, so these are bits from various random positive Backlogged reviews of the games noted.
Riven:
“No puzzles for their own sake, only a rich world dripping with detail and history”
Another World:
“Bleak, boundless scenery that evokes the soul of a universe that isn’t ours”
Portal 2:
“the way Portal 2 elevates what made the first entry so special, full of ambition in every aspect, feels like a warm hug. its closer approach to storytelling and the jaw-dropping atmosphere make the experience significantly more immersive and thought provoking, and i couldn’t be more on board with it.”
Unpacking:
“There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, but the point is not to simply reach that light; it’s to bask in it, revel in it, sink into its comfort and its warmth and hold on to its embrace for as long as it can last.”
The Witness:
“Lends about the same artistic value to the medium as solving a Sudoku book while watching science and philosophy Tiktoks and then trying to thematically tie the two together, but misogyny be damned that Johnathon Blowhard can make a puzzle.”
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Great quote lol
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yeah haha, seems like the person who wrote it is cool and has good taste, some very detailed, well argued reviews: Fumio's profile | Backloggd
I still think Braid is a great game. But it doesn’t really lend itself to replaying (I’ve tried). Other games have done similar with less awkward controls too. And most importantly a lot of the context of not only the world it was released into, but also the one in which it was an anticipated game, has been lost (see the VVVVVV thread as an example) and/or actively destroyed in the time since.
And it’s hard to sympathise with current day Jon Blow.
So I’m not surprised opinion has turned on it.
I do think the fate of Braid Remastered was similar to that of a game like Saltsea Chronicles (I’ll even throw the recent Bossa Studios drama in with them). That is, a “big indie” has failed to notice they’ve slipped under the bar where their games automatically get noticed. I find it mildly annoying that the performative dunking on Blow has masked an ongoing problem.
I think critical opinion of The Witness has been much more solid over time. I know I still consider it great. And the Hall of the Mountain King puzzle is an incredible and perfect sequence.
Though there’s another distasteful coda where many consider subscribing to blatantly false and disproven conspiracy theories (The Piss Jar) to be acceptable if the victim of them is a bad person. See also: Notch.
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i think some of what you’ve written here is just that if you weren’t really into the scene when it was contemporary, fps pc gaming was just so inaccessible - not only from a skills floor but also from the cost of the hardware and internet access being so goddamn high – and also the drive and technical acumen needed to set up a separate matchmaking service like heat.net or gamespy. that lead to a lot of very very insular culture. i’m not really sure what would be the multiplayer fps going ‘mainstream’ as you could probably separate that into lots of inflection points, but Quake 2 never struck me as being particularly accessible to get the true experience (your SSS+ tier period-appropriate CTF)
fwiw, tribes has this exact same critical and zeitgeist re-examination loop and i think it must just be because of the culture of pc gaming at this time.