Challenge and narrative are weird - The Witness

CAN-A-WORMES - 'The Witness' in spotlight.

Hello! It's been ages, hasn't it. I've been a bit busier than usual, that's all. :o)

Luckily, we got TAGged this Summer - special thanks to Ville for the write-up! Though I still don't know what MOBA even stands for (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena??), it was an interesting look at a new field.

(BTW: You mentioned in the review that people don't seem to know what they should be doing in the game... Err, watching a game of League of Legends or, heck, even Counter Strike, I usually have absolutely zero idea or sense of what's happening in front of my eyes. Without practice all the frantic sights and signals just blend together. Which is why it was such good times to have Nese, a proper bullet-proof CS player, working for our team for the Summer. Everything I know about CS I learnt while watching the Cologne world championship tournament live from YLE Areena and asking him n00b questions.)

Anyhow, I've got lots to tell and no time to lose, so let's get cracking!

The third (and final) part of FUUUDGE will appear eventually, I'm sure, but the heavy subject matter has proved draining. Uhhh... Each time I get back to the videos that motivated me to write on the topic I feel a little sting, so I think I just might sideline the downers and concentrate on the positives. We'll see.

This time, though, I'll kickstart another series, CAN-A-WORMES, in which I mainly show you my talents for witty acronyms, but also have a look at how games have ventured further into the unknown in the hopes of finding new, interesting types of engagement. (Okay, so that's 'Challenge and Narrative Are Weird, Or Maybe Even Strange', of course.)

A game set strictly on top of a mechanical backbone, some graphics and very little else, released into the wild for individual players to play would be one such example. That's basically MOBAs, for you.

But that's not my turf. No, I'm more familiar with another genre, that of challenge, unrelenting and punishing challenge. Those are the games that I played and enjoyed as a kid. They were the cat's meow, back then. For reasons beyond reason, it seems the world is ready for more.

(In fact, at this point I'd like to request Ville to write some good words of the game which he so often mentioned, the name of which I forget... Not Shovel Knight... It was this side-scrolling action platformer, with gruelling boss fights. I don't know, I'd just like to hear more about it.)

The other thread that I've been following lately is the games which put the narrative front and centre. These games don't necessarily give you a lot of "game" as much as options to affect the story or simply see different parts of it. Which I'm sure many of you will cringe at. Fair enough, so will I. :o) But I'll get to that in the next episodes, not now.

(I'll hopefully tone down the number of words to a more reasonable level, too.)

The first look will be on 'The Witness'. A game where there's no characters, little to no environmental storytelling, and I wonder if it even has a story or a backdrop... But there's challenge, in spades. Now, don't be daft, I haven't played it. Wouldn't that be the craziest thing, silly you! But I most certainly will. (I guess I'm awaiting for the upcoming iPad version, which will hopefully make it even harder for me to concentrate on work during my daily train commutes.)

It's a different kind of game, for sure. Some may know the developer and designer Jon Blow, who is known for his harsh critique of popular gaming conventions and tropes, traditional skinner boxes, and exploitative games. Oh, he's a regular party-pooper, he is. But he will apply the same level of scrutiny and standards to his own games, so watch out...

First, here's a look at the trailer.



I fell in love with the game's central premise as soon as I saw that the beautiful environment works both as a relaxing backdrop and a source of crucial clues to the puzzles. So it's essentially a puzzle game. You solve puzzles that look like they're just puzzles on a board. But its first set of nine simple two-dimensional maze puzzles alone grabs one's attention. Watch and see (Jon explaining it to a guy that cannot hold a camera straight):



Why does this feel so... captivating? Is this how some people see sudoku or crossword puzzles? But you'll have to admire the way the series of puzzles teaches the player abstract rules through play. Now this is not the learn through panic-trial-error-death-retry-death-and-excessive-swearing that games like Dark Souls and the unforgiving indie platformers like Spelunky and Super Meat Boy do it. Instead the game lets you take your time. The learning process is different.

The game rewards you for learning these tricks by showing you that you mastered them - and little else. You see the next challenge popping up, as if to say "here's the next puzzle, have a go at it."

In this sense I feel it is incredibly close to games like the aforementioned Dark Souls and Bloodborne, in which you absolutely must learn the rules of engagement and mechanics through play and repeatedly show that you indeed command those skills. In which the reward is seeing the baddie fall down, where no fanfare, no cutscenes and no achievement notifications are required for you to feel you've done a good job.

(As a side note, I just learned that you can turn off trophy/achievement notification pop-ups for XBone and PS4, but not for PC Steam games - I now feel insulted for being a PC player, why thank you, Valve)

The other uncanny similarity between these games is the depth of lore in the background and the ways in which the story is revealed to you - or kept away from your prying eyes. This isn't anything new in games, nor is it confined to indie publishings - Halo games have done this for ages, to a tee! And I just find this so incredibly refreshing, so invigorating that I can't help trying to get you all pumped up as well. :) How do you feel? Do you want your story to take backseat and concentrate on the mechanics, or do you want the cutscene to be there just to express your progression, even if it doesn't really interest you? Or do you want a proper story, like the ones you've grown to follow in film and books etc?

Alright. Getting back to The Witness, let's have a quick look at how game reviewers and gamers have responded...

SuperBunnyHop:



The review does spoil a bit, so I'll collect and show you the essential points below. Yeah, George wasn't impressed at all. This from the same guy who loves the Dark Souls series and Bloodbourne so very, very freakishly dearly...

"Most painful of all was that I learned I am not the kind of player this game was made for, because I COULD NOT STAND The Witness. Finishing the first run of the game without a strategy guide was like pulling teeth. It was one of the most frustrating, boring and unsatisfying experiences I've put myself through since the start of the channel."

"As a collection of maze of puzzles it's not unimpressive. The island itself is the collection of over 500-something - at a modest estimate - of these flat 2D puzzle panels. which really encapsulates my big gripes about this game. A high quantity of puzzles backfires the value of the game if the puzzles themselves aren't fun to complete. And fun was something I found very, very elusive during my trek through The Witness. Rules are conveyed not through words but rather by series of ambiguous symbols that could seem to mean just about anything, until you play through a small series of tutorial puzzles that are supposed to clue you in to how they work. Except for me a lot of times that just didn't happen."

"But what really had me nodding off and what made me want to turn the game off and do my taxes instead, is the complete lack of narrative reward for finishing these puzzles. There's an incredibly threadbare story to it all, there's no identifiable characters, and certainly no easy explanation behind what's going on. The result is a feeling of a game that's depressingly lacking in energy, heart and soul."

"It's more expressive, more interactive and immersive version of a puzzle book, a simple, clean collection of puzzles made by - and for - people who just really, really like puzzles."

So the game appears to be... challenging. :) Here's what the developer himself has said on Twitter:

Jon Blow:

"I see a lot of people going to forums immediately if they can't figure something out. Don't do that! It makes your experience a lot worse,"

"You are smart, you can do it! If you don't know now, sleep on it. Take a walk. Watch a good movie or go to a different puzzle!"
This optimism and encouragement for taking a different approach to The Witness as compared to other games in the past is shared by Eurogamer's reviewer Oli Welsh:

"We've been taught by so many games to respond to getting stuck with frustration. We've been conditioned to expect constant, unimpeded progress, to expect that every minute we spend in a game will supply a steady trickle of affirmation, of so-called experience. But sometimes the real progress, the real experience, comes from stopping. Sometimes it's found in a moment of stasis, waiting for insight to come. Sometimes, if you give up and turn your back on a problem, when you turn back to it you find you can see things differently, and the world has changed. You are smart. You can do it. No surrender."

And still, while admiring the "whole" comprised of the various puzzles, Welsh is much more sceptic towards the story aspects:

From his review:
"I expect the 'real meaning' of The Witness is something the game's community will enjoy debating and piecing together over time, but this thread struck me as self-involved and wilfully obscure, carrying the whiff of alternate reality games: a riddle to be crowdsourced rather than a message to be understood."

Okay, time to wrap up. I'll keep the punchline brief and tidy. Videogamer.tv's two reviewers, Simon Miller and Tom Orry:

Simon: "And I think, it's probably the smartest game I've ever played. I think that's fair thing to say. Do you agree?"
Tom: "It's one of the best games I've ever played, I think."
Simon: "One of the best games you've EVER played? Ermm... Umm.. There you go."

Here's the full video review:



And an excerpt from the beginning, about the difficulty and how they think you would do well to approach the game:

Tom: "It is hard, and I think there are points where I got help from someone. So I think when you're playing it, it's definitely good to talk to other people at the same time."
Simon: "That's the point, isn't it? ... That it wants you to go on social media and say "hey, has anyone got to this bit", and it kind of feels like it encourages conversation."

So that's another thing that's shared with Dark Souls and the like. Communication. I think we need more games like that. To make playing less a solitary pastime, and occasionally give a chance to pull in other people into this hobby, even if for a few fleeting moments. I feel like I should go to my favourite cafe and pull out my ipad and The Witness, and feel like I'm reaching out, bridging the gap between the elderly couple filling out sudoku sheets on the back of a newspaper and the group of preoccupied youths, each fixated on their own facebook feeds.

Anyhow, that's it for today. Next episode of this series will see us look into narrative games. See you, space cowboys!

Oh, nearly forgot... This definitely counts as spam, Ville, I know, but please, please tell us about your time as a firewatch in ... the Firewatch!

- Janne

PS: Helsinki is such a cool city... I once hurried down the escalator on a metro station and went past a guy who was playing FTL on his ipad. I feel slightly bad for not giving him the thumbs up that he so obviously deserved. :)