Being paid once a month has advantages and disadvantages. On one hand, there are many months where I'm often feeling that things are tight and that we should only buy ramen and hot dogs to tide us over. Well... not really, but you get the point. On the other hand, getting that paycheck gives me, albeit temporarily, the sensation that I can get whatever I want. Having just bought a new van, though, has tempered that significantly and I've had to give myself a monthly allowance. I've known for a while, though, what I was going to get with my monthly stipend: The Witness.
So I picked it up and downloaded it once I got home from work. I've read some reviews but I didn't want to spoil the surprise for myself. Once the game was installed, I grabbed my controller, plunked myself down in Mr. Chair, and waited to see what I could find out in the first few minutes. Turns out, I didn't find out all that much.
Here's what I can say: you start in a tunnel, you walk out of it, and then you're on your own. Free to explore but no real sense of where you should be going. For a kid who grew up with 80s Nintendo, conventional wisdom was to always go to the right. Nowadays, with technology giving programmers and artists the freedom to create vast, open worlds, games are played in the Sandbox. And this is a good thing.
The PS4 has a built in feature that allows gamers to share videos and screenshots. I haven't really done this before because quite honestly I didn't think anyone else would care in a world populated with PewDiePie and other prolific social gamers. However, I wanted to try and experiment with the feature and make this a little bit more of a shared experience for the handful of students and readers who might find their way here. These are a few pictures that I took yesterday:
I captured this image after completing a series of panels within the game. Essentially, these panels have you draw a line from a designated start point to the correct end point, always noting that there is a method to the madness. You need to use the clues around you to figure out how to draw the line often before moving on the next panel. The panel you see in the image above was part of a series where I had to not only draw the correct pattern, but reflect and mirror that pattern onto three opposite panels. I was some sort of camera type thing emerging out of the ground and firing a beam of light off into the distance. I've only just begun and this gets me excited... and feeling like I'm not so sure what I've gotten myself into.
As I move to another location and work my through more panels, I find myself having to use reflections of light to see correct patterns. This means positioning myself in a way so that I can try to work things out in my head, as panels are now partially obscured or relying on multiple sources of light. It's a bit hard to describe without showing you a video (which I will work on for later). Eventually I end up here:
What?! I spent more time running around this small room, with limited light and water levels that could be changed, before getting stumped and moving on to another area. I hope that I can remember to come back here...
One more picture to share.
I really don't want to give too much away, but I have already found several moments where the solution seemed impossible only to have something click as I look at things from a different angle. There's a lot to be said about problem-solving and I'm eager to scratch that itch of discovery that I am experiencing.
More to come...
~Mr.T
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