What you're calling the hardest part is precisely what makes Blow's games so amazing: The Eureka moment of understanding the concepts behind a puzzle is incredibly satisfying.

Why would you want to be told how a puzzle works if you can discover it yourself? Tutorials are boring, discovery through trial and error is exciting.

This doesn't just apply on the level of raw puzzles, but also on a meta level where you start understanding the ideas and concepts behind the puzzles, and then the absolute best part when you understand how these ideas and concepts interconnect (or are related or mirror each other, no pun intended).

Also, I find that his games aren't tedious at all. Sure, you might get stuck on a puzzle occasionally. But then you just go somewhere else and come back later. Or you go to sleep, gain the critical insight in your dreams, and then solve the puzzle. (I'm not kidding about that! It works wonders to sleep over a puzzle.)

I have not experienced any other games that's are as enjoyable as Blow's, not even close. But of course different people have different preferences.

If you don't enjoy the thinking and figuring things out, then maybe these games aren't for you. But every curious individual who loves playing with and enhancing one's mental understanding of abstract ideas, should absolutely play Blow's games.

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bena 21 hours ago | parent | next [-]

In the very next sentence I say that they’re often not hard to figure out.

I get more of a “Ah, ok” rather than a “satisfying eureka moment”.

All through your post you are assuming I’m getting stuck or “don’t enjoy figuring things out”, which I find presumptuous and condescending. Because, I’ve not had much problem with the figuring things out. It’s more with the repetition. You get a rule, then you get a couple dozen puzzles with slight variations of that rule. It’s tedium.

And Order is sokoban. Just, like, a lot of it. And even what you could claim is clever gameplay in it is just cribbed from the games he implemented.

They’re average games. They’re ok. They are not mind-expanding journeys into the very nature of the meaning of puzzles.

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renehsz 11 hours ago | parent [-]

> All through your post you are assuming I’m getting stuck or “don’t enjoy figuring things out”

I should have made it clear that I was referring to the generic/impersonal "you", the HN readers, not "you" as in the specific account I was replying to. Sorry about that! I should have worded it more precisely. It certainly wasn't meant to be condescending.

Re puzzle difficulty in The Witness, this is the part of your previous comment that confuses me:

> The hardest part of the Witness is the fact you aren’t told the rules of the line-drawing puzzle you’re presented. But often, they’re not that hard to discover. It’s not half as clever as Blow thinks it is. It’s essentially “what number am I thinking of”? Then being called a fool when you didn’t guess 12,859,155.

I might have misunderstood this paragraph the first time I read it and wrote my reply. But now that I've read it about ten times, I still don't understand what exactly you're referring to.

On the one hand, you say that the rules often aren't that hard to discover. Fair enough. On the other hand, you compare it to guessing the number 12,859,155. I took that to mean the rules are very hard (take a lot of tries) to guess correctly.

I don't remember the latter being true at all. There is some guesswork initially to discover the rules, but those rules then apply to a lot of puzzles, and different rules combine to form larger and more interesting puzzles.

What I personally found most satisfying was eventually gaining a meta-understanding of how the rules are structured, and sometimes being able to predict what the new rules for a set of puzzles will be, taking away the guesswork completely.

(Granted, it's been a long time since I played the game at release, so maybe I'm misremembering things or viewing them through a lens of nostalgia.)

> And Order is sokoban. Just, like, a lot of it. [...] They are not mind-expanding journeys into the very nature of the meaning of puzzles.

For me personally, Blow's games have been mind-expanding. But I rarely play puzzle games. If I did, I might already be familiar with a lot of these ideas and find the puzzles boring. For me, the difficulty was just right. But I can imagine that people who play a lot of puzzle games need more to find something interesting, and that's fine.

So if your criticisim is that the puzzle rules aren't interesting or sophisticated enough for some people, then fair enough. They are interesting enough for me, though, and judging by sales and reviews, a lot of other people feel the same.

Either way, none of this is meant personally, I just enjoy talking about these games. Also, I can't speak to Blow's politics or other opinions people have brought up elsewhere in this discussion. All I can say for sure is that I've really enjoyed his games, and other people might too.

	▲	tialaramex 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> you compare it to guessing the number 12,859,155. I took that to mean the rules are very hard (take a lot of tries) to guess correctly. The puzzles in The Witness can be obvious from a certain perspective and so then if you have that perspective there's only one answer, why can't everybody see that. But if you lack that perspective, or worse, have slightly different perspective which you have falsely believed to be correct, you struggle. If I know every US sports team's nickname then a Connections solution which hinges on knowing New York's team names seems obvious. If I didn't even know who the "Yankees" are then I'm going to find that particular connection hard to understand. Likewise if you know Lead's atomic symbol is Pb then you're going to more easily see that the letters PB might be related to a clue you had previously thought was about the verb "lead" not the noun.

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tialaramex 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

So, two things can be true simultaneously.

That "Eureka" moment you describe is what puzzle makers are striving for, which is why e.g. Portal 2 has a hack where either portal button will save you in a situation where players may realise "Oh! A portal can save me!" but forget which end they need - just dying because you picked wrong isn't satisfying. This isn't Wolverine - if you just stubbornly don't use a portal you will die - but if you flail and pick orange when you needed blue the game has mercy on you.

However, Blow doesn't seem to have yet understood that the skill isn't in making the puzzle difficult and having a "Eureka" moment for some players but in designing your game to maximise this experience for the most players.

You can learn about this more easily playing "Zendo" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zendo_(game). A master who invents a rule their player cannot discover isn't a good master, that's just frustrating for everybody, there is skill in choosing a rule that will give your players the "Eureka" moment.

Two recent-ish video games stick out in my mind for delivering on this in very different ways. The first is Blue Prince. Blue Prince really wants you to figure out what's going on and have those Eureka moments. I have seen one gamer go "Bridge. Bride. OK I see what we're doing here" in their first five minutes of the game. I have seen a different gamer go "Yes, yes, a map of the house and more riddles, but what does it all mean?" while standing in the Study still not having understood the exact same puzzle... Tonda designed the game to be enjoyable for both players.

Secondly, Fleb's games, most obviously "20 Small Mazes" and its sequal "20 More Somehow Even Smaller Mazes". This time rather than offering many, many clues, the game delivers Eureka at pace by not forcing you to solve increasingly complicated versions of the same puzzle as "The Witness" does but instead you go from not understanding to then figuring it out and at about the time you go "Eureka!" the maze is solved and the next one is different.

That meta-stuff you mention leaves me cold because it's just introspection and I can do that without a video game. If the video game needs to fit in a Commodore Vic 20 (a machine with 4096 bytes of RAM, yes I said bytes) then sure there's no room to do more, giving me pause to reflect on my own beliefs is maybe the best you can do. But games like Animal Well show that in a modern video game you can, and I argue you should, actually put more game in the game, not just sit back and tell players their thoughts are part of your game. "The Witness" has moments where you think "Ooh, maybe there's more game in this game" but no, Jon couldn't be bothered to deliver more game, that's really your job apparently.