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.

> 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.