Whether you like to visit space, indulge in an RPGs or a grand adventure, get spooked by horror or get uber techy with hacking, the chances are that there's also a puzzle game for you - hence our list of the best puzzle games on PC. The queen genre straddles many others, so our list of the 25 best puzzle games has all that we just mentioned and more. Take a look to find a new favourite puzzle game today.
]]>Video game parodies are often ropey, being neither funny nor fun to play. I am delighted that The Looker is both, and free too. It's a loving send-up of The Witness, inviting us to a strange island to solve more line-drawing puzzles and listen to more audio tapes. Some of the puzzles are quite clever, and many of the jokes made me laugh—plus it's only an hour or two to complete.
]]>The Cracking The Cryptic YouTube channel became an unexpected hit during lockdown last year. Mark Goodliffe and Simon Anthony have been uploading two videos a day for the past few years now, showing them methodically solving very difficult puzzles (typically sudokus and crosswords, but others sneak in as well). Now, in an almost inevitable development, the Cryptic lads are poised to become your favourite video game streamers. For the past few weeks, Anthony has been streaming his playthrough of Jonathan Blow's huge and layered puzzle game The Witness, and it is some of the most enjoyable streaming you'll ever come across.
]]>I know, I couldn't believe nobody had done The Witness before either. But here we are. The Witness is a 3D, first-person puzzle game in which you, presumably someone trapped in an ironic punishment after making an ill-advised deal with the devil, explore an island made of puzzles. And solve those puzzles.
]]>Whether you feel that The Witness is slightly or enormously pretentious, three things are undeniable: It contains a lot of puzzles, it's lovely to look at, and it's the Epic Games Store's new fortnightly giveaway. Developed by Jonathan Blow's (Braid) studio Thekla, it's part Myst, part jumbo puzzle book. In the game, your sole method of interaction with its lovely landscapes is to draw lines, mostly on strange high-tech signs, featuring unwritten rules that must be wordlessly intuited. You can grab the game here, and see a trailer and some thoughts below.
]]>I love The Witness. It’s a great game. But the more I play it, the more I’m sure that Jonathan Blow was taking the mick out of everyone with it. In an interview with The Guardian, he said he wanted to make video games for people who read Gravity's Rainbow. Widely considered to be Thomas Pynchon’s magnum opus, Gravity’s Rainbow made TIME magazine’s list of “All-Time 100 Greatest Novels.” Pynchon’s book is a great big amalgamation of beautifully messy imagery that leaves you absolutely clueless as to what actually happened by the time you put it down. Hm...
Video essayist Joseph Anderson posted a video back in 2016, called “The Witness: A Great Game That You Shouldn’t Play”. In it, he attempts to come to terms with Blow’s shenanigans, but never quite does. What I found most interesting about Anderson’s video was his focus on the fact that The Witness absolutely does not respect the player’s time in any way, even though it emphatically claims that it does.
]]>It's the end of another puzzling year in which plenty of things have made us scratch our head and frown so hard that we have permanent crease-marks in our foreheads. The RPS Advent Calendar highlights our favourite games of the year, daily, and behind today’s door is...
The year's best puzzle game: blow me down, it's The Witness [official site].
]]>As pretty as it is, I don't know why you'd share screenshots of The Witness [official site] - the primary response seems to be people screaming that your screenshot of a pebble contains the hugest of spoilers. However, bold video game photographers now have a new tool. J. Blo and Thekla's puzzler has added support for Ansel, the super-swish camera mode exclusive to Nvidia cards. It lets players place the camera where they please, tweak lens settings like rotation and field of view, then save snaps in fancy formats like 63360x35640 or VR view-o-spheres. Pretty!
]]>In the great tradition of taking something cool and then reducing it to its most basic elements while simultaneously challenging what made it cool in the first place, someone has made an NES version of The Witness It's a curious thing, because at first glance The Witness is a game about tracing lines through grids so that you can trace different lines through different grids. In that pursuit, The Wit.nes [Itch page] seems to excel.
]]>Nvidia have unveiled their next top-end GPU, the GeForce GTX 1080, which they say can draw lots of really nice pictures really fast. Look, I'm sure Jeremy and his Week in Tech will have more to say about that soon, but what's interesting to me is the software they announced alongside it. Nvidia Ansel will let people take fancier screenshots, pausing the action to rearrange the camera, apply effects, take ultra-high-res snaps, make 360-degree panoramas compatible with VR goggles, and so on. Support for Ansel is coming to Nvidia GPUs for games including The Witcher 3, The Witness, and No Man's Sky, and it'll work on many cards older than the 1080 too.
]]>While attending GDC I was thinking a lot about how "outdoors" works in videogames and speaking to artists and designers about how they had approached those environments. I was relatively early on in my experience of The Witness [official site] but I was intrigued by how many biomes were crammed onto a small island space without it ever feeling overcrowded. With that in mind I sat down with artist Luis Antonio to talk geography, architectural decay and why a simple handrail needs an entire backstory...
]]>Dark Souls [official site] isn't for everyone in the same way that a bowl of piping hot broth isn't for everyone. Let it cool for a while, add some seasoning, and people might happily tuck in and enjoy, but if you expect them to eat it exactly as you would – whether that's by chugging it down in a few swift gulps or taking tiny sips long after it's gone cold – a fair few folks would rather have a nice sandwich instead. Nothing wrong with that. Nobody should have to drink soup through a straw.
Or should they? Given the cries of 'git gud' that greet many complaints about the difficulty – or inaccessibility – of Dark Souls, it's tempting to see those who love the series as precisely the sort of people who would chase you away from the bowl if you brought a spoon to the soup kitchen. “NO SPOONS” they'd shriek “YOU WON'T APPRECIATE IT IF YOU DON'T GET IT ALL DOWN YOUR CHIN AND THE FRONT OF YOUR JUMPER BEFORE YOU MANAGE TO SWALLOW A MOUTHFUL”
I wholly agree with these kitchen monsters.
]]>This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites a developer to help him put their game up on blocks and take a wrench to hack out its best feature, just to see how it works.
The Witness [official site] is generally considered to be very hard. It is frequently very hard! I’m feeling a little brutalised by a succession of puzzles that I encountered last night. But I’m not sure it’s particularly hard compared to all puzzle games. Sokobond, Pullblox and Box Boy on Nintendo 3DS, Spacechem, The Talos Principle: I find all good puzzle games hard.
But in The Witness you feel peculiarly alone. Everything you know about the game you’ve learned yourself from observation and experimentation, a feature that doesn’t make The Witness unique, but combined with its sheer wordlessness, it makes its puzzles feel awfully cold when you’re stumped. And yet answers do come, because the game is always subtly teaching you, a lesson that starts right at the game’s beginning, in the Entry Yard, where you experience its:
THE MECHANIC: Non-verbal tutorial
]]>So this is the irritating situation I find myself in. I want to talk about the things I've found and seen and taken pictures of in The Witness [official site]. Except because of the infernal "environmental clue-giving" aspect I can't do that without running the risk of giving spoilers or whatnot by accident - spoilers I might not even know exist.
But! I have uploaded the images from different areas to Colourstory which is an app I use to get an idea for the relative proportions of colours in a picture/set of pictures. Here I was using it because I wanted to see whether the differences between each area were as striking as I thought they were when I was wandering between puzzles. The results were pretty in and of themselves AND, unless J. Blo was using relative proportions of colour to impart valuable game information (OH NO, WHAT IF HE WAS DOING THAT?) I think these would be classed as spoiler-free!
]]>Inspired by recent experiences with The Witness' [official site] puzzles, Robert Zak has been reminiscing about the art of note-taking while playing games. From graph paper for dungeon crawlers to suspicions and clues for Her Story [official site], many genres are represented, with only the noble pen and paper to hold them together.
]]>After a whopping seven years in development, Jonathan Blow’s follow-up to Braid is finally here. The Witness [official site] throws out much — though not all — of the pompousness of its predecessor to deliver a less obtuse, modernised riff on Myst. And it’s actually quite brilliant, if you can ignore its layer of self-satisfied philosophical grandiosity. Here’s wot I think.
]]>I'd normally not care one jot about how many copies a game has sold, but there has been enough reportage of The Witness's budget that I can't deny I'm interested in how it fared. So maybe you'd also like to know that Jonathan Blow has said on Twitter that the game "is on track to sell more in a week than Braid sold in its first year."
]]>As you might have guessed from all the riotous jokes on Twitter about finding the laser gun in The Witness [official site], about losing the boss battle with the ice wizard on level three, asking how to craft a diamond pickaxe, about unlocking the warp drive, and about the ghost, J. Blo & co's puzzler came out last night. We'll be telling you Wot We Think in a bit, but for now here's a reminder that hey, it is out!
]]>Jonathan Blow's time-twisting platformer Braid was a powerful force in the latest resurgence of indie games, helping propel them into the relative mainstream. Since 2008, J. Blo and his studio have been working on The Witness [official site], and the colourful puzzler will finally arrive on January 26th. Consider this me reminding you of that, while also relaying word that it'll cost £30 and its voice cast includes some folks that might make you say "Hey! I liked that voice they did! e.g. Ellie from The Last of Us off that there PlayStation, and Hermes out Futurama." You talk funny.
]]>The Witness [official site] always sounds to me like a Lynda La Plante two-part drama which would air on ITV and feature foreboding music and chilling crime. Braid creator J.Blo thinks differently and has now presented a taster of his brightly-coloured, six years in the making puzzle island in the form of a launch date trailer.
Video and thoughts below:
]]>I love puzzle games. But it’s not beating them that’s the exciting part: it’s understanding them.
Whether mulling over a cryptic crossword or somersaulting through Portal’s portals, there’s a moment of epiphany which, for me, pretty much transcends all other moments in gaming. But how do you design a puzzle to best provoke that eureka moment? What gives a puzzle its aesthetic, its pace and texture? Why does one puzzle feel thrilling while another feels like a flat mental grind?
I’ve asked three of my favourite puzzle game designers to demystify their dark magicks: Jonathan Blow, best known for the puzzle-platformer Braid and currently hard at work on firstperson perplexathon, The Witness; Alan "Draknek" Hazelden, creator of Sokoban-inspired sequential-logic games, including Sokobond, Mirror Isles and the forthcoming A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build; and Jonathan Whiting, a programmer on Sportsfriends and collaborator with Hazelden on Traal, whose own games are a regular Ludum Dare highlight.
]]>The Witness is Jonathan Blow's next game, so it makes sense that it be filled with brain-teasing puzzles. It makes a little less sense to me that those puzzles be mazes, which appear on screens littered around its colourful island environment. How do the screens and the world interact?
There's ten minutes of new footage below, as recorded by YouTube user NukemDukem at a preview event last November. It shows the game's opening and introductory puzzles, and it certainly looks interesting.
]]>Apparently "PlayStation 4 will be the only console that The Witness is on" when it first launches. Which is a very un-clever way of saying, "and also, it'll be on PC," but whatever. We get an actual, factual trailer of Braid creator Jonathan Blow's latest out of the deal, so Sony's inhumanly lengthy, droning "pppfffthrp" of a commercial's no skin off my nose. But I digress. The Witness, if you'll remember, is set on an open-world island full of laser puzzles. It also looks exceedingly attractive. I'm not sure what to think about the puzzles themselves, but it's tough to get a bead on these things when you're not, you know, solving them. Anyway, trailer ahoy!
]]>"A People's History" is a three part essay series by Robert Yang. He told us that he wanted to write an alternate view of the traditionally accepted history of the FPS genre as entirely dominated and driven by the mainstream, commercial industry, and to "argue for a long-standing but suppressed tradition of non-industry involvement in the first-person genre". This is part one.
In 1994, the New York Times filed a review of a first-person game under its "Arts" section, proclaiming it to be "a game that weaves together image, sound and narrative into a new form of experience." It sold millions of copies and inspired dozens of imitators. It seemed poised to define an era.
That game was Myst and it failed to define an era. Instead, a game called Doom came out three months after Myst -- and then it shot Myst in the face.
]]>Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Master Jonathan Blow has achieved unexpected fame and fortune through the creation of a logistical contrivance called Braid. Glad of this success, he has travelled far from his native San Francisco to take lodgings in riotous London's Clerkenwell district, so that he might demonstrate his his newest invention - rudely entitled "The Witness" - to the skeptical souls of the old world, including Mister Griliopoulos, unexpectedly standing in for Professor Rossignol. We join the interview at the point where the auteur is struggling with the thinking device hosting his daemonic design.
Now do read on...
]]>In an antiquarian hotel room in London's historic Clerkenwell, Braid creator Jonathan Blow is shaking his shaven head. His laptop has decided it doesn't want to run The Witness, his new game and he's copying all the files over to his spare laptop. (If you want to know what it says about Blow that he's the sort of man who carries a spare laptop... go hire a haruspex.) The game, he tells me, has just over a year to go now, with the appearance and sound likely to change; the 300 puzzles, though, they'll stay the same. As he copies, I watch the file-names flick by: ...theater... trees... rocket launcher... caves... wait, rocket launcher? It turns out Blow was making a very different game after Braid, before the Witness and some of the files are still hanging around in The Witness.
]]>While Spyparty and Monaco were rocking PAX as hard as their mighty indie thews could manage, Jonathan Blow wanted to do something a little subtler. In a corner of the Spyparty/Monaco booth, with no fanfare or sign-age whatsoever, the Braid-creator set up the Witness and let people come and play. Why unveil his work in such a way? As opposed to the general melee of a show, he "wanted to do something that is subtle, and a surprise — if you notice it, and decide to investigate, you find something unexpected". Also, let people play as long as they want. Among them was Kotaku's Stephen Totilo who wrote up some impressions and took some cam-footage...
]]>Jonathan Blow's taken his time to openly discuss what he's up to in the wake of Braid being a runaway hit (some of which's profits he's funneled into the Indie Fund, gentleman that he is), but now he's allowing the world a little peek down his trousers of tomorrow.
]]>This is rather cute. Almost immediately after Jonathan Blow announces his new game, Flashbang follow up with a parody site to announce their own. This is our way of telling you: Jonathan Blow and Flashbang have announced new games.
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