| > I can't disagree more. I'll disagree with your disagreement :) Part of this is having played Myst in the 2010s (rather than in its heyday) and comparing it to its successors, but I enjoyed The Witness much more than Myst. Myst falls down in the same way as many adventure-style games I've played, in that it has too few puzzles.
Each one is self-contained, without much relation to any of the other puzzles in the game, and is dropped in your lap, fully-formed and fully-complex. As a result, there's a lot of guess-and-check and you can kind of muddle through some of them without any understanding.
As a result of that, while each of the puzzles has its own internal consistency, the whole thing feels very arbitrary. In comparison, because The Witness has so many (over 600) puzzles, it is able to ease you into full understanding of their logic.
You acquire a mastery of each individual mechanic over a series of puzzles, and nothing feels arbitrary or forced.
Because all of them are the same kind of puzzle, it can combine mechanics with delightfully cohesive results.
I really enjoy this kind of game design, it's the "show, don't tell" of progression (while Myst felt more "don't tell, but don't show either"). I will say that Myst is better at world-building than The Witness (despite The Witness feeling much more consistent).
But I'd rather play a really good walking-simulator and a separate really good puzzle game than a half-baked adventure game combining the two. (All of this isn't to say you shouldn't try Myst if you haven't. I'd recommend RealMyst for that.) |