Taiji

Got that last puzzle in Taiji. It was the only one I needed a hint for ("look at the mines raft again" was enough), otherwise I found 100%-ing the game occasionally demanding, but all in all rather straightforward.

It was a game of great highs but also annoying lows. The four main rulesets were fairly interesting and worked well together, and the other puzzle types provided nice breathers. I liked everything lateral the game threw at me. The music was both soft and stimulating. And the way each area is built is remarkable - I'd never expect so much variety from a top-down 2D world.

The lows though... As I said before, the colors are all over the place, and being unable to zoom in on grids while there's nearly no contrast between the glyphs and the background makes the experience of solving some panels needlessly painful. The color inconsistency actually extends beyond the panels and into the overworld - imo there's no strong visual consistency within any area or through the whole game - and it doesn't help that the area themselves are pretty distinct thematically. Overall, despite the peaceful eastern vibes, to me it's a place that felt very odd and often on the verge of breaking apart. Maybe this was intentional, I don't know. And maybe I'm asking too much, but the game could have been great in that regard, and it's frustrating that it misses the mark.

We talked a little about puzzle design earlier. Here are additional thoughts. I can confirm that, up to the late game, many puzzles have multiple solutions. It may be that Cipher Zero has less purely logical puzzles than Taiji, though the difference hasn't felt significant to me. However I agree that the standout parts are the one with puzzles relying on pure logic - if only because they take up more time to pick apart and solve. I have a big gripe with these puzzles though: very often they feel very arbitrary and don't explore anything particularly new or interesting.

Take these puzzles from the optional late game area:

The left one isn't difficult but it's a fun glyph pattern. To me it's like a witty story or a balanced melody. The right one though, it mostly feels like there was a distant idea about many-dots vs. few-dots, but the idea is diluted between three colors (white, black, blue) unequally balanced on the few-dots size, and then there were yellows thrown in to fill in the logical blanks. It doesn't look good. It's like reading Kant: there are sound arguments in there and it's built to cover most cases, but it's not a fun experience and certainly not aesthetically pleasing. Tbh I've asked myself more than once why I cared about solving these - overall I wanted to and I enjoyed it, don't get me wrong, but that feeling of arbitrariness was never very far.

And unfortunately (like the colors before), the inconsistency extends from one puzzle to the next. Sure, the puzzles in one area used one ruleset extensively, but I didn't get a sense of progress or exploration. Take the puzzle directly after the fun diagonal pattern one:

Does it relate with the previous puzzle in any way, beside having dots? I don't see it. And that's maybe why I enjoyed The Witness much more: most puzzle series were heavily curated and organized around clear ideas. There were slow ramp-ups, natural follow-ups, surprising betrayals, recontextualizations, even the odd troll puzzle. It's a rich puzzle language, which unfortunately I found Taiji mostly devoid of.

One last negative I want to mention is that I believe Taiji actually suffers from its open world. It's great for the clever environmentals near the end, but it plays against telling (cognitive) stories through puzzle series. And my first hour with the game was without doubt the most frustrating, as I kept stumbling on advanced puzzles I didn't have the tools to solve. I went to the cascade, to the mansion, to the factory, to the tombs - every time I'd enter a new area, I was completely thrown off by an opaque panel. And the worst thing is that I didn't know whether they were the beginning of a tutorial (as you might expect from the first active puzzle you find in an area) or not.

Well, I had thoughts. 🙂

Fun facts: I never discovered the fast travel system. And I never understood the full rules for the first puzzle type in the game. :thinky_shrug:

It's a very good game, but it tries so much to emulate The Witness that when it falls short of something, I have a hard time not seeing it as a glaring mistake. And more recent games have shaped my expectations towards a richer, tighter puzzle design. But it's still a very good game. You should play it. 😄

(copied over from discord)