Hey did you figure out how the puzzle works and where all the pieces need to go? Enjoy spending an hour of walking and loading and double checking and loading in order to complete this one fucking simple maze puzzle. Whee fun.
It didn't quite take me an hour, but yeah, it was kind of annoying since it was basically trial and error that involved looking, going down, teleporting, loading, making changes, teleporting back, loading, going back up, and seeing if you did what you meant to do. That was my only real annoyance, puzzle-wise.
I didn't mind the puzzle itself, I thought it was kind of neat, it's just the way it was handled that kind of ruined it. It would have been better, I think, if you could rotate the pieces from underneath the maze.
Holy christ; this game runs terribly for me. Jesus. AutoDetect sets itself to LOW. Haha. Wow.
EDIT: Resolution Scale was set to 50. I. The fuck. I'm literally sitting here thinking "Why does this look like someone smeared it in vaseline?!"
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Sir CarcassI have been shown the end of my worldRound Rock, TXRegistered Userregular
Oh, a neat trick I found is that movement inputs stack (basically a bug). So, for instance, pressing W and up makes you move at double speed. You can use the numpad and turn with 4 and 6. Not good for exploring, but great for traversing quickly.
Oh, a neat trick I found is that movement inputs stack (basically a bug). So, for instance, pressing W and up makes you move at double speed. You can use the numpad and turn with 4 and 6. Not good for exploring, but great for traversing quickly.
yeah you move faster strafing diagonally as well so just lay on the inputs and move at lightning speed
Uhm, is the "Photo taking. . ." feature bugged? Some photos just show up black, and when I try to take photos of documents it puts the document away and takes the photo in an odd way.
On a brighter note. . .I got the power on! That's enough success for me for the night.
EDIT: After an hour of being stumped at "What do I do first. . ." I'm cooking with gas. This is what I wanted THE WITNESS to be.
Fuck. Well I use Notepad for these kinds of games anyway, but having the photos would be great. I should have got the Steam version I guess.
This game is really great though, it totally takes me back to the late 90's, sitting at my computer in frustration and then stumbling ass backwards into a solution:
I forgot that they made rocks out of the Morfang Video Tech and was stuck for way too long. I was running around when I heard the tell-tale humming and saw weird swirly things in the rocks and was like "Is my game glitching. . ." I knew that buggy couldn't have been a one-off.
Ugh can someone screenshot the solution(s) for the spinny maze?
Thing is: I have a brain problem that makes my working memory, aka, my ability to hold multiple pieces of info at the same in my short term memory so I can use them, total garbage. This puzzle REQUIRES working memory. I... basically can't solve it, because I can't completely remember the configurations when I move to a new area.
A screenshot of what I SHOULD be trying to do would help a great deal.
***
Unrelated news: I had a very long, very involved, crazy dream where for some reason my brother, myself, and this really hot woman with the most glorious afro I've ever seen, were all trying to infiltrate Mofang society, which by this point had up and decided they'd try to (badly) emulate human society at all levels, because they, the Mofang, were better at being humans than humans were...? So there was a lot of "Haha, uh, we don't speak the native language because we grew up with a human trading caravan! And, uh, we can't learn other languages because we have a brain disorder! >>;;;;;;; )
Ugh can someone screenshot the solution(s) for the spinny maze?
Thing is: I have a brain problem that makes my working memory, aka, my ability to hold multiple pieces of info at the same in my short term memory so I can use them, total garbage. This puzzle REQUIRES working memory. I... basically can't solve it, because I can't completely remember the configurations when I move to a new area.
A screenshot of what I SHOULD be trying to do would help a great deal.
There are actually 2 different solutions to the puzzle. You have to do one, then the other. Not sure if this will help, but focus on one disc at a time. When you're looking down at it, figure out how many quarter rotations and in which direction you'd need for it to make a valid path, then go do that. I remember most of the disc slots are pretty self explanatory, ie there's only one way to make a valid path. There was one that could be used for 2 different paths, and I had to use one disc to get to the north pedestal and another disc to get to the east and west paths.
piece of shit disk puzzle has driven me to drink. not kidding -- made booze to cut the edge off.
i call this one the Hunrath only because it's kinda orange, and clementine soda makes me think of Darling Clementine, because all those southwestern accents make me think of that song
Izze clementine soda -- idk it was in the fridge
1 shot tequila
1/2 shot st. germain
salted rim
mix it togethr however, man, im so tired of this fucking puzzle
drink it
cry because this puzzle sucks
the salt represents my salt at how I can't beat this puzzle
I'm a little annoyed right now. I'm enjoying the game so far, but one puzzle I thought was kind of bullshit:
So you get the Villein code from Farley's house and upon seeing the apparatus in the junkyard you're like "I totally got this. . ." Except when you put it in it "auto-corrects" to another number. "Well shit did I enter it wrong," is the thought most people would have (it is in fact what most of the videos I saw seeking out this shit thought). Apperantly it is written wrong in the game, and you're supposed to "suss" that out, but why would you? It comes off cheap an has kinda (for the moment) soured me on the game, because up to that point you're doing everything you're meant to (being exhaustive with your search and paying attention), but you come across a puzzle where you have no indication that something is amiss other than it not working (which could be any number of reasons). You're just meant to understand that the someone in the game world wrote down the WRONG code on PURPOSE and to go with that.
First thing you want to do, is swap the slightly bent pieces with eachother, then replace one of them with the completely straight piece that started in Hunrath. Then rotate the pieces so they look like this:
That gives you access to the northern panel. Next, all you have to do is rotate the 90 degree angle piece at the top counter-clockwise:
That gives you access to the eastern route. After that, you rotate the whole thing clockwise to get the western route.
If you have trouble remembering how the pieces should be oriented while you're rotating them in Hunrath, maybe it'll help if you think of it in terms of "one 90 degree rotation clockwise", "one 90 degree rotation counter-clockwise", or "180 degree rotation"? You can determine how the piece should be rotated from above and write it down.
It didn't take me as long to finish it as I expected, but I still think it's poorly designed because of how long it takes to execute your plan. The fun of a puzzle is figuring it out, not wrestling with the interface to put all the pieces in place after you already figured it out a long time ago.
Fuck, found out that I apparently didn't look at the system requirements and that I don't even meet the minimum. Oh well, it'll keep in my Steam backlog until I finally get around to building that new computer I've been talking about. Hell, by then maybe the game will support VR and I can use the Rift that I own too (because of course I have a Rift I can't even use yet; why wouldn't I?)
Okay, so I managed to juice up the tree in Hunrath. Wasn't quite able to do it unaided, though. Here are the ways in which I am dumb (so far):
• I didn't hold the dial on the train car generator to start long enough after priming it. I thought the power was on when it wasn't, then wandered around for hours wondering why I wasn't getting anywhere.
• I totally missed the note at C.W.'s place about resetting the code to Farley's vault. Just didn't see it. Or maybe I saw it and then got so wrapped up in the other two notes that I just forgot to look at it. Sigh.
I'm a little annoyed right now. I'm enjoying the game so far, but one puzzle I thought was kind of bullshit:
So you get the Villein code from Farley's house and upon seeing the apparatus in the junkyard you're like "I totally got this. . ." Except when you put it in it "auto-corrects" to another number. "Well shit did I enter it wrong," is the thought most people would have (it is in fact what most of the videos I saw seeking out this shit thought). Apparently it is written wrong in the game, and you're supposed to "suss" that out, but why would you? It comes off cheap an has kinda (for the moment) soured me on the game, because up to that point you're doing everything you're meant to (being exhaustive with your search and paying attention), but you come across a puzzle where you have no indication that something is amiss other than it not working (which could be any number of reasons). You're just meant to understand that the someone in the game world wrote down the WRONG code on PURPOSE and to go with that.
That's not rewarding, that's just fucking cheap.
To be fair, I thought that there were actually sufficient clues indicating what was going on there:
In the mayor's journal, he mentions that he's giving this information to Farley to put in her vault (where you find it) while everyone is evacuating the town and/or planet. Everyone's really busy, so mistakes get made. And in the mayor's bedroom, there's a copy of the Villein Number System worksheet from the garage, and it is barely even started. Mayor Josef is not that good at this to begin with.
Also, having already reversed engineered just how the Villein number system works using the worksheet made it clear without needing to go back to the console that there was no actual Villein number that would match what was drawn on the board. (There were no lines going off the edge of the grid, which seems unlikely-to-impossible for a Villein number with that many lines.)
On the other hand, maybe I was just meta-gaming with the knowledge that (as the worksheet says) there is an autocorrect feature in the Villein console, and concluding that because it was being called out, I'd need to use it.
I mean, everyone's gonna see all of this stuff differently, of course. Hell, I'm pretty sure the stuff I've missed so far was obvious to everyone in the world but me, but I didn't think this felt cheap at all.
I wasn't in time for the KS campaign, but I loved the Myst games (especially Riven and Exile) so you bet your ass I bought this game on day one.
I wouldn't say that I'm super far into it yet, but I'm loving it so far. God have I missed these types of games. There is just nothing quite like a good Myst. But since this isn't technically Myst, I guess now we're gonna have to start calling things a "Myst-like" because observation has taught me that this is how genres work in video games.
The puzzles are satisfying so far, but on the whole not quite as challenging as Riven. Remember that one really enormous puzzle spanning every island where you had to learn the number system, break into each dome, find where the dome was located on the island relief map, figure out what color it was associated with, then go to the one giant relief map and place all the colored marbles in the correct location corresponding to the correct dome and AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH
I do love that there are various types of cart rides and an alien number system to learn. Very Riven qualities, though I think Riven made you work a lot harder to learn the number systems, whereas Obduction is like, "Here is a piece of paper that completely explains how it works."
The game was running like garbage for me at first until I realized that NVIDIA released new drivers about a week ago and some of the updates specifically had Obduction in mind. Now it runs smooth as silk!
The puzzles are satisfying so far, but on the whole not quite as challenging as Riven. Remember that one really enormous puzzle spanning every island where you had to learn the number system, break into each dome, find the marble on the relief map, figure out what color it was associated with, then go to the one giant relief map and place all the marbles and AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH
While I will say that there's nothing QUITE as bad as the Goddamn Marble Puzzle in Riven, there's something that approaches it, especially on like... so, one of my main beefs with the Goddamn Marble Puzzle is that there's at least two pieces of data straight up missing from that puzzle -- one of the color symbols (I think violet?) and the location of one of the domes (the underground one). This makes the Marble puzzle go from "difficult" to "Fajsdlfjdsajfldksjfdsjfara." Like, you know HOW to solve it, but there's arbitrary missing pieces of data there that slow you way down.
Similarly, as other people in this thread have noted, there's a puzzle in this game where you know how to solve it, but the interface / execution method makes the puzzle unnecessarily long and annoying to solve. There's an in-universe reason for this -- they're trying to slow somebody down as much as possible -- but as a player it's unsatisfying and irritating.
Speaking of "unnecessarily long," @Sir Carcass I guess that means more damn teleport puzzles where I have to rotate a thing but I can't see what I'm rotating so I can turn the thing around so I can access the other tunnel. At least, I assume that the other tunnel must be behind me. I hope it's just behind me because I do not want to fuck around doing the whole "Teleport, rotate, teleport back, groan because it's not in the right position, teleport, rotate" thing for ANOTHER hour.
In general, like... the teleport puzzles are the worst ones in this game. The combination of excruciating load times plus arbitrary levels of difficulty imposed by not being able to see half the puzzle at any given time annoys the SHIT out of me. And like... I get it, Cyan, you became enamored with the idea of teleportation puzzles in Uru when you realized the engine could support that, but you're overusing them and they have weird load timers. The teleportation puzzles in Uru weren't fun, and these aren't either.
Speaking of "unnecessarily long," Sir Carcass I guess that means more damn teleport puzzles where I have to rotate a thing but I can't see what I'm rotating so I can turn the thing around so I can access the other tunnel. At least, I assume that the other tunnel must be behind me. I hope it's just behind me because I do not want to fuck around doing the whole "Teleport, rotate, teleport back, groan because it's not in the right position, teleport, rotate" thing for ANOTHER hour.
Yeah, another teleport puzzle, but it's not near as bad as the gauntlet one.
The entrance you're looking for is under one of the upper entrances, so rotate the platform so the bottom exit is facing one of the upper caves and if that doesn't do it, hit the rotate button 4 times and you should be good.
The puzzles are satisfying so far, but on the whole not quite as challenging as Riven. Remember that one really enormous puzzle spanning every island where you had to learn the number system, break into each dome, find the marble on the relief map, figure out what color it was associated with, then go to the one giant relief map and place all the marbles and AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH
While I will say that there's nothing QUITE as bad as the Goddamn Marble Puzzle in Riven, there's something that approaches it, especially on like... so, one of my main beefs with the Goddamn Marble Puzzle is that there's at least two pieces of data straight up missing from that puzzle -- one of the color symbols (I think violet?) and the location of one of the domes (the underground one). This makes the Marble puzzle go from "difficult" to "Fajsdlfjdsajfldksjfdsjfara." Like, you know HOW to solve it, but there's arbitrary missing pieces of data there that slow you way down.
THIS.
I like how in your world its official name is The Goddamn Marble Puzzle.
I'm a little annoyed right now. I'm enjoying the game so far, but one puzzle I thought was kind of bullshit:
So you get the Villein code from Farley's house and upon seeing the apparatus in the junkyard you're like "I totally got this. . ." Except when you put it in it "auto-corrects" to another number. "Well shit did I enter it wrong," is the thought most people would have (it is in fact what most of the videos I saw seeking out this shit thought). Apparently it is written wrong in the game, and you're supposed to "suss" that out, but why would you? It comes off cheap an has kinda (for the moment) soured me on the game, because up to that point you're doing everything you're meant to (being exhaustive with your search and paying attention), but you come across a puzzle where you have no indication that something is amiss other than it not working (which could be any number of reasons). You're just meant to understand that the someone in the game world wrote down the WRONG code on PURPOSE and to go with that.
That's not rewarding, that's just fucking cheap.
To be fair, I thought that there were actually sufficient clues indicating what was going on there:
In the mayor's journal, he mentions that he's giving this information to Farley to put in her vault (where you find it) while everyone is evacuating the town and/or planet. Everyone's really busy, so mistakes get made. And in the mayor's bedroom, there's a copy of the Villein Number System worksheet from the garage, and it is barely even started. Mayor Josef is not that good at this to begin with.
Also, having already reversed engineered just how the Villein number system works using the worksheet made it clear without needing to go back to the console that there was no actual Villein number that would match what was drawn on the board. (There were no lines going off the edge of the grid, which seems unlikely-to-impossible for a Villein number with that many lines.)
On the other hand, maybe I was just meta-gaming with the knowledge that (as the worksheet says) there is an autocorrect feature in the Villein console, and concluding that because it was being called out, I'd need to use it.
I mean, everyone's gonna see all of this stuff differently, of course. Hell, I'm pretty sure the stuff I've missed so far was obvious to everyone in the world but me, but I didn't think this felt cheap at all.
Yea I still call shennanigans. None of those really count as "clues" so much as "Well this makes sense if this was going on. . ." Especially when nothing up to that point had even operated that way; all the puzzles up to that point (and after) have been "fair" and not requiring you to put motivations on the characters in the game.
As to the second point:
The game tells you the machine auto-corrects; so the diagram not being a number didn't really tell me anything more than "Oh it's written wrong." However not only is it written wrong, it's written INSANELY wrong and I imagine most peoples thoughts would be "Well, this must go to something else." That or they just go "Fuck it, I'll try this number anyway."
Not trying to be a contrarian, it just pissed me off, and not in a good way.
I'm looking forward to playing this when the VR update hits, but I am also not looking forward to playing this without the ability to take notes on a piece of paper in front of me (on account of the headset). Here's hoping they have some kind of in game solution for that eventually.
I'm looking forward to playing this when the VR update hits, but I am also not looking forward to playing this without the ability to take notes on a piece of paper in front of me (on account of the headset). Here's hoping they have some kind of in game solution for that eventually.
They already kinda do; you can take in-game photographs. Unfortunately, it's a little buggy right now. Hopefully it'll be fixed for the Oculus update.
I'm a little annoyed right now. I'm enjoying the game so far, but one puzzle I thought was kind of bullshit:
So you get the Villein code from Farley's house and upon seeing the apparatus in the junkyard you're like "I totally got this. . ." Except when you put it in it "auto-corrects" to another number. "Well shit did I enter it wrong," is the thought most people would have (it is in fact what most of the videos I saw seeking out this shit thought). Apparently it is written wrong in the game, and you're supposed to "suss" that out, but why would you? It comes off cheap an has kinda (for the moment) soured me on the game, because up to that point you're doing everything you're meant to (being exhaustive with your search and paying attention), but you come across a puzzle where you have no indication that something is amiss other than it not working (which could be any number of reasons). You're just meant to understand that the someone in the game world wrote down the WRONG code on PURPOSE and to go with that.
That's not rewarding, that's just fucking cheap.
To be fair, I thought that there were actually sufficient clues indicating what was going on there:
In the mayor's journal, he mentions that he's giving this information to Farley to put in her vault (where you find it) while everyone is evacuating the town and/or planet. Everyone's really busy, so mistakes get made. And in the mayor's bedroom, there's a copy of the Villein Number System worksheet from the garage, and it is barely even started. Mayor Josef is not that good at this to begin with.
Also, having already reversed engineered just how the Villein number system works using the worksheet made it clear without needing to go back to the console that there was no actual Villein number that would match what was drawn on the board. (There were no lines going off the edge of the grid, which seems unlikely-to-impossible for a Villein number with that many lines.)
On the other hand, maybe I was just meta-gaming with the knowledge that (as the worksheet says) there is an autocorrect feature in the Villein console, and concluding that because it was being called out, I'd need to use it.
I mean, everyone's gonna see all of this stuff differently, of course. Hell, I'm pretty sure the stuff I've missed so far was obvious to everyone in the world but me, but I didn't think this felt cheap at all.
Yea I still call shennanigans. None of those really count as "clues" so much as "Well this makes sense if this was going on. . ." Especially when nothing up to that point had even operated that way; all the puzzles up to that point (and after) have been "fair" and not requiring you to put motivations on the characters in the game.
As to the second point:
The game tells you the machine auto-corrects; so the diagram not being a number didn't really tell me anything more than "Oh it's written wrong." However not only is it written wrong, it's written INSANELY wrong and I imagine most peoples thoughts would be "Well, this must go to something else." That or they just go "Fuck it, I'll try this number anyway."
Not trying to be a contrarian, it just pissed me off, and not in a good way.
For me, that puzzle was just "oh, I bet that pattern goes in that machine. A 3 digit number? Oh yeah, I bet I know where that goes!" Sometimes you just have to take what the game gives you. :P
In game, I think the explanation is that symbol is more familiar and rememberable than the alien equivalent, so that's what they use.
I got the good ending! And I did indeed see that the Mofang sphere got plopped somewhere in an Arizona that is on fire.
I don't really want to bother seeing the Bad Ending, but I kinda feel like from what I saw, Earth may not be 100% toast. It's a far future away from when CW was born, and probably even us, but I mean, Arizona is ALWAYS on fire, and I feel like a bunch of burned out strip malls & apartment complexes =/= THE ENTIRE EARTH IS TOAST :O, esp. since the sun looked OK?
... like I guess what I'm saying, is we might have Mad Max: Fury Road Earth in there, but that doesn't mean everything's wiped out. Hell, I think I saw trees out there.
The point is, though, that despite having some lovely national parks, Arizona as a whole is something of a shithole from what I've seen, so, I would much rather live out on Nice Green Colony World Thingy. Like I'm not even FROM Arizona, why would I want to go back there? I wish there was a way to kinda explore the fully realized, interconnected world, but I guess not. And damn CW, like, why the fuck were you willing to basically *let everyone die* so you could go back to Earth? The hell is wrong with you?
Regarding the Mofang -- jesus, was their "colony" THAT small? And that... bereft of basically any resources? Or does it only look like that because it got blown up? ... I feel like maybe both, because like... we can see outside Kaptar and Maray that there's more cliffside temple ruins and more jungle, respectively, but outside of the Hunrath bubble, the Mofang world still looked like something of a desolate wasteland. No wonder they kinda wanted to murder everyone, stuck somewhere like that.
I bet those loading screens where the entire world disintegrates into a cloud of swirling particles looks really cool in VR...
Maybe I'm being an oversensitive asshole, but the first time that happened it blew my mind, so I would have spoiler tagged it. Not calling you out or anything, your call entirely, for all I know that's in the trailer (that I didn't watch because I went in blind).
I bet those loading screens where the entire world disintegrates into a cloud of swirling particles looks really cool in VR...
Maybe I'm being an oversensitive asshole, but the first time that happened it blew my mind, so I would have spoiler tagged it. Not calling you out or anything, your call entirely, for all I know that's in the trailer (that I didn't watch because I went in blind).
The effect is in the trailer, but the object / action that triggers it is not. /shrug
Tbh the first time I did it, I had a combo of "OhgodIdidsomethingwrong" followed by "... I liked the Linking Book sound better."
I'm a little annoyed right now. I'm enjoying the game so far, but one puzzle I thought was kind of bullshit:
So you get the Villein code from Farley's house and upon seeing the apparatus in the junkyard you're like "I totally got this. . ." Except when you put it in it "auto-corrects" to another number. "Well shit did I enter it wrong," is the thought most people would have (it is in fact what most of the videos I saw seeking out this shit thought). Apparently it is written wrong in the game, and you're supposed to "suss" that out, but why would you? It comes off cheap an has kinda (for the moment) soured me on the game, because up to that point you're doing everything you're meant to (being exhaustive with your search and paying attention), but you come across a puzzle where you have no indication that something is amiss other than it not working (which could be any number of reasons). You're just meant to understand that the someone in the game world wrote down the WRONG code on PURPOSE and to go with that.
That's not rewarding, that's just fucking cheap.
To be fair, I thought that there were actually sufficient clues indicating what was going on there:
In the mayor's journal, he mentions that he's giving this information to Farley to put in her vault (where you find it) while everyone is evacuating the town and/or planet. Everyone's really busy, so mistakes get made. And in the mayor's bedroom, there's a copy of the Villein Number System worksheet from the garage, and it is barely even started. Mayor Josef is not that good at this to begin with.
Also, having already reversed engineered just how the Villein number system works using the worksheet made it clear without needing to go back to the console that there was no actual Villein number that would match what was drawn on the board. (There were no lines going off the edge of the grid, which seems unlikely-to-impossible for a Villein number with that many lines.)
On the other hand, maybe I was just meta-gaming with the knowledge that (as the worksheet says) there is an autocorrect feature in the Villein console, and concluding that because it was being called out, I'd need to use it.
I mean, everyone's gonna see all of this stuff differently, of course. Hell, I'm pretty sure the stuff I've missed so far was obvious to everyone in the world but me, but I didn't think this felt cheap at all.
Yea I still call shennanigans. None of those really count as "clues" so much as "Well this makes sense if this was going on. . ." Especially when nothing up to that point had even operated that way; all the puzzles up to that point (and after) have been "fair" and not requiring you to put motivations on the characters in the game.
As to the second point:
The game tells you the machine auto-corrects; so the diagram not being a number didn't really tell me anything more than "Oh it's written wrong." However not only is it written wrong, it's written INSANELY wrong and I imagine most peoples thoughts would be "Well, this must go to something else." That or they just go "Fuck it, I'll try this number anyway."
Not trying to be a contrarian, it just pissed me off, and not in a good way.
It makes sense if you play around with the machine long enough to understand just how lazy the autocorrect lets you be. In practice, each digit is just the number of spokes filled in, with the autocorrect letting you ignore the actual alignments. Once you know that, you don't even have to bother with letting the machine correct it, you can just do it in your head/on paper.
I'm stuck in the world with the beetles.
The chain gears aren't engaging with the spinning shafts, and I have no idea why. One of the connections seems to have no visible way to control it, while the other might have something but it's behind a puzzle with a ton of controls and no obvious objective.
It did feel satisfying realizing that I could exploit the different swap areas to reach the spot where the red beam emitter was before I blew it up. It was significantly less satisfying finding that there was actually nothing there.
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Sir CarcassI have been shown the end of my worldRound Rock, TXRegistered Userregular
The chain gears aren't engaging with the spinning shafts, and I have no idea why. One of the connections seems to have no visible way to control it, while the other might have something but it's behind a puzzle with a ton of controls and no obvious objective.
Hint
There are three things to make the giant machine fully function. First is the control to turn on the fan blades. The second is the control to engage the driveshaft. The third is a thing that you point at the joints and use to connect them. The first two are on the maintenance walkway. The third is not, but is nearby.
I got the good ending! And I did indeed see that the Mofang sphere got plopped somewhere in an Arizona that is on fire.
I don't really want to bother seeing the Bad Ending, but I kinda feel like from what I saw, Earth may not be 100% toast. It's a far future away from when CW was born, and probably even us, but I mean, Arizona is ALWAYS on fire, and I feel like a bunch of burned out strip malls & apartment complexes =/= THE ENTIRE EARTH IS TOAST :O, esp. since the sun looked OK?
... like I guess what I'm saying, is we might have Mad Max: Fury Road Earth in there, but that doesn't mean everything's wiped out. Hell, I think I saw trees out there.
The point is, though, that despite having some lovely national parks, Arizona as a whole is something of a shithole from what I've seen, so, I would much rather live out on Nice Green Colony World Thingy. Like I'm not even FROM Arizona, why would I want to go back there? I wish there was a way to kinda explore the fully realized, interconnected world, but I guess not. And damn CW, like, why the fuck were you willing to basically *let everyone die* so you could go back to Earth? The hell is wrong with you?
Regarding the Mofang -- jesus, was their "colony" THAT small? And that... bereft of basically any resources? Or does it only look like that because it got blown up? ... I feel like maybe both, because like... we can see outside Kaptar and Maray that there's more cliffside temple ruins and more jungle, respectively, but outside of the Hunrath bubble, the Mofang world still looked like something of a desolate wasteland. No wonder they kinda wanted to murder everyone, stuck somewhere like that.
Ending spoilery thoughts
From what I understand about C.W.'s plan, he thought everyone was already dead, and he was sure his battery was the key to getting back home (to be fair, it was), so that's what he was going to do. He didn't know what time he would go back to (and we don't really know how far in the future it was) or the state of the Earth at that time. My guess is humans either wiped themselves out, the Mofang let one of their WMDs loose, or they invaded somehow. In the "bad" ending, Farley still made it and they have a sad conversation as C.W. tries to figure out what happened and realizes what he has done.
Regarding the state of Mofang, it's likely the result of whatever bomb thing they were playing with. Basically that sphere was swapped with the Hunrath sphere, hence the size. I'd imagine it originally looked like what you see outside of the dome, but their own weapon got turned on them.
I guess that's a problem I have with the game. There's a lot of backstory going on but you only really get small bits of it. I would have liked more expositionary bits of info scattered around.
The chain gears aren't engaging with the spinning shafts, and I have no idea why. One of the connections seems to have no visible way to control it, while the other might have something but it's behind a puzzle with a ton of controls and no obvious objective.
Hint
There are three things to make the giant machine fully function. First is the control to turn on the fan blades. The second is the control to engage the driveshaft. The third is a thing that you point at the joints and use to connect them. The first two are on the maintenance walkway. The third is not, but is nearby.
I got the good ending! And I did indeed see that the Mofang sphere got plopped somewhere in an Arizona that is on fire.
I don't really want to bother seeing the Bad Ending, but I kinda feel like from what I saw, Earth may not be 100% toast. It's a far future away from when CW was born, and probably even us, but I mean, Arizona is ALWAYS on fire, and I feel like a bunch of burned out strip malls & apartment complexes =/= THE ENTIRE EARTH IS TOAST :O, esp. since the sun looked OK?
... like I guess what I'm saying, is we might have Mad Max: Fury Road Earth in there, but that doesn't mean everything's wiped out. Hell, I think I saw trees out there.
The point is, though, that despite having some lovely national parks, Arizona as a whole is something of a shithole from what I've seen, so, I would much rather live out on Nice Green Colony World Thingy. Like I'm not even FROM Arizona, why would I want to go back there? I wish there was a way to kinda explore the fully realized, interconnected world, but I guess not. And damn CW, like, why the fuck were you willing to basically *let everyone die* so you could go back to Earth? The hell is wrong with you?
Regarding the Mofang -- jesus, was their "colony" THAT small? And that... bereft of basically any resources? Or does it only look like that because it got blown up? ... I feel like maybe both, because like... we can see outside Kaptar and Maray that there's more cliffside temple ruins and more jungle, respectively, but outside of the Hunrath bubble, the Mofang world still looked like something of a desolate wasteland. No wonder they kinda wanted to murder everyone, stuck somewhere like that.
Ending spoilery thoughts
From what I understand about C.W.'s plan, he thought everyone was already dead, and he was sure his battery was the key to getting back home (to be fair, it was), so that's what he was going to do. He didn't know what time he would go back to (and we don't really know how far in the future it was) or the state of the Earth at that time. My guess is humans either wiped themselves out, the Mofang let one of their WMDs loose, or they invaded somehow. In the "bad" ending, Farley still made it and they have a sad conversation as C.W. tries to figure out what happened and realizes what he has done.
Regarding the state of Mofang, it's likely the result of whatever bomb thing they were playing with. Basically that sphere was swapped with the Hunrath sphere, hence the size. I'd imagine it originally looked like what you see outside of the dome, but their own weapon got turned on them.
I guess that's a problem I have with the game. There's a lot of backstory going on but you only really get small bits of it. I would have liked more expositionary bits of info scattered around.
Ending Spoilers:
I think the Mofang witnessed firsthand outside their bubble the destructive power humans could have. They probably watched in realtime as we blew ourselves up with nukes, and so presumed that the Hunrath humans would be capable of the same, and therefore went to stop them before it could happen with their own bombs. Then they either blew themselves up, or we blew them up with their bombs. There's literally a crater in the middle of the Mofang cell surrounded by broken spires, and their tree is half dead.
Edit: cripes that was a quote button not a spoiler button.
Posts
It didn't quite take me an hour, but yeah, it was kind of annoying since it was basically trial and error that involved looking, going down, teleporting, loading, making changes, teleporting back, loading, going back up, and seeing if you did what you meant to do. That was my only real annoyance, puzzle-wise.
I didn't mind the puzzle itself, I thought it was kind of neat, it's just the way it was handled that kind of ruined it. It would have been better, I think, if you could rotate the pieces from underneath the maze.
EDIT: Resolution Scale was set to 50. I. The fuck. I'm literally sitting here thinking "Why does this look like someone smeared it in vaseline?!"
yeah you move faster strafing diagonally as well so just lay on the inputs and move at lightning speed
On a brighter note. . .I got the power on! That's enough success for me for the night.
EDIT: After an hour of being stumped at "What do I do first. . ." I'm cooking with gas. This is what I wanted THE WITNESS to be.
Jesus Christ, between this and Deus Ex I'm just not going to sleep this week I guess.
Yes. It's something they are working on.
Fuck. Well I use Notepad for these kinds of games anyway, but having the photos would be great. I should have got the Steam version I guess.
This game is really great though, it totally takes me back to the late 90's, sitting at my computer in frustration and then stumbling ass backwards into a solution:
Thing is: I have a brain problem that makes my working memory, aka, my ability to hold multiple pieces of info at the same in my short term memory so I can use them, total garbage. This puzzle REQUIRES working memory. I... basically can't solve it, because I can't completely remember the configurations when I move to a new area.
A screenshot of what I SHOULD be trying to do would help a great deal.
***
Unrelated news: I had a very long, very involved, crazy dream where for some reason my brother, myself, and this really hot woman with the most glorious afro I've ever seen, were all trying to infiltrate Mofang society, which by this point had up and decided they'd try to (badly) emulate human society at all levels, because they, the Mofang, were better at being humans than humans were...? So there was a lot of "Haha, uh, we don't speak the native language because we grew up with a human trading caravan! And, uh, we can't learn other languages because we have a brain disorder! >>;;;;;;; )
https://podcast.tidalwavegames.com/
There are actually 2 different solutions to the puzzle. You have to do one, then the other. Not sure if this will help, but focus on one disc at a time. When you're looking down at it, figure out how many quarter rotations and in which direction you'd need for it to make a valid path, then go do that. I remember most of the disc slots are pretty self explanatory, ie there's only one way to make a valid path. There was one that could be used for 2 different paths, and I had to use one disc to get to the north pedestal and another disc to get to the east and west paths.
i call this one the Hunrath only because it's kinda orange, and clementine soda makes me think of Darling Clementine, because all those southwestern accents make me think of that song
Izze clementine soda -- idk it was in the fridge
1 shot tequila
1/2 shot st. germain
salted rim
mix it togethr however, man, im so tired of this fucking puzzle
drink it
cry because this puzzle sucks
the salt represents my salt at how I can't beat this puzzle
https://podcast.tidalwavegames.com/
That's not rewarding, that's just fucking cheap.
That gives you access to the northern panel. Next, all you have to do is rotate the 90 degree angle piece at the top counter-clockwise:
That gives you access to the eastern route. After that, you rotate the whole thing clockwise to get the western route.
If you have trouble remembering how the pieces should be oriented while you're rotating them in Hunrath, maybe it'll help if you think of it in terms of "one 90 degree rotation clockwise", "one 90 degree rotation counter-clockwise", or "180 degree rotation"? You can determine how the piece should be rotated from above and write it down.
I spent literally HOURS trying to solve the maze without it.
Steam ID: Obos Vent: Obos
https://podcast.tidalwavegames.com/
That one took me forever, but it's actually pretty simple.
If you want to save yourself a little time and frustration:
The VR version hasn't been released yet, but should be soon.
And do I want to turn off the WHOLE machine, or just one of the branches?
https://podcast.tidalwavegames.com/
It's easiest to turn the whole thing off. You won't need it anymore.
• I totally missed the note at C.W.'s place about resetting the code to Farley's vault. Just didn't see it. Or maybe I saw it and then got so wrapped up in the other two notes that I just forgot to look at it. Sigh.
As for my favorite puzzle so far:
To be fair, I thought that there were actually sufficient clues indicating what was going on there:
Also, having already reversed engineered just how the Villein number system works using the worksheet made it clear without needing to go back to the console that there was no actual Villein number that would match what was drawn on the board. (There were no lines going off the edge of the grid, which seems unlikely-to-impossible for a Villein number with that many lines.)
On the other hand, maybe I was just meta-gaming with the knowledge that (as the worksheet says) there is an autocorrect feature in the Villein console, and concluding that because it was being called out, I'd need to use it.
I wouldn't say that I'm super far into it yet, but I'm loving it so far. God have I missed these types of games. There is just nothing quite like a good Myst. But since this isn't technically Myst, I guess now we're gonna have to start calling things a "Myst-like" because observation has taught me that this is how genres work in video games.
The puzzles are satisfying so far, but on the whole not quite as challenging as Riven. Remember that one really enormous puzzle spanning every island where you had to learn the number system, break into each dome, find where the dome was located on the island relief map, figure out what color it was associated with, then go to the one giant relief map and place all the colored marbles in the correct location corresponding to the correct dome and AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH
I do love that there are various types of cart rides and an alien number system to learn. Very Riven qualities, though I think Riven made you work a lot harder to learn the number systems, whereas Obduction is like, "Here is a piece of paper that completely explains how it works."
The game was running like garbage for me at first until I realized that NVIDIA released new drivers about a week ago and some of the updates specifically had Obduction in mind. Now it runs smooth as silk!
But those load times are still excruciating.
While I will say that there's nothing QUITE as bad as the Goddamn Marble Puzzle in Riven, there's something that approaches it, especially on like... so, one of my main beefs with the Goddamn Marble Puzzle is that there's at least two pieces of data straight up missing from that puzzle -- one of the color symbols (I think violet?) and the location of one of the domes (the underground one). This makes the Marble puzzle go from "difficult" to "Fajsdlfjdsajfldksjfdsjfara." Like, you know HOW to solve it, but there's arbitrary missing pieces of data there that slow you way down.
Similarly, as other people in this thread have noted, there's a puzzle in this game where you know how to solve it, but the interface / execution method makes the puzzle unnecessarily long and annoying to solve. There's an in-universe reason for this -- they're trying to slow somebody down as much as possible -- but as a player it's unsatisfying and irritating.
Speaking of "unnecessarily long," @Sir Carcass I guess that means more damn teleport puzzles where I have to rotate a thing but I can't see what I'm rotating
In general, like... the teleport puzzles are the worst ones in this game. The combination of excruciating load times plus arbitrary levels of difficulty imposed by not being able to see half the puzzle at any given time annoys the SHIT out of me. And like... I get it, Cyan, you became enamored with the idea of teleportation puzzles in Uru when you realized the engine could support that, but you're overusing them and they have weird load timers. The teleportation puzzles in Uru weren't fun, and these aren't either.
https://podcast.tidalwavegames.com/
Yeah, another teleport puzzle, but it's not near as bad as the gauntlet one.
THIS.
I like how in your world its official name is The Goddamn Marble Puzzle.
Though I'm not sure I agree, adding spoiler tags by request.
Spoiler related to how cool a certain thing would look in VR. I don't think the thing is a spoiler. At least one other disagrees.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
*/edit*
Yea I still call shennanigans. None of those really count as "clues" so much as "Well this makes sense if this was going on. . ." Especially when nothing up to that point had even operated that way; all the puzzles up to that point (and after) have been "fair" and not requiring you to put motivations on the characters in the game.
As to the second point:
Not trying to be a contrarian, it just pissed me off, and not in a good way.
They already kinda do; you can take in-game photographs. Unfortunately, it's a little buggy right now. Hopefully it'll be fixed for the Oculus update.
https://podcast.tidalwavegames.com/
For me, that puzzle was just "oh, I bet that pattern goes in that machine. A 3 digit number? Oh yeah, I bet I know where that goes!" Sometimes you just have to take what the game gives you. :P
In game, I think the explanation is that symbol is more familiar and rememberable than the alien equivalent, so that's what they use.
I don't really want to bother seeing the Bad Ending, but I kinda feel like from what I saw, Earth may not be 100% toast. It's a far future away from when CW was born, and probably even us, but I mean, Arizona is ALWAYS on fire, and I feel like a bunch of burned out strip malls & apartment complexes =/= THE ENTIRE EARTH IS TOAST :O, esp. since the sun looked OK?
... like I guess what I'm saying, is we might have Mad Max: Fury Road Earth in there, but that doesn't mean everything's wiped out. Hell, I think I saw trees out there.
The point is, though, that despite having some lovely national parks, Arizona as a whole is something of a shithole from what I've seen, so, I would much rather live out on Nice Green Colony World Thingy. Like I'm not even FROM Arizona, why would I want to go back there? I wish there was a way to kinda explore the fully realized, interconnected world, but I guess not. And damn CW, like, why the fuck were you willing to basically *let everyone die* so you could go back to Earth? The hell is wrong with you?
Regarding the Mofang -- jesus, was their "colony" THAT small? And that... bereft of basically any resources? Or does it only look like that because it got blown up? ... I feel like maybe both, because like... we can see outside Kaptar and Maray that there's more cliffside temple ruins and more jungle, respectively, but outside of the Hunrath bubble, the Mofang world still looked like something of a desolate wasteland. No wonder they kinda wanted to murder everyone, stuck somewhere like that.
https://podcast.tidalwavegames.com/
Maybe I'm being an oversensitive asshole, but the first time that happened it blew my mind, so I would have spoiler tagged it. Not calling you out or anything, your call entirely, for all I know that's in the trailer (that I didn't watch because I went in blind).
Tbh the first time I did it, I had a combo of "OhgodIdidsomethingwrong" followed by "... I liked the Linking Book sound better."
https://podcast.tidalwavegames.com/
I'm stuck in the world with the beetles.
It did feel satisfying realizing that I could exploit the different swap areas to reach the spot where the red beam emitter was before I blew it up. It was significantly less satisfying finding that there was actually nothing there.
Hint
Ending spoilery thoughts
Regarding the state of Mofang, it's likely the result of whatever bomb thing they were playing with. Basically that sphere was swapped with the Hunrath sphere, hence the size. I'd imagine it originally looked like what you see outside of the dome, but their own weapon got turned on them.
I guess that's a problem I have with the game. There's a lot of backstory going on but you only really get small bits of it. I would have liked more expositionary bits of info scattered around.
Ending Spoilers:
Edit: cripes that was a quote button not a spoiler button.
Steam ID: Obos Vent: Obos