Look, while we’re talking about puzzles hidden in the landscape, this one bugs me. Everything you needed to solve the puzzle was always nearby and you didn’t need to traipse halfway across the map to solve something. The primary tenet of The Witness puzzle design, which it seldom broke, was that all puzzles were local. These hidden puzzles of Taiji make an interesting departure from The Witness.
Only with the right eyes can you see them: the solar panels the orchard paths the gravestones. Taiji, however, does have a bunch of meta-puzzles, each of which requires the player to seek out a puzzle disguised in the landscape. They are “ so-called” puzzles because most of them aren’t really puzzles, right?. Perhaps Taiji’s biggest break with The Witness is that it doesn’t have any so-called environmental puzzles where you draw circle-and-line shapes in the virtual world around you. As with the diamonds, the result is clearly not a Witness puzzle but after seeing all the other parallels with The Witness it was similar enough to grab my attention. This means you have to solve the puzzle using a continuous line. This is probably a stretch, but some of Taiji‘s puzzles involve toggling squares on with your avatar’s feet instead of using a magical cursor.
#The witness ending full#
Taiji also has its own secret treasure trove, full of optional challenges, behind the waterfall. Inside the GalleryĪnd consider also the secret puzzle cavern of The Witness which is full of puzzles which are merely included for the joy of further puzzling (well, all except for one). Structurally, I previously noted that the Gallery area is similar to The Witness’ village ruins with hybrid puzzles that are only solvable after you’ve got some knowledge under your belt. I was even more surprised to see shapes hidden in the reflective glare of the solar panels in the Mill area of Taiji, which is straight out of The Witness’ desert area. However, Taiji’s central mechanic of toggling squares on and off makes these puzzles distinctively different. The diamond puzzles work largely the same way as the treehouse puzzles of The Witness – diamonds of the same colour must be partitioned in pairs. There is even overlap in how the orchards’ puzzles work as they are both exercises in reading tree branches – and it becomes clear Taiji’s own interpretation of The Witness does not just reproduce the major brushstrokes. The orchard puzzles use cherry blossom trees at the height of Spring just like The Witness did for its orchard section. It’s shaped to resemble the key motif of The Witness: the circle and the line. The cutest homage to The Witness is near the middle of the Taiji map – the pool at the base of the waterfall. It’s spoilerin’ time for Taiji and The Witness! I decided to catalogue every similiarity. Story is a bit more complicated than that, I actually started this project before The Witness even released!”īut I was surprised to find Taiji has a lot more callbacks to The Witness than just panels and cables. I hoped by now that someone would have made a similar game, but nobody did, so I’m doing it.
“I guess you could say I’m a big fan of The Witness. Watching the trailer, it doesn’t take long to notice the landscape blistering with puzzle panels, bound with cables.ĭeveloper Matthew VanDevander wrote a couple of years ago: One of the most striking features of Taiji, probably the biggest factor for the attention it garnered over the years, was that it looks and feels like The Witness (Thelka Inc., 2016). This is the second part of the Taiji Quartet.
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