I had just finished "The Sojourn" and enjoyed it, so I decided to give "The Witness" a try, and it is a slog. I've played for 11 hours, and I'm just exhausted with the line puzzles. The puzzles themselves annoy me. Like all the puzzles that involve getting the absolutely perfect viewing angle, the puzzles that involve memorization etc... My mistake was that I assumed the good reviews of the game were indicative of a game with wide appeal. I like puzzles, but I'm not the type of puzzle lovers who enjoys figuring out the rules of a puzzle.

commenting almost two years after posting but i immediately compared case of the golden idol to the game storyteller (which was released a couple months after this video). golden idol is more complex, but i think they have a narrative style

Maybe the one that is not smart enough is you. The game is great.

Only 4 environmental puzzles? As far as you got into the game you should have found dozens. The slow sections are there to get you to look around and spot them, they are everywhere.

4:36 yeah it’s old and unwieldy, but it’s a great nonetheless. Also you don’t need to keep the engine on constantly, the sail is its own way to move.

Its not a good game. And i have the receipts to prove it I have dragged 3 people through it and the common consensus is, the game is profoundly arrogant, inaccessible and is tailored to people who would call themselves "smarter than you" because they won a game of who can headbutt a wall the longest.

The hearing section was so hard for me, I did the first ones with the birds, but then when the cellphones and other animals appeared I wasn't able to hear the bird anymore, not even using earphones or turning up the volume, I had to look up a walkthrough

Honestly true imo. I was looking for games on the "metroidbrainia" sub (shitty name btw) and was looking for an experience that could only really be had once, in the same vein as Outer Wilds, Obra Dinn, Inscryption, etc. Everyone was recommending the Witness, like always top 3 or 4 recommendations. Heard the game had to be experienced totally blind and that it was "a Myst clone" and I thought "y'know, I like Myst, this seems like a good idea". Then I got into the game, eventually realized it was all just line/grid puzzles, and by the time I was done with the Sun Temple, I realized I just wasn't having fun, and the core gameplay wasn't gonna change. And like, I can't believe this is what so many people consider peak. The puzzles aren't interesting, there's no plot. Everyone's like "GO IN BLIND GO IN BLIND", and I did, because I already made that mistake with Outer Wilds and got copped out of what is supposedly a life-changing gaming experience, but what was I even gonna get spoiled on, fucking line and grid puzzles? I get that the game just isn't for me. I want there to be a bit more substance to the games I play. But I just can't believe that this game is as highly acclaimed as it is. At least the parody game, the Looker, has a sense of humor.

this video just answered more than just the "why did sable feel like such an important game" question I had. this was amazing.

Fantastic video

Nice video! I just beat the game today and loved it. Been playing card games my whole life, even had a stint as a pro card gamer, so Inscryption was a joy to experience. And yes fuck the Wizard cards lmao

skill issue

Personally from a heist game I want a task that can be done in a few different ways where I execute a plan I made and stuff can go wrong

황금우상사건

kinda looks interesting, this video is flawed heavely anyone with unbiased opinion can realise this...

It sounds like you're being sarcastic the entire time

A major difference between acts one and three is that P03 wanted Luke to play so it could achieve its goals, whereas all Leshy ever wanted was to make a fun game and play it with us

You have the iq of someone who uses pronouns

Interestingly, each of the game's 4 main mechanics seems to be a dual reference to different types of games, but the references change between the "mechanics" of the cards and the "flavor" of the cards. To keep it simple, i'll seperate them first. For flavor, leshy's beasts probably best match pokemon and other creature collection style tcgs, whereas magnificus' magic theme is VERY yugioh, only emphasized by the duel disk analog he brings out for the final duel. My card game experience is a bit more limited to make a direct connection with the robots and graveyard themes in any sort of iconic tcg, but there are plenty out there, especially in the digital space, that you could choose to make reference to whatever your personal favorite niche game you want. Mechanical references are quite a bit more clear, though. Leshy's sacrifices are a direct reference to yugioh's tribute system that dictates more powerful monsters needing more sacrifices to bring out, with the actual ruling being 1 tribute for lvl 5-6, 2 for anything lvl 7+, and 3 tributes being reserved for some of the most powerful creatures in lore or game warping effects, but those that require as many tributes always state as much on the card. But all those basics for yugioh mostly fly out the window in the modern game with the focus shifting to special summoning and otherwise cheating out high level monsters to get around the early restrictions. P03's energy is most closely linked to hearthstone and its engine, where mana is a currency spent to summon monsters that increases in cap every turn while completely refilling, as a way to manage the pace of the game and limit how early powerful monsters can be summoned. That leaves the underutilized mox to represent card-based resource costs that have to remain on the field, like pokemon's energy or magic's lands. Again, that leaves bones to be an obscure or otherwise wholly original system without an easy flagship to point to, but it isnt hard to make the loose connection to cards that generate some resource or advantage on death, such as pokemon's prize cards mechanic or yugioh which started leaning into it as power creep made tributing obsolete in all but a few very specific decks built around it.

7:08 the little picture of him rolling is so cute

Yeah I didn’t like it either. The world felt empty it was pretty but it felt empty. Given the only puzzle games that I played besides mobile puzzle games was the two portal games. So that world felt way more lived in though it was way more destroyed.

3:29 ironically, a name can genuinely be way more important than half the stats on the card because so many modern cards can only target other cards with a specific name / part of a name but ANYWAYS

There's a lot of Yugioh dna in Inscryption. The entirety of act 1 feels like a shadow game from the anime. Some of your cards talk to you, and the rest feel like they also might be sort of alive, making you feel uncomfortable with sacrificing them, your character's soul can get trapped in a card and you find other cards that have lost souls trapped in them, you can use various occult items in the cabin to essentially cheat at the game, etc, just a ton of wacky ideas from the plot of Yugioh that I've never seen properly explored in a videogame before. Meanwhile act 3 somewhat reminds me of modern Yugioh videogames, (partially due to all the blue holograms and tech stuff and all of the cards looking like robots) but also due to what you mentioned about the game becoming somewhat of a shell of itself that's totally focused on mechanics over flavor and is run by a cynical business-minded robot with no imagination that just sees Inscryption as a tool for achieving his goals. (alright well I guess you didn't say all of that.) I like P03 btw, very entertaining character.

I got bored with this game. I thought it was really cool and fun at first, then the further I got into it I started doing things like using my phone to take reference pictures of tedious puzzles (and using pencil/paper) to make it go by quicker and I realized I wasn't really enjoying myself anymore so I stopped playing. I get that it's rewarding to solve some of the more difficult puzzles and it can be fun to come to the realization that you understand how something works in the game, but the novelty wore off and I was no longer having fun at a certain point so I just turned it off.

I've gotten almost to the end of the game and didn't know you could sprint after rolling 😅😭😭 Total game changer

Im glad someone else mentioned how fucking terrible the bumpers are on xbox controllers. Genuinely aggravating to interact with.

Favorite Yugioh card is a Gate Guardian card?! Love it.

fascinating as a creative side project, i translated (mostly) all of the cards from act 2 to my native language, and tweaked the rules a bit, resulting in a fun card game. when you're given complete freedom of what you put into your deck, the game becomes extremely broken. with optimally built decks, the two best strategies by a long shot are blue/green mox aggro, and turbo urayuli fueled by meatbot. i introduced a playset limit of 3 cards per regular cards, 1 per rares, and 4 per support cards such as squirrels, but this wasn't enough. after playtesting, it became evident that the game works best as a draft environment. we drafted inscryption with 4 players. each pack contained 13 cards, none of them being support cards. in the card pool there were 3 of each regular card, and 1 of each rare. there were 2 rounds of draft. after darfting the cards, players had a chance to add support cards to their deck as they pleased. playing with decks created this way solved the core issue with the game, that being the consistent turn 1 or turn 2 kills, and it highlighted some cards that would otherwise never see play. i think inscryption (the card game) is a ton of fun with these changes. games of inscryption are varied, i played very short games and very long, grindy games too. resource management is very flavorful and a lot of fun. in inscryption, there is less of a board strategy element to the game, because unlike magic and other older tcgs, the only point that you as a player make decisions is when you play your cards, and you can only do that during your turn, creating an interesting dynamic. you interact with your opponent by placing your creatures either in front of theirs to kill them, or in front of an empty space to deal damage directly. i might make a video about my version of the game once it's ready. favorite card: blue mage

Probably a weird rule to have but I try to avoid games where the best logo the developer could come up with is just the name of the game typed out in a very normal serif font. It's usually not a good sign.

Inscryption is truly one of the best meta games I have seen.

The inaccessibility was definitely the biggest thing for me. My spatial reasoning, short term memory, and pitch perception are all very weak, and I'm color blind on top of it all. For me, so many of the puzzles were way harder than they should've been, not because they offered problems with interesting solutions to work through, but because I was mentally or physically not able to engage with them at the level that they demanded. Using outside tools didn't help me, it just made the things I wasn't able to do on my own even more frustrating and tedious. Even if you don't have to do every area to beat the game, having to skip whole areas because of something like that is still a miserable feeling. It's not like it had to be this way to offer interesting puzzles either; my favorite first-person puzzle game of all time, The Legend of Grimrock II, is full to the brim with so many different kinds of puzzles and secrets and riddles, and I could count the number of times that my disabilities caused me to struggle on a puzzle in that game on one hand!

I think that the experience of the people who never found out about the holy cross, or did and just weren't interested in engaging with it, and who beat the final boss for the first ending and were satisfied with it as an action game, is still a valid way to enjoy the game. The fact that the golden path feels like a grand secret that most players will never solve is exactly what makes it so special!

Thiat was a lot of words to just say you have the short-term memory and spacial reasoning skills of a newborn

If you don't mind, I would like to recommend a game series that I think is EXTREMELY interesting from a storytelling perspective: the Project Moon series. Literally all of their games have some of the best stories I've ever seen. They have three games that all take place in the same universe: Lobotomy Corporation: the first of the series, a brutal but fair management simulator where you manage horrific beasts derived from the human subconscious. Library of Ruina: the second in the series and debatably the best, a sequel to Lob Corp where YOU get to run the death gameshow (think of Danganronpa). And finally: Limbus Company, a gacha game made by people who have no clue how to make a gacha game in the BEST WAY POSSIBLE. I recommend starting with Lob Corp and going unspoilered if you check the series out, as it's the first in the series. Aside from that, this was a great video and I'll be following your channel from now on :)

It's cool to take breaks if you aren't feeling it dude.

I don't fully agree with you on the worth of Kaycee's Mod, to me this is the prequel, the back and forth between Leshy and Kaycee, and there are clues Leshy Mourns this time and her. The golden age before the fall. This place in time makes it a bittersweet farewell.

Something relevant of note I think is that Daniel's previous game to Inscryption, The Hex, was similarly a video game about video games. He probably branched off of that. Makes me wonder if Pony Island 2 will continue the trend.

Very good video Also based gate guardian player

"We don't have to keep score" got to me the most. The last thing he wanted was a fun game of cards. I think about it sometimes.

Worried about watching a video on Inscryption from a channel called "Video games are bad" EDIT: Ok checked the rest of the channel and the name seems ironic. EDIT 2: Ok the video starts with Sacrifices Must be Made, this video is gonna be kino.

Poe!!!!!! Pretty sure you just enraged the entire inscription fan base

It's funny that you compare the Wizards to the gymnastics meme and feel that it's the hardest to win with, but it's actually the most consistent deck if you know how to build and play it, which is, I would imagine, an intentional design decision on the part of Mullins. (To go into it, Blue has the only source of card draw in the game, combine it with Green's high strength and liberal use of the hammer to kill the Blue mages and make way for your Green ones, and you can easily dump 3 damage onto 3 of the 4 lanes on your first turn. Card draw is, as always, in all games, really really powerful.)

You were talking about Magnificus’ cards and didn’t know what they were doing, well each of the Scrybs represent an archetype(there are cards they have that fit into other playstyles, but most build towards something in particular). Leshy is like agro/midrange, he goes on the board early with strong cards for the turn, but burns through cards faster than the others. Grimora is a value archetype, each time a card dies they make bone, so she’s extracting additional value from each card and she builds towards expensive, but game winning plays(Mullins admitted he overvalued bones so her plays are a bit overpriced). P03 is control, with a focus on board positioning, he also has Mrs. bomb, the games only board clear card. Finally Magnificus in combo, he has a lot of draw cards and some ways to suddenly build large numbers (his starter deck sucks though, it doesn’t have a combo it’s building towards so it’s just a weird gimmick deck to begin with)

I absolutely adore your material and style, but will STRONGLY disagree with music opinion :D for me it was the most unique and extraordinary video game soundtrack I've heard in a long time, but you know how it is with art and feelings - everyone likes something different ;)

If you value your time so much, and go out of your way to make every puzzle less enjoyable just look up the answers at this point

You're absolutely right that Inscryption, the physical card game that apparently exists in this setting, must be an absolute mess to play in person 😂 Blood and Moxes aren't that bad, since they just rely on cards that are on the field, but needing to keep track of the energy count in case one play or the other just happens to have thrown an energy card in their deck would be quite annoying, not to mention keeping counters around for all the bones in case someone has a bone card. As for Mox decks stacking up against the others, I'm not sure that it actually does in-game (I believe it's noted that Magnificus never managed to win out against the other three in their little metagame to take the game over), but in theory the idea would be cards requiring a specific mox would be on the level of a 1-blood card, while there could be some uber-powerful card that comes with the stringent condition of needing all 3 moxes in play, something very hard to assemble.

Nicely done 👌🏽💚 Definitely keen to hear your thoughts on Void Stranger. Absolutely insanity of a project

I love this video! I mean this is the best way possible, but this is a video I think I could have written after my first playthrough of Inscryption. While I tended to describe it as a "love letter to card games and card gamers", your descryption is much more succinct. This is one of my top3 games ever because it came right at the end of my "arc" playing card games like MtG and YGO. So, the feelings it captures, especially the handshakes they have you do at the end, were borderline tearjerkers for me. Excellent video!

Void Stranger would be a fantastic video! No idea how deeply hard it would be to produce, though; there's a lot there, but there's also just a lot a lot.