Obviously you are right to compare it to The Witness, but I do think the ways in which it is different is for the better. Unlike the witness where you had to draw a solution in a single line for every puzzle, here many of the puzzles are grids where you can figure out a bit of the solution at a time, putting it in bit by bit. This allows for much more complex problems and a lot more puzzles that remain interesting after you know the rules at play. The Witness only had a handful of these kinds of puzzles, and something like The Challenge - which I consider one of the key highlights as far as puzzling goes- could only be accessed after beating every area, many of which were more tedious than interesting. For those reasons I'd say Taiji made a better impression on me than The Witness. It's not as interested in exhausting every possible puzzle from its system, so the game feels more even and tight in pacing - and it certainly doesn't hurt that it isn't slow as molasses to move from one area to another! And Taiji has more puzzles that remain interesting after getting over the hump of figuring out how they work. It is less stunning to look at I suppose, but in a puzzle game I personally don't find that too valuable
Yeah I agree with a lot of that, I think the only reason I didn't mention slow traversal and overwhelming quantity of puzzles in The Witness was to avoid talking too much about it in a video on Taiji! I like you're point about being able to complete puzzles bit by bit, that was something I hadn't considered as a difference. But you're right in that it does allow for big, over the top puzzles that you can solve incrementally which can be very satisfying
@@Table53 there is an older maze game called Alcazar, it used to be available for android (and maybe iphone?) but unfortunately system updates has rendered it too old to be playable and it is no longer up for download. That game was a fairly simple logic puzzle where you draw a connected line through a maze covering every cell, and because you could input the line in pieces the mazes are often very complex and it ends up playing like a pen and paper logic puzzle game akin to sudoku or star battles. When I played The Witness I remember thinking how it highlighted quite nicely just how restrictive the system of having every solution be one uninterrupted input really was. So even before playing Taiji, the input system being individual cells was one of the main things that sold me on it lol
I enjoyed Taiji. A couple of the introductions to mechanics are a little rough, but mostly it does quite a good job. There are some really satisfying puzzles - honestly I think I enjoyed the puzzles more than the rule discovery.
Yeah agreed, there were just a couple of subtle rule details that were hard to deduce. In fact in the puzzles with the straight lines I'm still not sure I understand them 100% even after all the puzzles haha
I forgot to come back with my thoughts after completing the game. They largely mirror yours. Though ultimately I enjoyed The Witness more, I appreciated the different puzzle mechanics this game had and the "click squares method" allows for a very different possibility space for puzzles than the "draw lines" input method of The Witness which kept the game fresh in spite of the similarities. I do however agree that there was some tutorialization of mechanics that didn't work very smoothly, but overall it was a fair brain teaser. I was also very pleased a bit near the end of my playthrough that one of my favorite mechanics of The Witness does indeed show up in Taiji, though implemented much differently. I knew I was seeing hints all over the place while going through the game but it took me a good long time before I figured out how to make use of them compared to The Witness' more on the spot approach. Also, as a laugh I didn't realize the fast travel points were... fast travel until roughly the end of my adventure. Oof.
Someone else in a comment pointed out the the clicking squares approach meant that you can "half solve" a puzzle and then think about the rest of it, which wasn't possible in the line drawing of The Witness. I didn't really think about that while playing but it is an interesting difference Yeah a couple of puzzles that involved a bit of frustrating guesswork to get past, but largely I was very happy with the meta puzzling!
I just heard about this game and specifically went to this channel hoping you'd have a video on it. If you've deemed it worthy to discuss then I hardly need to watch the whole video to know it's a puzzler worth my time.
Haha, it'll come as a shock if I ever decide to talk about why a puzzle game is really bad! (Although I can't see when I would ever really want to do that)
I had a lot of fun in my playthrough of this game! I think the mechanic of having to learn and relearn the rules of each area was very much intentional, possibly the philosophical theme of the game if we want yet another tie to the Witness. It's the scientific mindset: you don't necessarily know something just because you think you know it. You have to keep questioning the rules and looking for more-encompassing rules that account for both the new cases and the old cases.
I bought it Saturday evening and played it for several hours on Sunday. Really dig the vibe. Some puzzles have me stumped and I occasionally get lost in the world due to my lacking sense of direction 😅 But it’s really fun! I hope the genre of Witness-likes takes off because I want more!
@@vargsvansify oh yeah, there were a lot of puzzles where I was randomly clicking for a good few minutes before starting to understand what I was supposed to do haha
@@filurenerik1643 without a doubt that took me the longest to get my head around! The transition from the tutorial puzzles to the first proper ones was such a leap
