Your loyal minion in all things,
Jake

And many of the less irritating but still annoying puzzles are not “use your brain to solve this”, but actually “look around you to find the solution to copy into the ipad”, some of which can be pretty hard when using low gfx settings as they rely on shadows/reflections.

But I appreciate that The Witness shows, through gameplay, how mathematics can stop being something abstract (iPads with lines) and can actually permeate the whole environment and the whole world. (For example, it’s not a coincidence that he included hexagonal rocks and mountain pillars in the sea – these are actual natural formations on Earth that demonstrate how geology comes from mathematics, and the shapes also featured in puzzles.)

Then the player can recognize math as the building block of everything around us – landscape, nature, architecture. Starting to understand this gives us power over the world, but in the end (entering the mountain) we find the world more confusing than before, the final truth out of our grasp. (This reflects Blow’s personal beliefs, and partially, history of science when we entered the quantum realm).

Braid was also about a scientist seeking the ultimate truth. And while for various reasons I don’t really like Blow’s worldview and his games so much, the truly amazing thing about him as a designer is that he has this reductionist approach to design, where gameplay must always express and serve a particular idea and everything else must be removed. On PC he even has only 2 achievements. “Finish the game” and “Do more than finishing the game”. Really inspiring that he makes money by sticking to his principles instead of succumbing to cheap tricks used in other games.

He also likes subtlety, perfectionism and beauty which also makes me respect him so much. But he never allows graphics, no matter how beautiful and detailed they are, to distract from the point of the game. Which makes the beauty less distracting than most AAA graphics I have seen.