Taiji Reviews

Better than the witness

Good level of challenge

I played the witness, and loved the game. this is a cheap imitation with bad rule signaling.

Excellent game! The art style is fantastic and the puzzles are very imaginative. It makes good use of grid puzzles.

I've played other Witness-likes in the past, but this is the first one to really recapture the vibe. I love walking around on little puzzle islands.

The closest thing to a (sequel? prequel? clone? genremate?) of The Witness we currently have, especially if you consider that Jonathan Blow is listed in the credits in multiple supporting/testing roles. A wonderful puzzler in which learning the rules of the puzzle is part of the puzzle. Had fun solving the various puzzles all throughout the 'normal' end of the game and only struggled on around 3 puzzles. The regular end felt like an appropriate 'final exam' and I had lots of fun solving it. I didn't immediately understand how to access and then solve the special end, but [spoiler]I had ideas that proved correct since I already played The Witness, but the mechanics of the special end puzzles were annoying and clunky to crossreference and I didn't want to spend hours running around the map collecting the relevant data, so I just looked up and entered the solution.[/spoiler] Overall, a great puzzle game that I would recommend to any fan of the genre. Puzzles that stumped me: [spoiler]The gallery bit of the map has 2 of the puzzles I struggled with. The red wall is weird, uses a rule used nowhere else in the game or puzzles preceding it and technically would have tons of answers if you were to just consider different colors as solutions, and I didn't see how was I supposed to learn the ones the game wants you to use as a solution, so I had to look it up. And the dancefloor in the basement stumped me until just now as I'm writing this I realized that it was the swirly pattern on the wall, dang it. Had to look the solution to that one, too. The third puzzle I didn't quite understand and bruteforced is the last puzzle in the binary section, when the zero and one combine into a sort of a quantum number that I didn't really understand the behaviour of, but there were only like 4 possible solutions so I just tried all of them and one was accepted.[/spoiler]