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Comment by jsheard | Hacker News Reader

Yeah it's a real step backwards from how The Witness was presented: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul7kNFD6noU

This looks to be the first of Jon Blows games to put writing front and center, so I wonder if the clunkiness goes beyond the trailer. That's not really his forte.

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Huh, featuring "Escape Artist" by Zoe Keating, I wonderful choice. I forgot about that.

Would you not consider Braid to have put writing front and center?

The writing of Braid wasn't fantastic imo. But the game really spoke for itself.

It's been about 15 years since I played it, but I recall the writing in Braid being memorably shallow, clumsy, and pretentious (with the grand twist at the end being that they guy who spent the whole game acting like a clingy stalker was actually a clingy stalker this whole time).

I very deliberately did not say anything about my opinion about the quality of writing in Braid (and I think replaying it again wouldn’t do it any favors) ;)

But I do think that the writing was fairly central to the intended experience and design of the game.

The actual story wasn’t anything special, but I thought how it told the story through mechanics was really well done. It wasn’t the first to do that but did it a larger scope than anything else at the time.

That wasn't the real twist, the real twist is that it was all an allegory for the Manhattan Project

Not really, the writing is sectioned away from the gameplay and easy to skip over unread without missing anything relevant to the main event, the puzzles. It's not good but its unobtrusiveness made it easy to forgive. Judging from this trailer the characters will be yapping to themselves and each other during gameplay though, so it had better be well executed, especially if they end up talking a lot.

I think release trailers and announcement trailers are different things. This is what came up when I searched for announcement trailer of witness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amR6LmU6bzg

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