I didn’t either until i started playing but its length and size isn’t just for the sake of it. It’s that size because it’s that complex. It’s like The Witness dialed up to 11
Can't wait for 11hr unskippable cutscene that contains a hidden puzzle. And if game dies during that time... Restart from the beginning.
Having to sit through a full hour of video to slowly trace a line is pointlessly antagonistic. It only tests a player's desire to sit through your bullshit. Being able to do it does not make you better at any other part of the game. It doesn't even make you better at that part of the game.
I consider the witness one of my favorite games, and I fully completed it, but I did not do that because it's dumb. The existence of the thing really has nothing to do with the game.
I said that bit was bad puzzle/game design. You say it’s dumb. Which is another way of saying you didn’t think it was a good design.
I think it’s psychologically interesting how many people feel the need to defend Blow and his games to the hilt when he’s produced so very little.
But it's not really a puzzle, or the game, or antagonizing you, because there's no purpose in doing it. Like I said, it's just something that exists in the game. It's not the game; it doesn't reflect upon the puzzle design or the game design because it's irrelevant to the actual puzzles and the actual game.
I'll repeat myself: if you stand in one spot for an hour a special sound effect plays and some lights flash for 2 seconds. If that happened in Call of Duty, it would be strange, but it also would have nothing to do with the game design quality of Call of Duty. It would not make sense to say Call of Duty has bad game design due to the presence of this thing.
I'm defending the witness because it's a good game, and this comment thread implies that doing that dumb thing is required to play or finish the game, when it is not. It is a misleading comment that gives an uninformed reader an incorrect impression of the product.
It's a puzzle in that it's a line you have to draw to complete all the puzzles. What's that worth to anyone is what it is. There are lots of games with post-game content that's not technically required to "finish" the game.
But the goal of the Witness is to find and draw these lines. If you didn't find and draw that line, Blow would say you didn't find and draw all the lines.
So, it is a puzzle in the game. It is. It's a puzzle. It's in the game. You don't know whether it's pointless or not until after you complete it. So you can't look at it and say, "Well, this is not needed, I can skip it".
And the overall product is kind of bad. It's overly tedious and mistakes hiding necessary information with being clever.