In many puzzle games, the “ point” of the puzzles is essentially to be a challenge. So, what is the reason to make those kinds of decisions? To create puzzles which by their very nature exclude certain people from fully enjoying your game? Jon Blow says it is because the puzzles in The Witness are all “about things.” I agree with this sentiment, but it perhaps requires a bit more clarification to even make sense. In my last point of defense of Jon Blow before I move on, he has been quoted saying that he wanted to ship the game with a puzzle which only color-blind people would be able to solve, however in this case he was hamstrung by the the poor color consistency of most display technology. The last one is particularly strange, considering the game received a PC patch to add a click-to-move mode, and nearly all of the puzzles in the game-including many that use color as a cue-are designed to be as accessible as possible symmetry puzzles that care about colored hexagons using cyan and yellow, for example. Because of this, the designer-Jonathan Blow-has been called callous, “ableist”, or at best unconcerned about accessibility. There are some puzzles in that game which people who are color-blind or hard of hearing will have trouble with, or may simply find impossible without just looking up the solutions. Similar concerns arose in the wake of the release of The Witness. Even still, after discussing the details of the puzzles with the aforementioned accessibility advocate, they did not seem particularly convinced that there was any tension other than my laziness and lack of care. Some of my thoughts on this are a bit hard to clarify without specifically addressing and spoiling some of the puzzles planned for Taiji. In many cases, it would be easy to make additional visual cues, and to not do so can simply be chalked up to laziness.īut my big question is, are there particular cases when not adding those cues can be justified? And if there are, what are they? It is easy to see why making a puzzle that relies on pure audio cues is a bad move from an accessibility standpoint. As an example, if you want to do puzzles that are “about sound”, deaf people will unfortunately, but necessarily, be excluded. However, I think there is some tension between accessibility concerns and the pursuit of particular subject matter. Obviously, I think that accessibility is an important and often ill-addressed concern, and my goal with the game is to never make a puzzle difficult for reasons that have nothing to do with its subject matter. This was an interesting and challenging conversation, and has left me thinking a little bit about what’s involved in making a game more accessible, and how that intersects with the design of Taiji. This week, I chatted with a deaf accessibility advocate for games. Let’s not even get into how behind the curve I am from an aesthetic point of view. Obviously this is just considering design work. There are some areas that I’m pretty happy with as is, but there is still a lot of work to be done to improve some other areas. Overall, I think the game is in a pretty good place moving forward. Essentially, just solving them all and taking notes on what might need to be improved or removed. So, I’ve finally finished up auditing all the puzzles in the game.

The witness puzzle solutions steam