This is the first part of the Taiji Quartet.
I started Taiji (Matthew VanDevander, 2022) last month on a Thinky Games stream. And I finished it a couple of weeks later. It was definitely my kind of thing, an open-world puzzler which was compelling from start to finish.
Some of the more difficult challenges perplexed me but when they were done, I breathed a sigh of relief. Relief. Is that what I should be feeling?
Spoilers for Taiji follow.
Let’s talk about “The House”. Well, that’s what I initially called it. Later I redubbed it as “The Mansion” but Taiji wouldn’t stand for that. When I completed this particularly eclectic section of Taiji, the “Gallery” Steam achievement popped up which immediately laid waste to my bespoke nomenclature. The… Gallery is the area where I started to reflect on my Taiji frustrations and, to be absolutely fair, some of what I write here could equally be applied to Taiji’s spiritual ancestor, The Witness.
Elyot Grant has a brilliant online talk called 30 Puzzle Design Lessons and describes the Eureka Moment, that “sudden, pleasureful, fluent, confident feeling of understanding”. It’s not about feeling smart but discovering and understanding something. He then asserts that a puzzle is anything that conceals a Eureka Moment. Lesson 8 discusses the contrasting experience of “Fiero” which is what you feel when beating something difficult. The Gallery seemed to be stacked with Eureka – yet all I was feeling was Fiero.
Modern puzzle design teaches players through what might be termed a “leap of faith” design pattern. Instead of explaining diamonds do this and flowers do that, a puzzle game will prompt the player with situations that imply rules, carefully designed sandboxes in which to experiment. Unless the designer puts the player on a tight leash, it’s usually up to the player to come up with hunches and follow through. If you think the Taiji diamonds work like the stars in The Witness, then prove it through play. Take a leap of faith. Maybe you can fly, Mandy.
Like The Witness, you can bump into a new Taiji ruleset before the appropriate tutorials. The first area I wandered into after escaping the starting area was the Gallery, which is like wandering onto a black piste for your virgin skiing experience. The Gallery is similar to the village ruins in The Witness, which is dotted with hybrid puzzles that merge rules from the rest of the game although it’s not precisely analogous because the Gallery houses a handful of unique puzzles.
Now, I trusted Taiji. As it was not possible to make a meaningful leap of faith with most of the puzzles, I understood I had to let the Gallery go for now. Every subsequent puzzle victory convinced me this was the correct decision. But, inevitably, as the unsolved Taiji territory shrank, I was coaxed back towards the Gallery. Despite my transformation into a Taiji veteran, I was dubious that I had developed sufficient tools to handle it.
Some easy wins not only bolstered my confidence but also let me in on the Gallery’s secret. The Gallery’s artworks were literally about deconstructing meaning. Most of the puzzles had a logical challenge inside them, but encrypted in a visual code.
For example, our feathered friend here:
The flowers are obvious if you’ve finished the relevant Taiji section – but the real challenge is understanding the owl’s eyes are meant to represent two zeroes, a signature of the binary puzzle. I’m still amused that my initial guess was the eyes were negative domino markers even though they didn’t look right and made no sense without positive domino markers to pair with.
What’s next along the corridor? A playing card.
I identified the logic layer quickly, making the correct guess that the “3” was meant to represent a domino marker of 3 spots. But consider what implication that has for the owl puzzle: rule markers can be aliased. It casts a spell of doubt in the deadliest place to lose confidence. If these symbols could be different, maybe everything else could be too. If a “3” can be used to represent the three spots of a domino, maybe there’s something I’m missing on the owl.
And worse still, even though I had isolated the logical heart of the puzzle, I couldn’t solve it. Normally, violated rule markers flash and let you know where you’ve gone wrong. But the obfuscated Gallery puzzles cannot give anything away. They cannot stop me floundering – and eventually put me in the perfect frame of mind to throw soup at some Gallery art.
The road puzzle consisting of shape markers and diamonds was the most disastrous crisis of confidence I had within the Gallery. Real rabbit in headlights stuff. The whole picture was straight lines and flat colours. Anything could be an alias for anything. And even if I figured it out, I had to be careful in identifying the correct positions for these rule markers…
All of these puzzles were all leaps of faith. If you made the correct leap and solved the logic puzzle rapidly thereafter the experience would be amazing. But as the encrypted logical puzzles were not usually simple puzzles, the possibility of error was high. And if I was forced to consult a walkthrough, it meant I had lost my faith. Surrender to your greatest fear: that the developer cannot be trusted.
Turned out I had decrypted correctly right off the bat but struggled with simple mistakes time and again. And so, when I finished the road puzzle after several wearying sessions slumped before it, I did not feel euphoria. There was no happiness to be found here, only relief. Only a thank-God-that’s-done and then it was off to the next brutal test of faith.
When faith works, it feels absolutely brilliant, like your brain is throwing a party and everyone is invited. But at times the uphill Taiji drive required a lot more guesswork than I would have liked. The Witness had some of this too; I struggled with the “XY axes” puzzle at the back of the village – this was one where I surrendered to fear.
In Taiji, it was usually visual decryption puzzles that led to relief rather than eureka. I felt a surge of excitement when I discovered the secret to solving the pillar puzzles, but that didn’t survive contact with the rest of the pillar challenges which are all about missing information. I was usually guessing, having to explain my successful guesses with hindsight.
If you think the meta-puzzles would have generated the same tension then, dear reader, you would be quite wrong. Most of these relied on a shock moment of revelation. After my first meta-puzzle solution, I realised it would be obvious if I had found the meta-puzzle or not.
You might be surprised at which meta-puzzle I solved first because it is not the easiest one to pick out. I was scouring the orchard, checking if there was an orphan tree that wasn’t attached to any puzzle, when I suddenly saw the truth. Oh. My. God. The paths look like tree branches.
It’s funny because I had problems solving the orchard puzzles in general, there was always an element of uncertainty – oh, maybe this block needs to be active rather than that one – and most solutions involved a little fudging. But I knew immediately it was the real puzzle and the clincher was seeing it match the meta-puzzle solution grid.
If this process of revelation fails, the meta-puzzle morphs into a warning to future generations: radioactive meta-puzzle waste buried here. Although I didn’t stumble on the flower meta-puzzle, I know the fact that it was assembled from different features of the environment caused a lot of player grief. My personal meta-nemesis was the diamond mine one for which I eventually turned to a walkthrough and, I’m glad, because I don’t think I was ever going to realise the floating platform inside the mine was part of the puzzle.
Still, I can cite one example where a frustrating puzzle climaxed with euphoria. Under the yin-yang tree, there are four challenges where you have to construct a puzzle that satisfies multiple solutions. Three of these fall out with too much trouble but the diamond one was a disaster. Although I was able to eliminate some of the rightmost columns from consideration, I found myself attempting to solve through brute force, yet another spin at Monte Carlo. I had convinced myself that I was seeking patterns or chinks in the puzzle’s armour… but nothing emerged.
After a short break, I returned to the puzzle and took a different tack. I spotted that one part was a binary decision: either there were two diamonds in the bottom left corner or there weren’t. In a leap of faith, I filled them in. Following through on the consequences of that choice I bumped into my old friend reductio ad absurdum. We shook hands and then I made the opposite assumption, that the squares were open. To my surprise, the rest of the solution exploded out from that like a jack-in-the-box. It was an incredibly beautiful sequence climaxing with heart-pumping excitement as I hit the space bar to confirm the solution… and was rewarded.
Taiji is strewn with leaps of faith. Every player will find some of them to be traps; they will jump, plummet and be smashed against the hard ground of failure. But sometimes they will jump from the ledge and motherfucking soar. You cannot know which moments will work for you, but they are there.
Next: Chasing the Witness
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So I never actually finished Taiji – I got to the point where I could unlock the last portion of the game and just kind of… Fizzled out? I enjoyed the game a lot, as in the puzzles were mostly fun (with the exception of the gallery where I had similar problems as you and once I had a solution my reaction was usually of being glad it’s over) but at the same time I don’t think I ever had any “wow this is awesome” moments.
I hope it doesn’t mean I am getting old and grumpy.
As for the diamond puzzle, I watched a bit Alex Diener playing it in his LP and quickly noticed one thing – there are a lot of squares you can immediately rule out because in one of the screens they contain a lone square. Not sure how much it makes things easier, but it felt like it will remove a good chunk of guessing.
Maurycy, hello! Haven’t heard from you in a while so hope things are good with you.
Sorry to hear you didn’t get any cool Taiji moments! I had quite a few, sometimes just due to the structure of a puzzle – there’s this one where I realised I had to join the two corners to make a single shape. I really thought that was clever.
There were some puzzle implementations I didn’t like. Some of the shape puzzles I found impossible to boil down to logical inference and became just a question of guesswork. And larger puzzles could be frustrating as small errors early on would lead to a lot of wasted time carving out a solution which was already wrong.
Diamond puzzle: The bit where I mention the “I was able to eliminate some of the rightmost columns from consideration” is where I identified all the lone squares, but this still didn’t seem to be enough to make any logical leaps. I spent about an hour in this state then quit for the evening.
The Gallery is _also_ like the village ruins in The Witness in that it’s extremely easy to wander onto it very early in your playthrough, before you’ve learned enough to realize that you need to leave it and come back later.
In fact, I think my playthrough of Taiji benefited in many small ways from having played The Witness first, so much so that I wonder if I would have liked the game half as much if I had never played The Witness.
As it was, I found Taiji to actually be the more pleasant game of the two. I never got seriously stuck. I only needed hints on a couple of puzzles, none of which were very important ones. (Almost exclusively in the Gallery, in fact.) I encountered nothing like The Witness’s “XY” axis puzzle, or the shipwreck puzzle (which took me literal days to muddle through). Taiji seemed to strike a perfect balance, and it offered so many moments of appreciation of the nature of its solutions. But again, I wonder how much of that is due to my having already learned from The Witness how to read this type of puzzle game. Like having learned the conventions of a genre. (Will we now start to see people using the term “Witness-likes”?)
(For me, the only part of Taiji that felt like a slog was the Waterfall area. So many hard puzzles in one place, a number of which did not succumb to quick logical analysis. But I almost never had that experience elsewhere.)
“He then asserts that a puzzle is anything that conceals a Eureka Moment.”
And presumably stands back to admire the kindling catching alight…
Semantically I’m still on team Matt W here. There’s just too much utility in the puzzle/riddle distinction. The solutions to puzzles are manifest in the laws of the ruleset and can be deduced accordingly. The solutions to riddles exist only in the designer’s brain and have to be drawn out (presumably through the nostril, as per the ancient Egyptians).
The problem I had with the Witness (and seems to be also true of Taiji) is that it presents itself as a logical puzzle game for logi yogis and then slips in its riddles with the boldness of an arch provocateur. It’s a wonder we weren’t invited to solve an environmental ‘meta puzzle’ that took us beneath a bridge, such is the trollery at work.
I’m not saying you can’t experience euphoria from solving a riddle (thou shalt not prescribe is my prescription of choice) but let’s put it to the test: Joel, would you note any kind of correlation between euphoria on solving puzzles, and relief on solving riddles? It was quite stark for me in witland.
I *was* euphoric when putting together the pieces and slowly grokking the rules (even the slightly too obscure ones that refused to explain themselves). Whereas realising the shadow of branches vaguely resembled the correct shape that could make something soluble only brought relief that I wouldn’t (yet) have to throw in the towel and become The Idiot Who Needed a Walkthrough.
To take a stab at why: with puzzles, you are putting the blocks together, experimenting, testing hypotheses and gaining satisfaction that comes with understanding. With riddles, you’re exploring a negative space – you can’t build towards the thing you *have* to notice, you can only notice or not. Or know it or not like the correct synonym for a crossword clue. If you don’t notice it, you’ll Miss Out forever: the sense of relief presumably comes from the Fear thereOf .
Brian
Hello! I was going to touch on this in another Taiji post, that The Witness has provided a template which has been picked up by others. I’m not sure I’d go as far as saying Witness-like, but it definitely popularised the open-world puzzler and decisively shifted puzzle design away from lists and towards spaces. It’s not total, of course, more casual puzzlers still rely on lists to help guide people dipping in and out. Taiji is not for dipping. (Still, there’s something else I want to say there later…)
But I think what you’re taking note of here is just progress in puzzle game design. Your audience is now aware of how these things work and you design on the basis of that knowledge, design for them. Plot twists in shows 30 years ago are no longer plot twists to any avid television viewer; your twists have to be more twisty or submerged to work. Knowing your audience.
Taiji was clearly built for The Witness generation and the level of homage is ridiculous at times. You cannot judge Taiji as independent of The Witness because it is inextricably linked to it.
I can understand your reaction to the Waterfall area. I think part of this is because it offers no road of “progress” and it’s a big mashup of everything with few new ideas on offer. It’s just the Big Cavern of Optional Content like that below the Witness mountain. I’m not saying it is or isn’t a slog. I certainly had my moments in there! But I didn’t have the negative impression because I accepted what it was. Funniest thing thought is that I only discovered this area watching someone else’s walkthrough.
CA
Elyot’s “definition of a puzzle” is just a foundational stone in his personal theory of puzzle design, rather than being prescriptive. Perhaps lifting his line out of context makes it sound more “what is gam” inflammatory than intended. I mean, the whole thing is deeply fascinating and Elyot has been in the Electron Dance comments before. Optional bonus: he also designed some of the puzzles for Taiji (not rules sets, but actual puzzles).
For the benefit of newer readers, here’s what Matt had to say about this in 2018: “Riddles and puzzles have solutions, and they’re both supposed to exhibit a logic, but the logic of a riddle is a one-time thing. Once you’ve figured out what has a face but no head and hands but no arms, you can’t necessarily apply the same principle to the thirty white horses champing on a red hill.”
Riddles, as a rule, don’t bother me but it is true that riddles were the main cause of my “relief not joy” response. And some of the shape puzzles feel difficult to solve through the application of logic and feel quite riddle-y as a result. Can you see the shape that works? No. Do I have to guess?
It’s true both Taiji and The Witness have a few riddles – one trick puzzles rather than full-blown rulesets. I definitely get euphoria from the riddles but I think your state of mind has a lot to do with it. For example, if a puzzle professor hands out one puzzle a year and it’ll take you weeks to resolve, you’re probably going to feel a high – because this is something special. You’ll really trust this professor, they ain’t gonna screw around. But when you’re in a videogame, you have hundreds of puzzles and there’s always that nagging doubt that maybe this is just balls.
Sometimes it IS balls. Even though I did it, I was not a fan of the flower meta-puzzle, because it was cobbled together from a set of inconsistent notations. (Exactly why I had a problem with the diamond meta-puzzle.)
But if you see it, if you get the trick fairly quickly then it can feel wonderful. That was brilliant, I shout. Everybody should play this. And then someone buys it and stares at paths for 20 hours unable to see the wood for the tree puzzle. I think there’s something else going on here too, and I’m going to try to get into that in a later post, rather than spill my entire load in this one comment.
@Joel
I am good though I started getting coldish on my flight back and my ear decided to not decompress until I landed in Poland, don’t recommend the experience.
Okay, maybe I had two cool moments I remember – figuring out the draw with your feet big twin room that is its whole section and that one super complicated puzzle where you need to build a bridge. I first solved it without making a proper bridge and was very amused by how much I got focused on the puzzle that I missed what I need it for. But nothing as exciting as getting through Witness’s Hall of the Mountain King or the whole Mountain section or discovering the environmentals (which are not puzzles and I will fight anyone who tells me otherwise!).
I think it’s the first time I see the riddle vs puzzle dichotomy and I find it interesting, though it will be difficult to override my personal distionction – fun puzzles and guess-what-the-author-had-in-mind-slash-many-things-fit-but-author-thought-of-only-one-of-them. Still working on the name. I remember going through a book of Mensa puzzles as a tween and there was this… puzzle:
Something something house, winter, snow, you need to get into the house through a window on the first floor how do you do it?
I don’t remember the proper solution but I came up with a bunch of them but, sadly, I was just outclevered by the big brain author of the book, and I am totally not still salty about that. I guess taking a ladder, borrowing a ladder, climbing a tree, rope down from the roof were all impossible by the… whatever, joke’s on you author because I did all the questions right in record time on my IQ test and that’s totally not b͕́e̝̋c̠͊ạ̃u̩͌s̖ͮē̼ ̘̒I̤͑’̦͐v̫̈́e̯ͪ ̬ͩb͇̉e͓ͬe͍̚ṉͫ ̠͂p̝̊l̫̍a̰̅y̰͉ͯ͊ī͕̯͐ṅ͇͕ͨḡ̳͖̋ ̫̘ͤ̆p͓̺̐̄a̟͖͛̐t͉͙̾̅t͈͉̀̈ĕ͇̲̐r͍̗ͩ̊n̪̽͊ͅ-̙͚ͣ̌m̯̹͐͑a͙̤ͤ̑t̲̻ͤ̉c͔̮̿̿h͎͓ͧ͗i͖͖͑̚ń̟̮̚g̟̞͓͗ͩͧ ̱̱̤̓͐̾g̻̦̻ͩ̔͊a͎͖͉͑͆̒m̬̹͉̐̐̈́e͓͖̜̋̊͛s̘̖̮ͦ̔ͦ ̯̦͎͂̐͗f̗̤̤̓̋̌o͎̟̩̽̏̐r̹̳̼͂͗̓ ̹̥̦ͧ͂ͩd̟͔̠͂̾͆e͙̥͙̒ͩ̿c̠̟̪̎̎̐a̖̗̘ͩͪͨd͉͉̺͊̍ͯê̯̜̭͆̊ș͙̼ͪ̒͂!̜̻͖̃͌̄
Cough.
I think I ran out of thoughts!
riddles vs puzzles: so yeah, Taiji’s meta puzzles, and the playing card and road puzzle in the gallery all begin with a riddle: first you have to identify what the pieces are. Once you have done that, you have a puzzle, defined by the previously established rules that belong to those pieces.
The owl: a youtuber i follow, SB, also initially thought the eyes were negative domino markers. she was stuck for a good long while trying to subtract them from the flower petals.
actually thats an important meta-cognitive skill for these games: recognising when you are faced with a puzzle whose rules should have an explanation (and so you simply havent found the explanation yet) versus when you are faced with a riddle where you already have everything you need to solve it. if you cant correctly discern that a given problem is simply a not-explained-yet puzzle, then you will be liable to get stuck on it for a long time. if the design and context of a thing does not communicate clearly if it is a puzzle or a riddle, thats a problem; the “spell of doubt” as Joel put it. the gallery unfortunately mixes both riddles, and puzzles, and… that damn sculpture which is neither flesh nor fowl.
The Witness of course sometimes had puzzles (the panels with symbols) and sometimes had riddles (the sunlight and shadow puzzles), and sometimes mixed them together (the jungle; the colour area). what it did consistently was base its riddles on the idea of “perception”: more often than not simply the question: “how does this look different from a different vantage point”? and this carried through to its environmental things and of course the hidden ending. for me in Taiji, neither its gallery riddles nor its metapuzzle riddles felt like they had any consistent idea behind them.
eureka, fiero, relief: the ending diamond placement puzzle for me was simply a slog that ended in relief. i never found any logical progression to it, but had to keep making a guess for one pair of diamonds on one screen, and check the other screens to see if it worked or not. there was a lot of backtracking involved, and some cursing. in contrast, the flowers and shapes placement puzzles did feel like they solved logically. i think my brain just couldnt handle the nonlocal consequences of the diamond rule when spread across an extra dimension of space.
finally: i now have to wonder if Joel has actually played any games before? maybe its all just a big con. “Your audience is now aware of how these things work and you design on the basis of that knowledge, design for them” he says, and then not a minute later: “Funniest thing thought is that I only discovered [the waterfall] area watching someone else’s walkthrough.” Joel! where have you been? there is _always_ a secret hidden behind the waterfall!
I should hasten to apologise for suggesting bad faith on the part of anyone. Originally I had wanted to make a wry observation on the lines of ‘whenever someone attempts to define something, the internet explodes’. Clearly this got twisted at some point along the road to the end of the text box. (It seems at some point the thrust of my argument took a conspiratorial bent: puzzle game designers are all out to personally sleight and/or mildly inconvenience and/or make me feel like a dummy!)
I agree with vfig that when you strongly theme your riddles, collect them around an idea or activity, you can teach the player some behaviours that can make it easier for them to make the critical leap to future riddle answers. As was mentioned, once you realise the importance of considering a Witness puzzle from multiple perspectives, and although the way the game requires you to do so are myriad, it becomes much less likely that you get stuck on any given one.
I would still argue that this riddle language, unlike puzzles per the distinction we’re using, only affords a sort of half-logic; more a checklist of heuristics rather than a reliable set of rules. But it does underscore that Blow is a Clever Fellow who knows what he’s up to, and must have considered this, resulting in a game that does not in fact throw off the player like a bucking bronco.
(Contrast this with Braid, which had one of these riddles with absolutely no forewarning or thematic link to the ruleset (the menu one) and I would argue was actively rubbish, clever-for-cleverness-sake grandstanding)
I still don’t like it, mind. This perspective trick may seem brilliant the first time, it certainly created a Eureka moment for many, but it also instructs the player that, just to be sure, they now need to look at everything from every possible perspective, vastly increasing the possibility space of solutions that need to be checked, and maybe that kind of ruins the game?
This isn’t a new thing; from the very first message written on a wall in Dungeon Master, players have been wearily noting a new need to look at every wall in every square, twirling their way down corridors at a much decelerated rate of progression. And shed a tear for the lad who discovers their first secret room in Wolfenstein 3D – an entire childhood of rubbing their face along every wall with the space button held down beckons. Is that really the sort of Pavlovian programming we want baked into our games? DO we, Dr. Jonathan Blow, PhD in Intelligence Studies, University of Brilliance, Olympia?
(They’re all out to mildly inconvenience me!!)
The meta-cognitive skill vfig mentioned (‘do I have everything I need yet to overcome this obstacle?’) is, I think, also well observed and a key takeaway from this discussion. I think it applies to more than just puzzle games – Metroidvanias, open world games and adventure games very commonly also give off this vibe. I don’t personally like to experience it – I find it a sort of nagging doubt, a threat of a new memory-burden that has me half-reaching for a txt file that will thenceforth need to be open at all times (I find nothing quite so much of a chore in a game as the need to alt-tab to refer to notes/maps/to do lists).
I think games do a player a kindness when they clearly signpost such moments to the player (of the ‘you can’t do this yet’ kind; sorry if my rambling has chased you away from the point). Better still when they provide their own in-client means of note-taking, objective-tracking and annotation (Baldur’s Gate 2 had this over 20 years ago; how are other games still so far behind the curve?).
And finally, I laughed very hard at the waterfall thing.Have you actually in fact ever played a videogame in your life, Joel? Next you’ll be telling us you don’t turn the camera around at the start of every level.
@Joel
I pretty much agree with everything you said. And, to be precise, I should say that the Waterfall area was the one part of Taiji that felt closest to a slog. And, as you noted, that had as much to do with the fact that there was no progression in the game (other than solved-puzzles-counter number-go-up) than with the difficulty.
In fact, in case it wasn’t clear from my previous comment, I want to stress just how pleasantly surprised at the consistent quality of Taiji’s puzzles. I almost never had that “Monte Carlo player” experience — not even with the ending diamond placement puzzle. (Or with the black-and-white sculpture puzzles, which it seems, from peeking at a few Let’s-Plays, that a number of people found inscrutable.)
@vfig
I will confess that I only found the waterfall area because I was holding down a diagonal move while walking along the path one time. To those of us who didn’t grow up playing Zelda games, the waterfall isn’t as immediately obvious maybe? (In any case, I will certainly be checking every waterfall I encounter in future games.)
@Brian zelda? oh dear no! my secrets-behind-the-waterfall instincts come from reading tintin and playing ultima.