Recent reviews by mataglap

I'll preface this by saying that enjoyment is highly subjective and if you like difficult puzzles, you might enjoy the game much more than I did. Personally, having played games like Myst, Portal 1/2, Talos Principle 1/2, and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, I'm ranking The Witness much lower than any of those.

Pros:
- Pretty world
- Some really fun and clever puzzles
- Pattern searching gets addictive

Cons:
- Open world chock full of puzzles you don't have the means to solve yet. You may end up wandering in increasing frustration, trying to find something solvable, and you'll never know for sure if a given puzzle truly isn't solvable yet, or if you're just being dense.
- If you have any sort of input processing issues, you'll be pulling up a walkthrough even if you understand the solution to the puzzle. For example, while I can identify sounds just fine, my brain is incapable of separating three birdsongs playing on top of each other. (For comparison, the sound-stacking puzzle in Myst was easy, because the sounds were single notes, short, and different enough to easily isolate.)
- No hint system of any kind. If you get really stuck on something, well, sucks to suck, find a walkthrough.

I'm not going to comment on the random pieces of poetry, famous people quotes and weird long-winded Eighties Professor speeches, because who knows, it might all make sense in the end. I've gotten tired enough that I don't think I'll ever get to that point.

Pros:
- Great story (except the ending, about which I'll talk in cons section).
- Great characters with distinct personalities and motivations. You will really need to put some effort into getting to know them, and getting some of them to respect you.
- Resource management, including the crew's morale as a resource, balanced in a way that makes you really feel like you're continually one step from dooming the expedition.
- Good dialogues (when they aren't full of typos), where the "nicest" option often does not mean "best".
- Truly difficult decisions, one of them in particular so heartbreaking I won't forget it anytime soon.
- And, last but not least, I feel that the game really manages to convey some of the incredible hardship of polar expeditions.

Cons:
- The game's narrative is great right until the ending, which feels like it was cut and pasted from a completely different game. The moment you progress into the ending, your gritty story of hardship and survival becomes a fairy tale riddled with plot holes, and dialogue cohesion falling apart and erratic behavior of some characters makes it even worse.
- The game sometimes fails to recognize some of the early decisions you make, and characters that have not been part of your crew since the beginning magically pop up in your camp 20 weeks later to have a chat.
- The save system (which only lets you load the game at specific points) can be tedious when you're forced to replay 30 minutes of the game because you got caught up in dialogue and forgot to do one chore.
- You need to be extremely cautious about assigning people to work, because if something more important pops up, you are for some reason not allowed to reassign tasks -- even if people doing them are right there.
- The closer to the end of the game, the more typos there are, which kind of spoils the immersion.

Overall I still recommend playing the game, for its story (minus the ending) and the characters. Keeping my crew alive and gaining their hard-won loyalty was the true ending as far as I'm concerned, and the real ending I'm going to do my best to forget.

"F*** this game!!!", I yell as I press 'Play' again. And again. And again...

TL,DR: a great piracy game mashed together with yet another reskin of AC2 with a horrible plot. Buy only if heavily discounted and if you liked Sid Meier's Pirates!.

After I dropped AC3 not even halfway through the game because Connor was utterly bland and boring, I almost did the same with Black Flag; this time not because the protagonist was boring, but because he was a dumb, greedy bandit. He's got all the negative traits of a pirate, but without the charisma and style of legendary pirates we know and love. Naturally, it's all set up so that he can convert in the end (it's really not a spoiler; the plot of the game is as complicated as a brick and can be predicted with saddening accuracy), but as a result you have to suffer playing as an entirely unlikeable idiot most of the time. Oh, and to make things worse, Ubisoft in their infinite wisdom decided to ruin the modern-world plot and replace Desmond with an anonymous, faceless corporate drone, so now we have TWO protagonists that suck.

The assassin-related part of the game consists basically of AC2 retextured to look Caribbean, plus 100% more guards, plus a LOT of bushes. Unless your idea of fun is sitting in a bush for 10 minutes painstakingly mapping patrol routes of 30 guards, you're either going to suffer or say "to hell with 100% synchronization" and just brute force your way through. Oh, and of course AC2 had a decent plot, while Black Flag's plot is cringeworthy.

The only thing that saves this game and even makes it recommendable is the "being a pirate" part. Sailing the seas, listening to your crew singing shanties, attacking and boarding other ships, conquering forts, avoiding storms, looking for treasure and upgrading your ship is loads of fun. If only Ubisoft cut out the Assassin Creed-related parts and made it a pure piracy game! Alas, instead we have this weird hybrid where you groan your way through umpteenth "kill an opponent from hiding after eliminating several dozen guards on the way" mission while wanting to be back in the sea, already.

Since there is no 'meh' button, I have to give this a thumbs up, because I really enjoyed the piracy, even though as an Assassin's Creed series game this is an utter failure. As a pirate game, though, it's awesome. Decide for yourself if being the scourge of the seas is worth occasionally wasting time sitting in a bush.

This game should come with a health hazard warning, because I can't get a decent night's sleep anymore. MUST BUILD! MUST IMPROVE! ...why is it 3am again?