Sudoku expert plays The Witness

[brat-sampson]

Second Baba video. Love skimming through these the next day a little sped up over a coffee.

[MojoJojo]

Yeah, I'm really liking it. I've been playing ahead so the puzzles are fresh in my mind. Ended up shouting mother fucker at the screen a few times. I'm also surprised by how often they find a different solution to a puzzle than I did - Baba is bizarre in that a) there's only a few things you can do b) there are often multiple solutions c) it's still bastard hard.

I'm a little suspicious about how fast they solved Prison. It relies on such an obscure bit of game mechanics that I can't help wondering if someone spoiled it in the comments and Simon kept quiet about it. But then again it's hard to imagine him doing that, he's too lovely.

[MojoJojo]

Third was last night. I was a bit worried they'd be zooming ahead of me with the shorter gap but thankfully they're starting to find them hard now. They seem to struggle with the "multi step" puzzles, where you have to rearrange the rules multiple times to reach different objectives, more than I do. They're a bit slow on the sokoban aspects too. I'm getting a new enjoyment watching them struggle over puzzles I finished fairly quickly.

Although they still made more progress than I do in 2 hours.

[brat-sampson]

Simon vs Grieg. The Witness

He starts heading for The Challenge about 45m in, then

Spoiler alert

smashes through it in like an hour while apologising for being slow.

[close]

He cottoned on to a helpful trick pretty much immediately.

[brat-sampson]

They're having a crack (geddit?) at Return of the Obra Dinn next, as a Baba Break on the 28th

This is a very different kind of puzzle game, so I'm again very interested to see how they take to it. I hope they've ben warned as well that it's not as family friendly as their usual fare.

[MojoJojo]

I'm interested to see how Simon's motion sickness copes with it.

I'm not surprised they're taking a break from Baba is You - the last video turned into a bit of a slog. I think it's a particularly exhausting game to solve many different puzzles in a two hour period, as every puzzle is using new and different concepts, whereas in something like the Witness the puzzles tend to be variations on a theme.

[MojoJojo]

Hmmm, turns out watching obra dinn on a stream really highlights the most annoying aspect of the game - the way the visiting memories setup very quickly becomes repetitive.

[brat-sampson]

Yeah, it's a little annoying how it kinda forces you through a bunch of them in a row with little time to stop and collate your thoughts/information. I don't think it's such a big deal though, it never does more than maybe 3 or 4 at a time and you can fill in partial information as you go along. The bigger problem they're suffering from here is that he'll rarely look around the scenes properly. There was a man clearly speaking a name to another person outside a room and Simon never even turned to look. Oh well, I'm sure they'll get the hang of it. It's all part of the joy/suffering of watching others play puzzle games.

[MojoJojo]

They've finished the Obra Dinn now. It's a nice way to experience games I'm never going to be patient enough to play through myself. Although Obra Dinn didn't play to their strengths, and isn't a great game to stream*. It's really a game you want to scribble notes on a piece of paper with, and that's something they avoid doing much because they don't know how to make it work with streaming.

So there were a couple of long episodes that dragged pretty badly.



(*if nothing else, youtube's compression algorithm really struggled at points).

[how do you like apples]

Cracking The Cryptic got really big (last year?) after a few Social Media people talked about how relaxing it is daily, and it got onto The Grauniad and everything, which is great!
To be honest, Simon is a lot better at presenting, but I do put him at 1.5x speed, Mark goes a bit too quick and brute forces some of the puzzles, they're a good watch if you like that kind of thing - also have published sudoku games on Steam and all that too.
Planning on watching this soon, I hear it's a bunch of line puzzles, which should be pretty straightforward for Simon I reckon!

I got into the channel about the time they took off in the first lockdown. Despite being quite interested in sudoku, I never thought I'd get anything out of watching somebody else solve them, but it's since become my go-to youtube channel for just sticking on whenever I'm bored (in a similar way I used to love bingeing RLM). Probably watched about 500+ of their sudoku solves at this point and I still get taken aback by the quality of both the puzzles and the brain that goes into solving. If any of their videos go beyond 30 minutes I won't even attempt the puzzle before watching, I know I'm not clever enough to find the break in (but I still do often point at the screen towards the end of the puzzle yelling "Simon you idiot there's been a 4 in the corner for the last 5 minutes")

Tried watching him play The Witness however and it was more infuriating than anything else (though not nearly as bad as watching Limmy play a puzzle game). I think he probably did end up solving the puzzles quicker than I did when I played it, but it still felt very slow given I knew most of the answers already. I also recently watched his first livestream solve of a sudoku and the constant stopping for donations and reading messages in the chat was as much a pain in the ass as I imagine it was on The Witness streams.

Anyway, really happy for their success, two genuinely lovely guys. If you are slightly interested in sudoku but watching it seems a bit too much for you, I'd still highly recommend their apps (I think they go under Studio Goya on the app store). Proper handcrafted puzzles from the best constructors around, not the computer-generated stuff that pretty much every other app on the market is.

[MojoJojo]

I'd suggest you try watching him do the music box challenge - they sorted out how to do the donations later on, and it doesn't have the long bits of him not knowing what to do.