Taiji

Ever since I finished The Witness for the first time back in 2017, I’ve been looking for a puzzle game that follows that same formula, and this year I found it with Taiji. Instead of being a first person puzzle game about completing puzzle panels where you fill in the edges, this is a top-down puzzle game about completing puzzle panels where you fill in the squares.

Like in The Witness, the puzzle panels are either derived from clues in the environment, or from symbols in the puzzle grid. Also like in The Witness, the game doesn’t explicitly teach you what those symbols mean, so if you encounter something you don’t understand, you’re probably going to have to go to a different area to hunt down the introductory panels.

This game is about the same difficulty as The Witness, and the world looks and feels just as good to explore. It took the three of us about three evenings (7-10 hours) to complete the game with all achievements. The only external hint we had to look up was just because we’re dumb and missed a pathway we could have taken but just completely forgot to check whoops. Another thing to note is that while we were playing, we made liberal use of Windows Magnifier, but that was partially because we had the laptop plugged into a TV for us all, and because the game uses a custom mouse capture, Magnifier may tend to struggle in places. There was an update recently that allowed for direct mouse input that might fix this. Haven’t checked yet.

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1141580 £19.49