Those Sound Puzzles [The Witness]
Difficult puzzles that are also gratingly annoying? Welcome to the jungle of random noise in The Witness. To the right of the central village, you’ll find a thicket populated by puzzle boards — the kind you find all over The Witness. This genius little puzzle game is all about exploring your surroundings and using all of your senses to determine how to solve puzzle mazes by drawing lines. For my money, almost all the puzzles are a joy to learn. Discovery is your reward, as you learn all the rules to solve each puzzle.
But the sound puzzles in the jungle don’t follow any of the rules we’re used to. Instead, you’ll have to listen to strange sounds that aren’t very distinctive, blaring over each other in a cacophony of hard-to-distinguish noise. The puzzles start out simple but get increasingly annoying as you travel down the line — by the end, I was reaching for Advil, turning up the volume, and desperately trying to determine if a sound was a thud or a thump. Was that clanging sound a bell or a clank? If you’re going to skip any of the puzzles in The Witness, these are the ones to avoid.
Ghost Fish [Ninja Gaiden Black]
Nobody likes the ghost fish. In a game that’s brutally difficult from the prologue onward, Ninja Gaiden Black has plenty of annoyingly difficult little parts — the Alma demon boss, the section with all the gun-wielding soldiers, the helicopter fight, and the late-game mutants. These are all annoying and difficult, but if you’ve got the skills you can handle them no problem.
The Ghost Fish? These things are just obnoxious. They aren’t even that tough if you know exactly how to handle them. The problem is you’ll have to die over and over as you learn the trick. Very far into the game, Ryu will have to navigate a swarm of invisible ghost demon fish. If too many latch on, they’ll drag Ryu to the ground and deal huge damage. Each individual fish isn’t strong, but they just keep coming. There’s no way to wipe them out. You just have to run through them.
How to deal with them? You need to equip the a katana and perform mid-air spin-attacks. You’ll get just enough invincibility frames to jump back into the air and repeat. Trying to enter a combo is a death sentence — unless you’re using fast weapons like the flails. Even then, entering a combo is extremely dangerous. The Ghost Fish are like invisible homing mines that exist only to annoy us.
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