After playing the game to its epilogue twice, in bursts separated by 3 years (most recently completed this past week), I felt with certitude, firstly, that I will learn to play violin; and secondly, that I needed to tell you.
(people who haven’t finished the game: obliquely spoilery stuff to follow, as well as horrible rambling)
Since I have been known, in my circles, to be intensely analytical when confronted with personal adversity, I really felt akin with this game and how Tim looks at the world; it is profoundly resonant.
For example, several people in my family encountered serious health problems, some dying from them. As many do, I skimmed dozens of medical research articles, stuffing as many variables into my head as I could, so as to maybe help them live longer or recover. When I, or my loved ones, encounter such adversity I — wrongly — considered emotional support to be but a minor part of my contribution. I was often guilty of relentless reductionism, breaking problems down into their constituents and then cross-referencing, making databases, etc, to try and find correlations. Usually, my knowledge was too pitifully narrow to change anything, but I would only angrily redouble my efforts. I lost sleep, lost interest in all of my hobbies, lost interest in people, lost interest in reading for real pleasure, and thought of little else in my free time.
Sometimes, it helped in some small way. But usually it didn’t.

And what did I do then? I would study what I did, replaying it all over and over in my mind, to try and become more efficient.

***

After seeing mention of the secret stars to collect (and having time and patience in my life to collect exactly zero of them), I concluded that it didn’t feel wrong to look at their solutions online; I was convinced that the effort required couldn’t possibly be worth it. I then saw what happened when you complete your task of scouring the game world for every star, probing every fruitless corner and trying, gamely, to affect the outcome of the epilogue and World 1.

I had been pretty sure, up to that point, that I was getting close to a real (for me) understanding of the game’s meaning just by playing it, but after seeing the “alternate” denouement in world 1, I was struck, and utterly hollowed out. “Now Tim’s really done it,” I thought. “The ultimate completion and the ultimate failure.”

And so I was able to get out of my own head a little more. I returned to the present, just a bit more.
There is considerable beauty in the game that Tim never turns to look at or contemplate. The guy is so… two-dimensional. I don’t want to be him anymore.
And so I am going to learn the fiddle.

Thanks again.

Fixing this somehow involves moving the frame to somewhere later in the game, but the only other place for it is 2-4, which is maybe too late (one function of these frames is to be a sort of break time to help alternate what activity is being performed, and to give the player an idea of progress so far, and, well, what is the point of that if you put it at the end of the world just before the player goes back to the house where all the puzzles are, anyway?)

It can’t go in 2-3 because 2-3 is a tightly-integrated one-screen level.

So basically all of world 2 would have to be redesigned into something completely different. I didn’t have the energy to do that and I felt that what I come up with could well be worse anyway, all things considered. The ideal would have just been to make the opposite choice early on and let world 2 organically grow into something different.

Game design, when done in a high-quality detail-oriented way, is really complicated.

It seems to me that this should be pretty simple to fix – in fact you could fix it via a small patch, even today (very Braid-like, no?). All that needs to change is which pieces are acquired where. Obtaining the second two pieces requires that two other specific pieces (the ones depicting the platform) have been obtained previously. So simply place the platform pieces in level 2-1 or in the first half of 2-2. 5 puzzle pieces are acquired prior to reaching the two unobtainable pieces, so there is plenty of opportunity.

In any case, I wanted to take this opportunity to thank you for a very insightful and humorous talk. I wasn’t fortunate enough to be able to make it to your Witness reveal, but I’m very much looking forward to exploring that world when it’s ready, too.

One question, what song starts playing in the last level after you touch the princess (by that I mean that you get half way through the level and then everything reverses)? I have looked through the soundtrack with no luck….

Hopefully, the official recording will appear sometime soon!