Taiji
Solve puzzle panels and uncover the meaning of the symbols within. Explore a dense world where secrets are hidden in plain sight.
Taiji is a puzzle, nonlinear and difficult game
developed and published by Matthew VanDevander.
Released on September 09th 2022 is available only on Windows
in 13 languages: English, French, German, Spanish - Spain, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese - Brazil, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Estonian and Korean.
It has received 1,188 reviews of which 1,086 were positive and 102 were negative resulting in a rating of 8.7 out of 10. 😎
The game is currently priced at 24.50€ on Steam.
The Steam community has classified Taiji into these genres:
Media & Screenshots
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Requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- OS *: Windows 7 SP1 64-Bit
- Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo / AMD Athlon 64
- Memory: 2 GB RAM
- Graphics: Nvidia GTX 400 / AMD Radeon HD 5000
- DirectX: Version 11
- Storage: 350 MB available space
Reviews
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
9/10 puzzle game. Total play time: 19 hours for "good" ending. Plays similar to The Witness but cuts a lot of the fat for a more streamlined experience. Good mix of logic and environmental puzzles; optional bonus puzzles to better understand/extend the rules and unlock shortcuts; and "required" bonus puzzles for the good ending. Only loses points for the puzzle interface itself being pretty clunky, but I was fully used to it by the end of my run. I think I got 100%, but not all puzzles are required so I may have missed something. The secrets are well-hidden and a bit frustrating at times, but fair overall.
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Time to beat: Roughly 10-15 hours for the bare minimum, and roughly 25-30 hours for 100% NOTE: To get the most out of this game, it is recommended that you play the game without spoiling anything for yourself. With regards to this, I will try to spoiler everything that would could impact someone else's ability to get the most out of this game. Taiji is a wonderful puzzle game that takes inspiration from a lot of other puzzle games, including The Witness among others and blends them together into a spectacular masterpiece of a puzzle game, with an amazing soundtrack to boot! Just remember to pay attention to your surroundings..... Taiji drops you into a condensed island that has you solving puzzles using a simple principle: grids. When solving a puzzle, a grid will pop up, and in order to solve the puzzle, you must turn some cells white and leave the others black in order to solve the grid. The game starts you off with some really simple puzzles, but will quickly evolve into brain-bending puzzles that involve multiple mechanics from multiple areas of the game in order to solve them. After you complete a tutorial area, the game brings you to an open world area where you can go to many different areas at the same time, like you can in The Witness, and leaves you to your own devices. The game is divided into nine major areas with several optional areas included. Each major area has its' own unique mechanic that it will teach you, however, some areas will require you to solve puzzles with mechanics from both the area you are in as well as other areas you may or may not have been to yet. In each area, you will have to solve a series of puzzle grids that culminate in something similar to The Witness' Laser puzzles: Fire Puzzles or Campfire Puzzles (not sure what to call them, but they look like a campfire to me). When you solve that Fire/Campfire Puzzle, you have completed the area, and the corresponding symbol that matches up to the area you were in is illuminated in the center of the main hub area to get to the other areas. . Solve enough areas to unlock a new area in the main hub of the world. Just like in The Witness, you can get yourself in trouble if you go to the wrong area first because you may not understand the rules of the area you go to. Unlike most puzzle games, this game leaves the discovery of the rules and mechanics of each areas' puzzles to you, the player, and I really do like this approach, especially when it is paired really well with good tutorial puzzles that help to teach you some of the mechanics first. I also really appreciate that the fast travel system is itself a puzzle that you have to figure out in order to fast travel. Each area has a pedestal with a symbol on it that you can use with the pedestal it comes on to unlock the fast travel for that specific area. In order to do so, though, you must have found at least one other fast travel pedestal, and then remember the first pedestal's symbol that you went to and unlocked in order to unlock the second fast travel pedestal. You must do this for *almost* every pedestal you come across to unlock that fast travel point. While it not seem too intuitive, it really fits in with the rest of the game. Every area in the game also has optional puzzles that you can solve to unlock shortcuts between the areas , or test your knowledge of puzzle mechanics with puzzles that require you to know mechanics from multiple areas in order to solve. Keep your eyes on your surroundings as you solve puzzles, though, as this will come into play after you've solved every area in the game and see the first ending of the game. You might be surprised what may happen if you are observant enough! Here's my list of pros and cons: Pros: The game has an amazing soundtrack, which seems to change as you progress in each area, as well as between areas, and in secret areas There is an amazing assortment of puzzle grids for you to solve 445 in all! and puzzle mechanics for you to figure out. Each area of the game is carefully thought out and very well designed, and every puzzle grid fits into each area surprisingly well. I especially loved the bonus area behind the waterfall and the secret White ending . That really tugged at my heartstrings! The puzzle difficulty was, for the most part, very well done. I only had gripes with the difficulty of a few select puzzles: The second puzzle in the sequence of puzzle grids behind the waterfall on the back of the stone head, the shortcut puzzle to connect the Ruins area to the Mine/Graveyard area, the Ruins White puzzle, the Mill White puzzle, and the Lake Tree puzzle . The puzzle designs were also very well done, and there were many puzzles that will make you shout out Aha! when you solve them for the first time. Cons: For me, the price of this game is a little high for what you get. I would've put the price point at $19.99. This may not be the case for you, though. For me, the game felt too short. I completed the entire game 100% in about 26 hours, which is rather short for a game like this. I was expecting to get at least 50 hours of playtime from this game. Some of the puzzles in this game are very esoteric/cryptic to solve, mainly the White puzzles and the puzzle to get into the White area . In addition, some of the puzzles seem to go off the deep end in terms of difficulty (those are the ones that I said I had gripes with in the Pros section). All in all, if you are a puzzle game lover, I highly recommend this game at either full price or slightly discount.
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TLDR I enjoyed this game and highly recommend it, but some of the design choices of the game, specifically with the map layout, annoyed me (no major spoilers except text with spoiler tag) to start off though, game played flawlessly, no bugs or whatever, and the controls / basic mechanics are intuitive and work well. I'm going to talk about this game from area to area as this game has no structure or progression, so you can play the game in any order. also I'm going to compare this to The Witness as that inspired this game and plays very similarly just with different mechanics. the graphics are also really nice, each area is distinct and really nice looking, I dig the style of this game. RUINS: 5/10 the first area I did, I didn't care much for this area, and I didn't like the solution for the last puzzle. the last puzzle was 1 of 3 times I googled the answer in this game because it didn't click with me MINES: 7/10 one of my favourite areas in the entire game, this borrows one of the mechanics of The Witness, being that tiles have to be separated into pairs. this is far different to the witness though due to the mechanics of the game. I loved the floating platform puzzle, where you have to solve it multiple times by walking on the tiles to take you to the different areas (I'll call puzzles like these environment puzzles) SHRINE: 8/10 another of my favourite areas in the game, this area introduces the number tiles which are some of my favourite in the game. these work really well and I enjoyed these puzzles thoroughly. this area has really fun environment puzzles where you have to make bridges out of the activated tiles ORCHARD: 6.5/10 this is like the tree puzzles from the witness but not the same. this is another puzzle where the solution is hidden in the environment like the ruins area, but I enjoyed it more than the ruins GRAVEYARD: 4/10 I mentioned in the beginning that "some of the design choices of the game annoyed me", this is one of the areas that annoys me map design wise. this area is at the top of a mountain, however there is an incredibly difficult set of optional puzzles at the bottom of the mountain. these are VERY easy to mistake for a tutorial, so I had to google the answer, to which I thought "how the hell was I meant to know that?". turns out the tutorial for these puzzles is at the top of the mountain, which do a pretty good job of explaining the mechanic, but by then I'd already spoiled the mechanic for myself (most of the challenge in this game is discovering what the mechanics do) this has a very similar problem to the game its based off of, The Witness, where because its open world, you're never really sure whether the puzzle is intentionally hard, or you aren't supposed to do it yet. I will say though that other than this area, and the Mill, the map is designed well and its only really these two areas that suffer from this (other than the art gallery but that's incredibly obvious that its an endgame area). GARDENS: 6.5/10 the gardens have a mechanic which is incredibly difficult to explain but it makes sense when you play the game there's 4 flowers that can be yellow or purple, yellow = number of same tiles surrounding it, purple = number of opposite tiles. for example if a tile has 3 yellow flowers and 1 purple, and the tile is off, 3 tiles surrounding it have to be off (same) and 1 has to be on (different) if you didn't understand that, it makes a lot more sense visually seeing it, and these puzzles become really fun. its only 6.5 though because when these are mixed with the tiles from the mines it becomes annoying personally, and still after finishing the game I still don't know how it works if the tile is at the edge of the puzzle. PLATEAU: 6/10 there's only 2 puzzles in this area, both being environment puzzles, where you have to draw a maze. these are fun, but I wish there was more MILL: 9/10 this is the return of dodgy map design, as once again you get presented with the hard puzzles first and then have to find the entrance, which is at the other side of the map (I have no idea how anyone would find this naturally) However. I am going to completely disregard that as this is easily my favourite area of the entire game this is like the Tetris puzzles from The Witness, but you have to find the right shape, as every other symbol of the same colour has to be the same shape the environment puzzle of this area is really fun and the final "boss" puzzle has a super elegant and satisfying solution ART GALLERY: ?/10 im going to be real, this is the most difficult area of the entire game for me and I only got 4 puzzles in. this area is the culmination of all the puzzles in the entire game but the puzzles themselves are hidden in paintings and it genuinely hurts my head. thankfully all the areas aren't required to finish the game (at least with the black ending) so I skipped this one FINAL AREA (BLACK ENDING): 8/10 I really enjoyed this final area, reverse engineering the puzzles is a super cool concept. I didnt do the white ending as I have a feeling you need to finish all 9 areas, including the gallery I very much recommend the game, it has issues, however i think generally this is a much more consistent package than the witness and despite getting annoyed sometimes, the rest of the game makes up for it also the puzzle in the games logo isnt a valid solution lol
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Very Witness-like For those that don’t know Witness: you complete Sudoku-like puzzles in an open world, but the game doesn’t teach you puzzles’ rules - you have to explore the world and deduce them yourself. Puzzle quality is high I completed the game 100% (beyond all achievements) in 22h05m in-game time without any hints. The vast majority of puzzles make total sense and are not convoluted. There were only 3 puzzles and 1 puzzle-group which I solved with some bruteforcing and luck. Out of them (having read the intended reasoning): [*]2 puzzles make total sense, I’d likely get them myself without bruteforcing a bit later [*]1 puzzle largely makes sense, but looks misleading [*]1 puzzle-group is indeed overly convoluted. The Dev (from Discord discussion) knows, but doesn’t quite know how to fix it That’s too say: obscure puzzles are present in the game, but they are the minority. The vast majority of puzzles (there are 400+ total) and mechanics are good and unlike The Witness, this game never makes puzzles artificially difficult with unclear/messed-up presentation (e.g. broken panels). World is nice. Visuals are nice. Exploration is nice, you have many paths to explore if you are stuck on any, with shortcuts to unlock as you progress. I had some minor disappointment when some parts of the map, which looked like they would change once you solve something, turned out to be merely decorations. Verdict If you liked The Witness (or my description of The Witness above sounds interesting), you’d also most likely like this one. Highly recommended. If solving a large number of Sukoku-like puzzles doesn’t sound fun, then you’d probably not enjoy neither The Witness nor Taiji. To be clear: both games go beyond Sudoku-like puzzles, but they constitute a big chunk of gameplay.
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Last Updates
| Steam data | 12 December 2024 00:36 |
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| SteamSpy data | 20 January 2025 04:04 |
| Steam price | 22 January 2025 20:26 |
| Steam reviews | 21 January 2025 19:51 |
Online players
4
Developer
Matthew VanDevander
Publisher
Matthew VanDevander
Release
09 Sep 2022
Platforms