The Looker gives the player a unique experience, and answers an interesting question: what would it be like to play The Witness from the perspective of, say, Egoraptor?

I learned of this game (as many others have) from Dunkey's video. From what I saw in that video I assumed that this game came from a relatively incurious perspective on its source material, and while I don't think my first impression was entirely wrong I will admit that The Looker did win me over pretty quick. I had already seen the useless hint button gag. What I did not expect was to find a second useless hint button, rusted over, sitting in a garbage can, smoking and drinking, with a story to tell.

The moments in which this game is overtly making fun of The Witness are without a doubt its worst. From the second that you see the first puzzle the fact that the simple abstract symbols of The Witness have been replaced with familiar words seems to completely undermine any meaningful comparison with what the original game is actually doing. Frankly there were times that I thought the game was going to pull the rug out from under me and it didn't. I thought for sure as I was writing down the sequences of the book puzzle that at the end the solution would be a non-sequitur and the game would make fun of me for taking notes; it did not. The beeping puzzle is obviously making fun of the audio puzzles in the original but it's so much worse of a puzzle that the joke completely falls flat.

The best moments of the game are when it genuinely provides interesting mechanical explorations beyond what The Witness's self seriousness would have allowed. The cannon puzzle, the snake game, and the rail shooter game are truly interesting evolutions of elements of this game's inspiration, integrating the perspective shifts and maze-solving in ways that make The Witness only look more clever, if less complete.

And that's kind of the be-all and end-all, being derived so closely from The Witness, all of The Looker's best elements, even the ways in which it builds on that game, are so tied to it that any joke at the original game's expense holds little weight. In what seems to be an attempt to reveal the apparent vapidity of The Witness, The Looker only reaffirms that the original game was a worthwhile effort.

I love The Witness, I don't hate The Looker. It's humor is generally entertaining, if disappointing and predictable. I kind of wish that an actual score attack game similar to the rail shooter segment existed on its own.

An incredibly entertaining spoof but a pretty mediocre video game.

The Witness is one of my favorite games of all time so all of the spoof stuff in The Looker hit super hard. I laughed at basically all the jokes making fun of The Witness. The audio logs are perfection. Even if you haven't play The Witness, there are some other just funny bits in the game.

But as an actual video game it's not great. The puzzles aren't satisfying as much as they're occasionally annoying. when they're not funny. For some reason the game made me motion sick too which has never happened to me with a first person game. But hey it's free so I can't complain too much

+ Pretty funny. Good jokes if you played The Witness
+ Some generally clever and funny other bits

- Some puzzles are more annoying than difficult

what i expected: 2022 post-gamergate pyst. extremely trite "erm isnt this pretentious guys?? i hate all video games that are about anything besides Shooting and Kicking ass!! puzzle games are too hard for me!" tier "commentary"

what i got: not bad riff on the witness. not remarkable in almost any aspect aside from a couple of the gags it pulls, but they're gags that work better if you know and like the witness already. also definitely made by someone who has definitely played all of the witness and most likely enjoyed it, very unlike pyst lol. still very unremarkable in the end though

I wish parody in games had bite. Most of them are either too ironic for their own good or end up moving into their own sort of territory abandoning the parody like a third of the way through. I kind of respect Stanley Parable actually, and it lost the coin toss of me playing its 'sequel' over this, but I'm sure it would have had much to tell in its own fashion. Whether played out or not, it would have something to say for itself.

This doesn't. That's the weird part, Jonathan Blow is to me one of the easiest targets ever. You can make some good jokes about him that can turn into many great points. Obviously, The Looker isn't about Blow, but its painful attempts to target what The Witness is going for makes me wish it kind of was because that would've been at least an interesting way of joking about the game. Here you have, puzzle types painfully recreated without any illusion to seem smarmy, and attempts to spin the joke to other genres that never actually quite capture when The Witness actually excels. The jokes have a dual problem of being too reverent of the game to give something really powerful, and too smarmy to land the joke about Witness being up its own ass. From the most charitable lens, it's all cute, but says nothing.

Want to hear another spin? The Witness is a game about someone who is so insecure of their own experience of the world being misunderstood, with walls of libertarian almost incel level thoughts of how they don't quite understand girls, as well as being met with heaps of talk calling their work pretentious already, that they make a work about widening your perspective. Get it, because his own is genuinely really shallow. The irony!

This is a better joke than anything you'll find here, and that fucking sucks.
t. Someone who quite likes the Witness overall

It must be hard to create a "parody video game." Everyone's done the easy jokes, even games that are supposed to be serious po-faced prestige games. And pastiching a particular game is a lot of trouble to go to, since you've got to recreate the look, the style, the mechanics... No wonder we haven't got "The Worst of Us: Part 2" or something.

But the Witness, now there's a good target, right? It's beautiful, but not overtly difficult to recreate the style of. It's clever, but also takes itself a bit too seriously. And the central mechanic is flexible enough that even if your jokes don't land, you can actually create a pretty good puzzle game just by riffing on it.

So that gets us The Looker, which is, for the low low price of free, far better than it has any right to be. Not every joke lands, but there's enough that you'll probably be tickled by a few of them. And it uses the player's assumed knowledge of The Witness to further twist that game's mechanics - I particularly enjoyed the clever little pirate ship puzzle.

This is worth an hour of your time whether you loved or hated the Witness. If nothing else, you get to experience some of that game's wonder without giving any cash to old Blow.

A parody game that is vastly superior to what it is parodying.

I loved this game. It's pretty humorous. It does a great job of understanding the good parts of The Witness and poking fun at what is terrible about it. The dev sure knew exactly what to do. They must have loved The Witness.

There are just so many jokes in this game. A lot of them can be funny without knowledge of The Witness. But of course, there is a whole layer can only be understood if you know The Witness.

The gimmicks do not ware out their welcome. They do a great job at making things more difficult but still fair/fun. There were only a few that were truly a bit much.

The second to last puzzle is def hard. It was the only one that felt like a true challenge. The final puzzle is the best though. That's all I'll say about that.

As someone who has major issues with The Witness this game solved pretty much all of them. It's a fair game. A game that is not up it's own ass. And most importantly, not made by Jonathon Blow. A man who refused to make his puzzle game accessible because it was against his artist vision or w/e his worthless excuse was. All you had to do is add numbers to the color puzzles Jon. So people who struggle with color blindness can complete your puzzles. Sorry, ablest behavior makes me bitter/angry.

way funnier than the stanley parable, not as funny or as good as the witness

review update this game sucks shit lol, kind of hating it every minute since i closed it. idk self referential shit like this that is just a worse imitation of someone else's true vision is like............................. its just a waste of air lol, even if jon blo sucks ass. its the kind of art id never want to make. it may be more funny than the stanley parable, but it's a lot more philosophically distressing for me.

Briefly entertaining and certainly cathartic - at least when you're one of those non-specific people who've lost 24+ hours of their life 100%-ing Johnathan Blownathon's "The Witness" for no reason other than a craving for a slow and aimless dopamine dripfeed while you're at your most suicidally-depressed.

Some genuinely very funny moments in this one, and quite creative - where it stumbles and falls flat on its face is before its ending, where it invokes the exact type of tedium it aimed to parody. Please, learn from Kikiyama: A maze where you can't at any point see the entirety of it, where all walls look the exact fucking same, is NOT GOOD DESIGN, and will frustrate your players, no matter how hard you strain your eyelids winking at them.