Still a masterpiece of a puzzle game, it’s not until this recentmost playthrough that I understood how meditative and deliberately slow-paced the game is. Ramping up the speed on the boat to max is absolutely deafening and the game wants you to take your time. We live in a world that moves so incredibly fast and this game, with brilliant mechanics and challenges, encourages you to stop, look around, and peacefully live in the moment. There's also some really sick Metroidvania aspects where areas that are locked off early on stay locked until you get the "key", that key being your knowledge and ability to identify puzzle mechanics and solve them.

Dodges five stars because the mountain puzzles, among some others, can get really messy, and definitely should've stayed in the cave plexus.

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A beam of sunshine on your skin. I'll be candid, I thought this was really mid when I first played it - but I have not been able to shake its profound allure in the now over 4 years since that time. I'm still not fond of all its quirks: some of its of-the-era attempts at eccentricity grate (chiefly anything to do with its 'story'), there's still some tedium to be had, and much of this is definitely still too unnecessarily cryptic for its own good. But fucking hell... just LOOK at it. This is patently like, top five visuals of all time for this or any system. If there's one thing this exceeds at above all else, it's putting you in your own little luscious world and giving you all the time on Earth to bask in its otherworldly aesthetic. Imagine how your most cherished and beautiful memories look in your mind, this is what that looks like. Intricate and poignant in a way that I'm not even sure I fully grasp yet (if I ever will). A deeply meditative, unforgettable, affecting, and - in its own way - transcendent experience. I used to think it was artsy-fartsy, now it knocks my socks off every time. Maybe that's the point?

A walking simulator with puzzles that mostly belong in an android game. But then, the game also expands the concepts by making the puzzles interact with the world in different ways, which is really cool and leads to some interesting ideas. Explore the island and solve puzzles to activate some beacons to finish the game. It's an interesting concept that will appeal to a lot of people, but not to me. It gets really boring after 5-6 hours, running around searching for areas you haven't explored before. I said running? More like crawling because you have 2 broken heels jesus christ this game is slow as hell. There were moments that I spent 20 solid minutes walking until I found some puzzles I haven't done yet. But then I found an area with easy as heck puzzle because it was supposed to be done earlier and I just skipped it because I went exploring right instead of left.
It's a shame because the puzzles themselves can get pretty challenging at times. but I just can't bother myself with finding them.

I'm not even going to bother trying to be fancy about what I think and feel about The Witness. It does the job on its own pretty well. Its solid watercolor visuals look artistic. It has audio logs of quotes by renowned scientists, artists, and philosophers. Its puzzles work every level of your audio-visual pattern recognition capabilities. It's a very smart game made by very smart people.

I love it for two reasons.

It's one of the rare games that is flawless in synthesizing every element to deliver a focused and potent message. From its aesthetics to its gameplay, it constantly reinforces the power of perception and how it defines our ideas of truth and reality.

It also knows awe as a genuine emotion that can only truly come not just by discovering but by coming to an understanding of something on your own, and that this feeling in and of itself is so powerful that experiencing it is its own reward.

oh and yes secret third reason the witness also knows how fucking hard it is to be a frail human being filled with insecurities and irrational thoughts and feelings in the face of a cold, uncaring world, and that this strange, unpredictable humanity leads to monumental works and also madness

but also jonathan blow sucks fuck that guy

After completing the “challenge” I was satisfied with the game and decided to write this review. I think this game is close to being a masterpiece of a puzzle game, but it does not excel in any other category, and that is fine.

I am amazed at how much the developers managed to do with such a simple mechanic, creating a whole game, with over 20 hours of gameplay, based on drawing a line from a circle to complete a puzzle (they probably went into rehab after making this). Going around the island I was always looking for more, seeing new twists to the puzzles, finding clever solutions thought up by the devs, not only using the tablets and the symbols, but also using the environment in so many different ways had me in awe. Truly a unique and refreshing experience.

Even though I did love the game I have to address it’s flaws. If you are expecting a story or a well written narrative, then you have come to the wrong place. The question of “why am I here and what is my purpose” always loomed in the back of my head. As I was traveling around I got some hints to a story, small bits and pieces, but nothing that really made me want to engage with it, so I never did. And after looking up the narrative online, I don’t think you should either, it’s not worth it.

One of the puzzles was a bit too abstract for me, and that is the shipwreck door, it has to be the hardest puzzle in the entire game(that I found at least), but luckily for me I was told this door was stupidly difficult before I even found it. After half an hour of jotting down sequences and trying to make sense of the sounds and the door, I gave up and looked up the solution online, and I still didn’t get it. After more research I found out the logic and I do respect the difficulty of the puzzle, but I can’t say it’s well crafted.

I do develop games myself so I can see why it wasn’t included in such a big 3D world, but a colorblind mode would have been great. Some of the environmental puzzles were actually impossible for me and the bunker and the epilepsy puzzles in the mountain were pretty difficult to get a read on.

To end it I have two personal tips to make the game a better experience. First of all is the addition of different people. I think having friends/family look at the puzzles and creating a dialogue around them makes for a fun and social experience of the game. I had people around for 50% of the game and I think that boosted my experience by a lot. Second is the use of your phone, especially with the sound sections. I filmed and slowed down the sounds of the birds to get a better understanding of the sequence and I think that was a must for actually enjoying the area.

The witness is a game full of puzzles. Really. Your reward for finishing a set of puzzles is another set. That's your answer to all the "oh I wonder what this door I've unlocked leads to". And when you're done with an area, you repeat the same process elsewhere.

It's good for a game to be to the point, but if your game is nothing but puzzles, it's a bad thing when they all suck. Mostly a mixture between a labyrinth puzzle in a kid's menu and those magazines for old people with crosswords, sudokus... There's an exorbitant amount of puzzles that are just "draw how the line should go in this screen" in sets of ten, which just screams "CREATIVELY BANKRUPT". Then the few zones where there's some other method to solving the puzzles, like looking at shadows, it becomes as gimmicky: with the game beating it over your head the same puzzle dozens of times in a row.

"But I thought the witness was this beautiful mystery game set in a strange island and..." No. (Maybe you're thinking of Myst) This island is a glorified setpiece, practically inert, with a few easter eggs where you can draw lines on very obvious parts of the landscape, and a few perspective tricks in some areas. Despite its ambigious scope and what the atmosphere might initially lead you to believe, this game has no real message, nor does the scenery or the audio logs you find scattered around.

It's certainly not that a game needs a deep message to be good, but for a guy that considers this and his other game "the only good videogames ever", it's pretty funny how it fucks up very basic stuff like exploration. As stated above, there's no real immersion nor incentive to explore once you've realized there's no underlying substance in this game. No, worse. There's cases where you might find an elaborate puzzle with a mechanic you haven't seen yet, and until you find how that works, by finding the are that type of puzzle belongs to, you're not likely progressing there.

The game is so bad though, it even makes walking around the lavish scenery feel like a chore after the first hour. There's a sprint button, but only if you keep it pressed. Surprisingly they didn't add a toggle in game where you are either going somewhere or drawing with your mouse. There's also a boat for 'fast travel' that you can unlock, but it's also shit don't get me started.

Some puzzle mechanics as I said above might not click with you, because there's no explanation for them. You rely on finding simple versions first, and/or trial and error. For a game where you have to figure things out, it makes sense. But so much remains obtuse because of the horrible way the game has of relying information with its insinuations. In its own way it works, because if just told you what rules were in a screen when drawing a pattern, the game would be even more trivial. But it's kinda sad the only challenge is through cloaking a ruleset.

This is also why the pacing is horrible. Stuck? Go try another or keep trying this. Much like a sliding puzzle where the only way to get the answer is when you have it in front of you and not by letting it rest in your head. It's not only that it's bad, but that many other titles do well what this can't.

Better puzzle games like Baba is You is you will have you thinking about the different things you could be doing even after closing it, and there's an even greater sense of reward in its puzzles, as well as way more variation and depth.

Outer Wilds also has puzzles where you have to position yourself with the sun. And the sun is not just a dot in the sky but part of the world. A world you explore, where you can interact with your surroundings and they are part of the puzzle as well. It's filled with even more breathtaking zones and a great history behind all the stuff you find.

Obra Dinn embraces the monotonous and gives you little information as well, but very quickly fills you with intrigue and you're pushing yourself to keep playing and playing the same logic checks.

The Witness is a lot of work poured into a very vivid, glorified tech demo, because all it does is show you how they weren't capable to do anything interesting with it except as padding for the puzzles. Take out all of those, put them back to back and what you have is a glorified lockscreen-like puzzle game for mobile that would probably be free with adds on GooglePlay.

A frustrating puzzle game that goes out of its way to inconvenience the player and waste as much of your time as humanly possible. Maybe I'm just an ADHD-ridden bastard, but exploring the island to get to the puzzles can be such a chore due to the endless invisible walls that part of me wishes there wasn't even an island to explore at all. Don't even get me started on the boat that I assume is supposed to be your fast travel. It might actually be quicker to just sprint around the island if you find a map of it online.

The puzzles themselves are interesting at first, but Jon Blow is obsessed with taking these concepts and adding some obnoxious gimmick on top of it to make it as annoying to solve as possible. For example, one set of puzzles involves drawing a line either around or on shadows cast by tree branches. Eventually, the game straight up obscures the grids of these puzzles with objects making it incredibly difficult to see where the tree branch shadows lie. Another set involves you drawing a line that is mirrored on the opposite side of the grid. Eventually, the mirrored line becomes completely invisible so you have to visualize it yourself. None of these puzzles are fun. They're annoying. It's like they couldn't figure out how to add difficulty to the game and ran out of ideas, so they just did random things to cripple the player. It's like if Super Mario Bros. repeated 1-1 over and over again and got more difficult by making the screen go completely black for 3 seconds every couple of steps. Or if the enemies eventually became completely invisible.

Some puzzles simply require memorization more than any actual puzzle solving. Draw the line to match where the apple is on the tree. Go through a hedge maze and replicate the path you took on the grid. There isn’t any real brain teasing here. It’s more busywork than anything.

Some of the puzzles aren’t bad. The tetromino and starburst puzzles are mostly fine, though eventually they get extremely hard. Too hard for my pea brain apparently. The problem is that the game does a really bad job at introducing you to these and getting you to understand what you’re even supposed to do. The fact that there’s a Steam guide specifically for explaining the rules of each puzzle set should be a testament enough to that.

As someone who’s actually a pretty big fan of Jon Blow’s first game, Braid, this was a massive disappointment. Maybe when Blow is done smelling his own farts, he’ll finally make a game that’s actually fun like Braid was.