Antes que nada: Ni en el momento en el que jugué a The Looker ni en el que escribí el análisis que estás leyendo, este humilde servidor había jugado a The Witness (aunque tengo intención de hacerlo).

Este juego me ha sorprendido para bien en muchos aspectos. En primer lugar, ¿cómo es que este juego es gratis? Entiendo que es corto y es una clara parodia a un juego comercial, pero no entiendo cómo esos dos puntos son motivos suficientes como para no obtener beneficio económico por el juego ya que está bastante bien hecho.

Por otra parte, la interacción con el entorno y el desarrollo de los puzzles junto al enlace entre sí me han parecido ingeniosos. Muchos de ellos son bastante descarados y sencillos con el propósito de hacer parodia de The Witness, pero conforme se va avanzando, se van complicando gradualmente hasta el punto de que tuve que ver una guía para hacer el del laberinto con los símbolos. Las notas de audio eran graciosas e imagino, nuevamente, que emplean un tono pseudo-intelectual con contenido idiótico con el fin de hacer burla a las divagaciones filosóficas de Jonathan Blow.

Lo mejor, para mí, es el final del juego. Tiene un plot twist bastante inesperado y cierra bastante bien la broma creada durante todo el juego.

No se me olvida destacar el aspecto visual tan limpio y cuidado del juego. Se ve tremendamente bien. El juego no cuenta con banda sonora (más allá de la canción de los créditos del final), pero el hecho de ir avanzando con el sonido ambiente con esos gráficos tan limpios es un auténtico gozo.

Había venido a jugar la parodia de un juego al que no he jugado y me ha terminado inyectando hype por The Witness. GG al desarrollador.

If you've played The Witness, this game is a must-play. The Looker is a parody game which pokes fun at the more pretentious elements of the original game's ideas and features. While it could've been primed for a brutal deconstruction, The Looker instead looks fondly upon The Witness's ideas and manages to come out the other end with a couple clever puzzles and ideas of its own. There are many gags played for laughs, and it's worth it to see everything this free title has to offer. My one criticism is a set of late-game puzzles including symbols which logic didn't seem to check out for (which I'm not sure is the point or not).

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.

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

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