The Witness is a devilishly simple game. Taking place on a luscious, deserted island, you're tasked with exploring and solving a seemingly never-ending series of maze-like panel puzzles where the goal is simply to draw a line from A to B, meeting certain criteria in the process. It doesn't sound like much but it's addictively fun.

Crucially, none of the puzzle parameters are ever explained. It's entirely on you to play around and make sense of the increasingly complicated mechanics, sometimes through sheer brute force trying. That is, though, what makes The Witness so fun to play; that feeling of discovery and conquest feels totally earned when you find and finish a new area of puzzles without any help from the game whatsoever.

Not every mechanic works though. Most are based on logical thinking (like drawing a line from A to B while dividing squares by colour, for example) but there's a string of sound-based puzzles where you have to interpret bird calls and map them to a route through puzzle panels. I found these sections to be a nightmare but they didn't ruin the game.

For context, I actually played The Witness as a couch co-op game. Me and my best friend threw out possible solutions to each other, scrawling out the puzzles madly with paper and pencils. I think it's probably the best way to play and experience the game because it makes those 'Eureka!' moments, where you finally crack a tricky puzzle, all the more satisfying.

Reviewed on Apr 22, 2024


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