I first heard of this game from a youtube video called something like "Why you shouldnt play the witness" and the video was a guy talking about how good it was so idk clickbait?
(like a week later edit: chain510 pointed out to me that the video was actually called "The Witness - A Great Game That You Shouldn't Play" by Joseph Anderson on youtube, and i rewatched a bit of it and now i remember exactly what happened; i watched the video, got to the part where he said spoilers, kept watching, saw the cool reveal, then heard him reiterate the spoilers specifically for people like me and i went "oh fine i'll go play it", im not gonna change the rest of the review since it still sums up my feelings about the game but the video wasn't actually clickbait just intriguingly titled, and he has some legitimate reasons for not recommending it for everyone)
anyways eventually i decided to play it since i kept seeing it recommended whenever i was looking at pages for games like superliminal or the talos principle and i watched i think that video again and saw him like draw a line in a river to solve a puzzle and i was like "WOAH OKAY THAT LOOKS COOL IM GONNA PLAY THIS"
so i downloaded it and started playing and immediately i found out that actually
the game is extremely repetitive
like yeah theres cool moments where you draw the line in the river
but then you also draw lines through the wall and through the cracks and through the tile and through the hundreds of line puzzles in the entire game
the game is basically those line/pipe mobile games where you have to draw a line from one colored point and connect it to the other colored point, and you have to make all the paths fit on one board
yeah basically that but with added mechanics to make it harder
when i realized that it was almost all just these puzzles i was really disappointed cus i was really hoping for something that was similar to games like superliminal or portal where the puzzle takes place in the environment around you, not so much in a little grid you have to solve to affect the environment
i ended up dropping it out of sadness and lack of enthusiasm to do the same line puzzle a hundred times
i dont think theres anything wrong with the puzzles themselves im sure a lot of people really like these kinds of puzzles i just dont like them myself
and maybe i would like them in a different scenario but i went into this game with expectations for something entirely different and i was severely disappointed so maybe i shot myself in the foot here
anyways im probably not gonna play the rest of this game ever (and i mean apparently the endings pretty bad too so if you play this game you gotta really like the line puzzles to stick through it all)

Reviewed on May 21, 2022


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