The Witness. Been sitting with this one for a while, trying to think about how best to tear it a new one. I think I'm finally ready to collect my thoughts in a review.
The Witness is aimless, purpose-devoid postmodernism. It takes the worst aspect of that era's fiction - its tendency to navel-gaze - to a new extreme.
If you have seen the ending (which I will not spoil, but will nonetheless warn you about), you know that this game holds no deeper meaning. The brunt of its intended message is: "Woah, isn't it weird how this video game absorbed you so much? WoaaaahhhH the way the human brain learns is SO COOL, line puzzles are everywhere now!" Except they aren't. Their importance starts and ends with the playtime of this game. It is not useful to you to learn how to navigate the complex rule set of these puzzles in your real life; learning them is a time bandit, nothing more.
The Witness is one thing: Line puzzles. Both gameplay-wise AND narratively, that is all it is. And that is the long and short of it.
The worst part, however, is that it tries - and succeeds! - in convincing you it is about more than just itself for the majority of its 20 to 40 hours. Quotation is abundant in The Witness: Audio diaries, movie and documentary clips; all of it feels like it's pointing to something deeper going on under the surface that is simply not there.
Lastly, I want to touch upon Johnathan Blownathon's blind spots in design that he fails to interrogate or amend: Accessibility design in The Witness is at an all-time fucking low. A lot of puzzles basically say "FUCK the hard-of-hearing LMAO", and basically all puzzles fail to account for colour blindness, or even offer an optional colour-blindness mode. Also, the FPS mechanics in this game make you motion sick incredibly quickly, which is an issue I really thought games at large had solved by this point in non-VR titles.
I 100%ed the Witness back in 2017, when I was at my most suicidally depressed. Its sound design, and environmental design are good; I have to give it that. It provided a steady and, at that point, needed dopamine drip-feed that kept me going for a while. I'm also grateful to it for introducing me to a myriad of more interesting media than itself, such as Andrey Tarkovsky's filmography and Italo Calvino's "The Invisible Cities". But that's where my praise wanes.
In the end, finishing The Witness is like eating handfuls upon handfuls of junk food with an intricately beautiful, "really-makes-you-think" art piece on the packaging. It's a binge-and-purge game that takes a lot of your time and leaves you with nothing.
3/10.
The Witness is aimless, purpose-devoid postmodernism. It takes the worst aspect of that era's fiction - its tendency to navel-gaze - to a new extreme.
If you have seen the ending (which I will not spoil, but will nonetheless warn you about), you know that this game holds no deeper meaning. The brunt of its intended message is: "Woah, isn't it weird how this video game absorbed you so much? WoaaaahhhH the way the human brain learns is SO COOL, line puzzles are everywhere now!" Except they aren't. Their importance starts and ends with the playtime of this game. It is not useful to you to learn how to navigate the complex rule set of these puzzles in your real life; learning them is a time bandit, nothing more.
The Witness is one thing: Line puzzles. Both gameplay-wise AND narratively, that is all it is. And that is the long and short of it.
The worst part, however, is that it tries - and succeeds! - in convincing you it is about more than just itself for the majority of its 20 to 40 hours. Quotation is abundant in The Witness: Audio diaries, movie and documentary clips; all of it feels like it's pointing to something deeper going on under the surface that is simply not there.
Lastly, I want to touch upon Johnathan Blownathon's blind spots in design that he fails to interrogate or amend: Accessibility design in The Witness is at an all-time fucking low. A lot of puzzles basically say "FUCK the hard-of-hearing LMAO", and basically all puzzles fail to account for colour blindness, or even offer an optional colour-blindness mode. Also, the FPS mechanics in this game make you motion sick incredibly quickly, which is an issue I really thought games at large had solved by this point in non-VR titles.
I 100%ed the Witness back in 2017, when I was at my most suicidally depressed. Its sound design, and environmental design are good; I have to give it that. It provided a steady and, at that point, needed dopamine drip-feed that kept me going for a while. I'm also grateful to it for introducing me to a myriad of more interesting media than itself, such as Andrey Tarkovsky's filmography and Italo Calvino's "The Invisible Cities". But that's where my praise wanes.
In the end, finishing The Witness is like eating handfuls upon handfuls of junk food with an intricately beautiful, "really-makes-you-think" art piece on the packaging. It's a binge-and-purge game that takes a lot of your time and leaves you with nothing.
3/10.