The following is my second review of the game, written on May 4th, 2024. My original review was written on the 1st and is available here.

The Witness is a fantastic game; I would really have no qualms about ending the review there. It uses a beautiful mesh of realism and painterly impressionism to make a beautiful world whose sense of exploration and wonder is perfectly in line with the great litany of things to be found, from a great many little secret and clever detail which reward the careful eye, to the hundreds of line puzzles throughout.

Despite the quantity of the puzzles throughout, almost each and every one of them serves some purpose. From teaching you a mechanical consequence to simply opening a door, each puzzle's completion is its own reward, bringing you step by step closer to enlightenment.

I'm being vague on purpose because as a puzzle game - a very, very good puzzle game - The Witness' every moment is that of beautiful, resonant revelation between utterly brain-bending trials. A lesser game would provide hints, background music, anything to latch onto, but The Witness leaves you completely and utterly to your own devices and is such very much susceptible to being spoiled and very much is best experienced as blind as can be. I'm going to intermittently talk about a few significant spoilers, which should not be read the prospective Witness player. If I've sold you on this game, please enjoy!

However, it's not perfect; I have a few gripes, really the tiniest of nitpicks on what was otherwise an amazing game I could happily recommend to any puzzle fan.

1. When you have a puzzle selected, there's often something dinging. Either the beginning circle or the endpoints of the puzzle - which the game elegantly and wordlessly teaches the importance of to the player - are constantly blinking, with a visual and auditory cue. For a game that relishes in giving you the time and mental space to think things out, a tiny mistake like this really feels like a bullet.

2. Some puzzles, upon failure, deactivate. This makes it so you have to go back and re-enter the solution (which is typically pretty easy to remember but does disappear as you re-interact with a given puzzle panel) to the previous panel in a sequence - a feature which is never telegraphed to the player (though even if it was it would be just as unpleasant). The Witness as a game, other than this one quirk, can really pride itself on its terseness of concept so again it is a shame to see something like this bubble up through. Solving a puzzle in this game is a communication of understanding, having to repeat it again mindlessly in some arbitrary rite of passage to retry the current puzzle is, even if a very short inconvenience when it does happen, a baffling blunder from a game like this.

3. There shouldn't be a sprint button. The obvious response is "Well, why don't you just not sprint? but at the end of the day the purpose of a system is what it does; and a sprint, naturally, encourages sprinting; every second spent walking is a moment which could have been spent sprinting, which is a recipe for madness. At least to me, something like that communicates a lack of trust in the game environment to a) be beautiful and b) communicate priorities and paths to the player.

The obvious exception to this is the challenge (which is fantastic by the way; I'm not sure I've ever truly comprehended the heart-stopping terror of In the Hall of the Mountain King until I played this game), to the point that I'm convinced that a sprint was added with the express purpose of being used in the challenge, just kind of being this odd vestigial growth for the rest of the game during which you, very notably, never need to and shouldn't move that fast. Especially for noticing the puzzles hidden in the map; the mix of boredom and wonder of an aimless walk throughout the island is very sufficient fuel to find a very large chunk of these.

Especially given the extra shortcuts and movement options the game grants you pretty early on and only expands on as you progress, having a sprint on top of that just feels overkill to me.

4. Obtaining the secret ending, the one with the hotel and the credits and the real-life video, is a bit odd. I'm going to have to talk a lot more about the game a bit more holistically to describe what I mean.

The Witness, to me, feels like an allegory for the Buddhist concept of enlightenment. As the game approaches its end and you enter the mountain which has been ominously looming over the island and attracting the lights of lasers, you begin to get the sense that this is all a test of sorts. A few nuggets that hint toward this appear throughout the island; recurring symbols, sketches of buildings and puzzles, but here it goes mask-off. Various security monitors show parts of the island, and malfunctioning and rejected puzzles are strewn about the various laboratory-like rooms of the mountain. And yet even these lead you deeper and deeper down the mountain, culminating in an elevator chamber which flies you to the beginning of the game, losing all your control as all your puzzles become undone and culminating in the game itself closing. When you re-open the game you are as you would be if you had never played the game at all, at the start of the very first hallway with no progress in the island to speak of.

This to me feels like a death and rebirth of the player character. Though the puzzles are in the same deactivated state as they were when you first downloaded the game, your knowledge and intuition of the game persists; if you started from scratch you would absolutely finish far quicker than your first attempt. However, the secret ending is not about progressing; rather it is about finding an environmental puzzle using the sun - the most significant circle in the game, one which looms over you for the entire time - thus activating a hotel lounge, which a straight walk forward through brings you to the secret ending. In this secret ending a human wakes up from some kind of virtual simulation and walks around the real studio in which The Witness was developed, utterly transfixed on patterns of lines and circles. This feeling was completely and utterly relatable, that tiny worm that The Witness grows in your brain for seeing circles connected to lines very well might be the game's most profound export.

However, the secret ending does not follow this exact sequence.

What I believe is the intended route to the secret ending revolves around a room, hidden behind activating all 11 lasers (of which only 7 of one's own choice are required to beat the game) and the optional challenge (which, amidst all this negative babble, I feel inclined to mention again is AMAZING). In this room is a puzzle solution which, when put into a certain panel in the starting section, re-seals the door making the sun puzzle, previously blocked off by forward progression, once again possible. I realize this is the tiniest of nitpicks, but the whole beauty of the secret ending, to me, is that voluntary relinquishing of all puzzle progress, is that metaphorical acceptance of one's own death to reach enlightenment! Being able to get this ending while having all your pretty puzzle panels lit up, while still indulging oneself in the samsara of the game world, feels so thematically incoherent to me! Of course, this is the most minute of nitpicks, but finding flaws in a game as pleasant and absorbing in this is like finding needles in a haystack, exclusively by having them prick your fingers.

If you read through all that, thank you! I have not tried to articulate my thoughts about The Witness very much at all, so actually putting the experience of this game that has utterly entranced me is always nice - like a release valve in my brain. I do want to revisit it someday, but for now I think I've earned a break.

If you just scrolled to the bottom and haven't played it, go away!! Play The Witness!!

To preface, I feel a bit bad writing this review. I like articulating my thoughts on games but at the end of the day I played this with some friends (who, thank goodness, don't know about this account) and am subsequently compelled to talk shit about it, maybe as a warning to other prospective players, maybe just for talking's sake. Anyways!

I didn't really know anything about this game going in, but I downloaded it for free on April Fool's, an April Fool's which kind of passed me by in comparison to others. After that day - which I didn't know until the time of writing but was the release day of the game overall - the price was hiked up to 10 dollars. Even trying to apply Hanlon's razor I can't really see this as much besides a cynical carpet-pull, a spur-of-the-moment reaction to the unprecedented success of their April Fool's game; whether it was to fund the game servers or simply to make a killing I couldnt say, but the impression persists.

I hate to be surely the billionth person to make this comparison - no less to a game I haven't played - but this follows in Lethal Company's stride as a co-op horror game with proximity voice chat, about exploring grim environments, finding artifacts and surviving encounters with monsters. The main difference is the addition of an in-game camera, the motivation behind your escapades being to gain views in the game's universe, funding future exploits. This feature allows you to save the videos you record in the game to your computer which I really appreciate; any kind of game that generates media like this (drawings in skribbl.io or Gartic Phone, replays in Super Smash Bros., etc.) gets at least a few points for me.

Sadly my praise for the game ends there.

When the emphasis is so heavily put on the players to "be funny" for an invisible audience all the sense of exploration in the game pretty much immediately feel dry and manufactured, the slippery controls and emphasis on physical darkness further pushing this absolutely stilted horror aspect where (seemingly) random audio cues and random things coming at you from the darkness and killing you comprises the horror aspect of this game.

I'm not huge on the monsters themselves either; they come from the DOORS on Roblox camp of monsters that come at you from nowhere, that you stand no chance against until you find out their "quirk", usually from a scholarly friend as opposed to any in-game learning experience. Most monsters, after they've had their fun with you, either kill you outright or separate you from the group, severing you from the camera and thus the object of the game.

The camera being a physical object in the game world is a fun idea, the real camera shake and angles that this allows in replays is honestly nice, but at the same time I feel like it puts an unfair emphasis on one player as the anchor of the group, everyone else orbiting around them and hoping they aren't separated. Because once you are separated, there's pretty much nothing to do except try and retrace your steps, or sit around in the post-game chat doing literally nothing. Maybe something like randomly switching who owns the camera - perhaps upon detecting a splinter in the group - but where it stands it makes half the game for half the players, at least in my eyes, dreadfully boring.

All in all this, for me, was a free game. I'm glad I played it for the short time I did, but 5 in-game rounds was enough for me to grow tired of the game; which I suppose is OK for a free novelty game, but for a commercial product is another prospect entirely.