The Looker gives the player a unique experience, and answers an interesting question: what would it be like to play The Witness from the perspective of, say, Egoraptor?

I learned of this game (as many others have) from Dunkey's video. From what I saw in that video I assumed that this game came from a relatively incurious perspective on its source material, and while I don't think my first impression was entirely wrong I will admit that The Looker did win me over pretty quick. I had already seen the useless hint button gag. What I did not expect was to find a second useless hint button, rusted over, sitting in a garbage can, smoking and drinking, with a story to tell.

The moments in which this game is overtly making fun of The Witness are without a doubt its worst. From the second that you see the first puzzle the fact that the simple abstract symbols of The Witness have been replaced with familiar words seems to completely undermine any meaningful comparison with what the original game is actually doing. Frankly there were times that I thought the game was going to pull the rug out from under me and it didn't. I thought for sure as I was writing down the sequences of the book puzzle that at the end the solution would be a non-sequitur and the game would make fun of me for taking notes; it did not. The beeping puzzle is obviously making fun of the audio puzzles in the original but it's so much worse of a puzzle that the joke completely falls flat.

The best moments of the game are when it genuinely provides interesting mechanical explorations beyond what The Witness's self seriousness would have allowed. The cannon puzzle, the snake game, and the rail shooter game are truly interesting evolutions of elements of this game's inspiration, integrating the perspective shifts and maze-solving in ways that make The Witness only look more clever, if less complete.

And that's kind of the be-all and end-all, being derived so closely from The Witness, all of The Looker's best elements, even the ways in which it builds on that game, are so tied to it that any joke at the original game's expense holds little weight. In what seems to be an attempt to reveal the apparent vapidity of The Witness, The Looker only reaffirms that the original game was a worthwhile effort.

I love The Witness, I don't hate The Looker. It's humor is generally entertaining, if disappointing and predictable. I kind of wish that an actual score attack game similar to the rail shooter segment existed on its own.

It must be hard to create a "parody video game." Everyone's done the easy jokes, even games that are supposed to be serious po-faced prestige games. And pastiching a particular game is a lot of trouble to go to, since you've got to recreate the look, the style, the mechanics... No wonder we haven't got "The Worst of Us: Part 2" or something.

But the Witness, now there's a good target, right? It's beautiful, but not overtly difficult to recreate the style of. It's clever, but also takes itself a bit too seriously. And the central mechanic is flexible enough that even if your jokes don't land, you can actually create a pretty good puzzle game just by riffing on it.

So that gets us The Looker, which is, for the low low price of free, far better than it has any right to be. Not every joke lands, but there's enough that you'll probably be tickled by a few of them. And it uses the player's assumed knowledge of The Witness to further twist that game's mechanics - I particularly enjoyed the clever little pirate ship puzzle.

This is worth an hour of your time whether you loved or hated the Witness. If nothing else, you get to experience some of that game's wonder without giving any cash to old Blow.

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