The Witness

You walking around and solving annoying labyrinth puzzles. Thats it. Its funny that none of the screenshots are actually showing these puzzles.

This is simply the best puzzle game I have played in decades: innovative, challenging, and mind blowing. A true spiritual successor of MYST (but with a much more modern approach) the amount of detail and attention in the design of the island is just amazing, a perfect balance of exploration and puzzle solving. It will keep your brain occupied for several dozen hours, both during play, and the real life. There are different layers in the game and many puzzles are optional, so you don't need to do them all to finish the game, of course for a completionist the challenge is to find and solve everything ! If you like puzzle games, The Witness is a must.

I heard great things about this game before getting it. Apparently, those people had low expectations. For such a colorful game, its remarkbly monochrome in its play. It's basically a mobile game where you solve screen after screen after screen of line and dot puzzles rediculously dropped into a Myst-like setting without any of the coolness and integrated puzzles of Myst. No story. No characters. Nothing but monitor after monitor of monotinous ugly puzzles. Sure some of them are challenging, but come on. Try a little variety. Try to make an emersive experience since that's the style of game this wants to be.

This game is incredible. For so many reasons. A large part of it is just how much it respects the player. It doesn't explain anything, it just lets you gradually understand. There is nothing blocking a knowledgable player from going straight to the end immidiately, but you won't be able to do that as a new player, because you don't know the rules yet. You will, though. Gradually. I've been talking with other people who have played the game, and it's like meeting people who have been in the army. We've all been through this incredibly unique experience, and have so much to talk about. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

Two things about the Witness bothered me as I was playing, but both I eventually determined were mistaken perceptions on my part. First, I thought the game was too easy. I did the puzzles in the entry area and the symmetry area on the west side of the island very quickly, and I never felt challenged for a moment. I almost thought the game wasn’t worth playing at that point but I kept going, and WOW, the difficulty starts to climb and the game eventually becomes very, very challenging and rewarding. Second, the game started to strike me as very pretentious. It’s full of ‘faux-meaningful’ artistic videos, lectures, and audio logs, that are scattered around the island, completely divorced from any context within the game. There’s really no other way to describe it other than pretentious- a word that almost every other review short of 5 stars mentions. As I was playing through the game, enjoying the puzzles and the environments, I kept getting irritated by these inclusions. This changed for me near the end of the game, when you explore a large hidden area and start to get more context as to the ‘story’ of the game, such as it is. The Witness is a phenomenal game, the best puzzle/adventure game I’ve ever played. It’s a homage to Myst, but it’s better than Myst. It’s harder than Riven, but the puzzles are more fair, more fun, and more rewarding. If you’re like me you’ll fill up pages and pages of graph paper working these out. It's also gorgeous, I can't think of any title in any genre with such amazing art and visual direction. Some of the puzzles are very difficult. One I couldn’t solve, and others I had to brute force. There are also scores of hidden environmental secrets to find and ‘collect’ that would drive a player insane if he committed himself to finding them all. But the very hardest puzzles and the environmental secrets are not required to complete the game, and not even required to complete the secret ending. So don’t be discouraged.