The Witness

You can stare at a puzzle for an hour, thinking "I don't think this is solvable", and you might be right - sometimes you must view a puzzle from a different lens. You'll have to screen cap some, from another angle, to be able to switch back and forth to solve. As it's an open world, you'll run into puzzles long before getting to the tutorial area for that genre - and you might long forget its location, by the time you reach said tutorial. A map, with note-taking capabilities, would have been a welcome guest. I had to bust out Excel as my makeshift graph paper for some of the Tetris puzzles. You'll find audio clips and vignettes that seem to be divorced from the game at hand - perhaps JB using this as a vehicle to express his personal views/spiritualism, which definitely comes off as pretentious AF; you can Google interpretations on the "truth" of which they seem to speak. There are puzzles where you must guess as to where your cursor must be to start a puzzle, ones where you can't see your mouse cursor and it doesn't line up with the on-screen display as this puzzle scrolls. There is a monitor that spin out of control, as though possessed, as you're drawing a line - by this time, I pretty much had it with this game - gimmicks rather than honest, solid puzzle design. The game became more about how many ways can it confuse/misdirect you than actual strong puzzling. While not terrible, this, along with World of Goo and Fez, are my most overhyped puzzle games ever. This game made me change my golden rule of no walkthroughs to be for just excellent puzzle games - life is too short. Play Braid instead - it's much better and has a wonderful OST (The Witness has none)...though it's a lil too easy. For a somewhat similar, openish world - Antichamber is far superior - my alltime fave puzzler. There are plenty of other, better, cheaper, hard puzzle games out there: Jelly No Puzzle Hanano Puzzle 1-2 Baba is You The Portals Toki Tori 1-2 The Swapper Tetrobot and Co

The game starts out quite nice and relaxed but after the introductory puzzles the difficulty ramps up like a wall. There is no given path in the game, so the chances are extremly high that you stumble upon puzzles without ever getting to the introductions of its concept. And even if you get an introduction there is a good chance that you misunderstand some concept and get stuck on the puzzles further down the line, since you never get told what to actually do in a puzzle. Then there are puzzles that expect you to use the environment to solve the puzzles without ever being told that there is even such a thing. If you don't see that you are stuck again. And the line about not wasting your time in the store description is a blatant lie. There is so many instances where you have to wait for something to happen. And most of these take forever.... Like the small bridge that takes over a minute to turn into your path. The only positive aspect I can find about the game is that it actually looks quite beautiful.

If you are looking to the screenshots and you are expecting a game in between a walking simulator and Myst, you may have the wrong idea. While the concept may be similar to the latter (a stranger in an unknown island that seems have a background history), it is actually a puzzle game, more specifically only line puzzle game. Every puzzles are about drawing a line from a start point to an end point, follow various rules in between like dividing cells of different colours, creating shapes, collecting dots and much more. You have to explore the island in which the game is set and solve every puzzles of each areas in order to activate their respectives lasers that will guide you towards the final level. While it seems to be a story, it is actually not clear what it is and it seems rather that the creator Johnathan Blow wanted to share an idea, his point of view in life, instead of providing any narration. The audiologs that the player may found contains only famous quote from scientists and phylosopher. Some FMV may be found but they are only portions of sperimental movies and documentaries. To be honest I think the game is just ok. Some of the puzzles were unnerving since it seemed like the rules of each changing without any explaination. Also there is no actual variety in them, leading soon to a sense of boredom. Instead of 600 different puzzles we are dealing with 600 iterations of the same one, I would apprecciate some difference in them. Only few of them have some interesting and creative way to solve but still we are talking of 10 out 600 puzzles. Maybe less but different puzzles would have keep the game more enganging in my opinion, making you wonder what new challenge awaits you in the next area, instead of what type of line puzzles should you solve. In truth, I don't know if I can suggest this game to anyone. If you are the type of person who like phisolophical themes you may enjoy it. For the casual adventure player, you can skip this. 7/10

This game looks stunning but nothing else about it particularly shines. The puzzles in the game are basic line games. You draw lines in a maze like diagram where you have a start point and an end point. These open doors and routes around an island for you to explore. Sounds simple enough and it is for the most part but the game goes out of its way to make every iteration of these puzzles frustrating. Like the idea by itself wasn't versatile enough to give variety so they decided to break their own rules to make them more interesting. They failed. The puzzles were not more interesting they were simply frustrating. The open world in this game is a bad idea as well. It wouldn't be so bad but there is NOTHING indicative of where you might need to go next. There are a variety of puzzle tiers. You can't unlock some puzzles until you've been taught the basic premise of that puzzle. The issue is you find high tier puzzles as soon as you leave the first tutorial area. At first it was fine but I wandered off in a particularly direction and the path split into two routes. So I decided to take the right path. This then slit into another two paths, so I took the stairs leading into a castle like building. Got to the bottom of these and then ANOTHER split in the road. Before I knew it I was a LONG way from the starting area and totally and utterly lost. They can give you a nudge in the right direction without it being hand holding. I don't want a map marker or GPS I just want some indication of which of the seven billion routes I should be taking!!!!! I just started getting frustrated by it. The convoluted island layout the BS puzzles where half of the board is invisible or smeared across a shadow. Then you also have the pretentious audio logs.... In the end I didn't give a rats *** about this island or the people turned to statues around it. The ending would have to be AMAZING to get over the frustration of getting there. I just know it won't be though.

This game is not for everyone. It's calm, pointless, but beautiful and logical. I just about completed the whole thing without any hints, but with constant challenge. It truly is an amazing experience. Yes, it's a little pretentious, and the ending is a bit weak, but the journey is so so good. If you like spending your spare time doing sudoku, slitherlinks, nonograms, etc, then this is probably right up your alley.