The Witness

I thought this game was brilliant. It's basically a massive puzzle. It takes thought, logic, and some frustration! But so satisfying when you crack each bit. And the 'world' looks nice and is part of the puzzle itself. Soon you will be seeing circles and lines everywhere you go. I've played it through twice with a long gap in between because then you forget the rules of the puzzles and can experience it again. Not for the faint hearted, but if you love a challenge and have patience then this game is for you.

...but becomes tedious after a while. Really enjoyed several hours into the game, some of the most memorable puzzles were the ones relating to nature and environment. After a while I simply lost interest. If you are looking for a superb puzzle game experience I would like to draw your attention to The Talos Principle.

"This game respects you as an intelligent player and it treats your time as precious. " ...there's a puzzle where you literally have to stand still for an hour. Several puzzles make you go back and re-solve the previous puzzle to be able to attempt them again if you try and fail. There are a ton of puzzles where you simply have to find something, almost to the point of having a pixel-hunting aspect. Like you see the shape but unless you stand at a very specific place, the game won't let you activate it. All that said, despite these annoying, smug features, the game manages to somehow still be fun. The island is very colorful and diverse. The puzzles are very easy - once you know where they are and what exactly you need to do. Finding the puzzles, and finding out the rules of each puzzle type are the main challenge in this game, not the puzzle solving.

If you are looking for a puzzle game like Myst, you maybe disappointed. The graphics are similar, but that is where the similarity ends. The puzzles tend to be uninspired. Almost all falling back to 'do a maze, but use some component of the environment as a clue'. There is no layering to the puzzles, which Myst did fantastically well. Each puzzle can just about be considered a puzzle in isolation. You finish one puzzle, then may as well forget the solution as you won't need it later. It's pretty. The first few puzzles are clever, but quickly become repetitive. The story appears to be reasonable. It's what is keeping me going. If it was puzzles alone, I'd be requesting a refund.

Game features fairly large open world area containing "draw the line" type of puzzles, initial ones are easy to learn and first few areas are fair in difficulty, my gripe is when it comes to tetris shapes (found few that has only 1 solution out of 5-6 possible solutions) and town area where quite few puzzles are practicing mighty art of confutse (seemingly having no indicator or very vague indicator of solution to puzzle making it quite guess work). Overall I'm happy with area and variation of puzzles but dissatisfied on puzzles itself.