The Witness

Got a few things to say but not so related to one another, so I use bullet points. Hope it's readable. -First off, a beautiful island with great art style. But that's probably the best feeling I have after beating the game, which I was forced to due to sunken costs. -The main part of the game is based on line puzzle that are governed by a set of rules, with no written or visualized guidance. It's a good thing, I like the feeling of gaining knowledge myself. There are a couple of 'tutorial puzzles' that are well-written. -One major flaw of this game is, as I said in the title, doesn't know how to pick your best puzzles and present them. Imagine how the devs of Portal or BABA Is You when they create the levels: they might think of hundreds of different levels that exploit their game mechanics, but they only put the most well-crafted and creative ones in it, for the coherence of the story/theme of the chapter, or to avoid the feel of tedious when playing it. Clearly not what the Witness is capable of doing. -Some puzzles are too easy. In fact, most of the puzzles that I feel slightly creative are still too easy. But I won't go too hard on this because this is fundamentally restricted due to the nature of 'draw a line' puzzles. -Not really a criticism, but this game lacks soundtrack, any sense of humor, and an actual story. I'm not saying it's bad to not include these things, it's a choice for sure. But on the same time i can definitely picture what the game could become if it has those, and I would say the experience could potentially be better in overall -As to my last point, I believe I will rate this game higher considering it's historical factor: it's released 10 years ago, and right now I can easily find examples that exceed the Witness -Final complaint: I hate the Town. Since I figured out some rules there before going to the right locations where the mechanisms are introduced, it kind of drained out the 'aha' moment of them.

Taken from my review on: https://detachmentinreviewform.wordpress.com/2016/02/26/the-witness-review/ This is a great big puzzle game and I'm going to call it right now, one of the best games of 2016. If you liked Fract OSC then you'll love The Witness. You only interact with the world through line puzzles but they introduce new rulesets and mechanics at a pretty rapid pace to keep you on your toes. There are tutorial areas spread over the island and hidden things to find everywhere, and something I really like is that everything that happens to/on the island is directly caused by you. In a way, it can be described as a "Metroidvania" where instead of requiring items to get through an area, it requires knowledge of a certain mechanic. The progression is nice and open-ended, the difficulty curve is 95% perfect and every bit of dialogue in the game is optional (thankfully). In fact, there's no music either, just ambient sound and the sounds your puzzle-solving create, making it very relaxing to play. You can get to the "ending" roughly halfway through finishing the main areas but beating all of them without doing any exploring will take at the minimum 10 hours, and that's if you're a puzzle whiz. There's more than enough content to justify the price here. On the other (much smaller) hand, the (optional) audio logs you'll come across are often the exact kind of pseudo-philosophy that plagues many other modern puzzle games (several of them from a religious perspective, which is funny considering how intelligent they want these audio logs to sound). It's great that they're optional though, because maybe - just maybe - someone looking for a nice brain teaser isn't going to conflate line puzzles with the meaning of life and the universe. Overall, if anything about this game sounds interesting to you then get it.

Remember the TV show LOST? The Witness is for gaming what LOST was for TV. Some people loved LOST. The mystery, the additional complexity every single episode, the unanswered questions that continued to pile up, the beauty of the island, the recognition that we were only privy to a small subplot within something much grander in scale, and of course the finale - it honored the viewer's ability to imagine and create their own answers and resolutions and gave us an honorable goodbye to the people we fell in love with. Some people hated LOST. Wait was that a flash forward or backward? What about GPS? Polar bears, seriously? Could you answer a question without creating 17 more? WTF IS THAT SMOKE MONSTER??? And the finale - what kind of DooDooFest doesn't answer any questions at the end? You're supposed to tell me the truth! I am in the camp that loved LOST, but more importantly to this review, I loved The Witness. I love not having all my questions answered, I love the bread crumbs left behind by a plot that's gone missing, I love the puzzles that make my brain feel more challenged than it has in a long time, I love finding myself saying, "This puzzle's impossible. It breaks the rules." and then 5 minutes later forcing myself to say, "Ok, it may seem impossible, but I know it's not. How can I change my thinking to find the solution that doesn't break the rules?" I am totally engaged and filled with energy when I play - I receive from this game, it takes nothing. If ever I find myself frustrated I remind myself that I am too limited in how I'm thinking - the puzzles aren't the issue, my brain is. That shift allows me to see the solution because I stop pigeonholing the puzzles into what I think they should be. It's a masterpiece.

CPC categorizes *) puzzle in games as follows: -clever (QUERN) - hard for human, even harder for AI -whimsy (RIVEN) - hard for human, impossible for AI -tedious (THE WITNESS) - hard for human, dead easy for AI. Witnessing took me 100+HRS for period over two months. The Witness is a very well made... well let's call it a game, although it rather looks like some offshoot of Alzheimer Prevention, Anger Management Program. There is a vast island world to explore with lots of hidden passages and secret rooms. Presented in rather nice graphic, apart from eye-burning colors now and then. With few exception, the only interaction is solving maze puzzles on flat screens - standing, laying ang hanging all over the island. Puzzles are of two kinds; pure math's topology problems and environmentally clued. The latter have always clues around, mostly ridiculous but unambiguous, once spotted. Puzzles are mostly tediously difficult and soon feel boring before they turn into obsession. I reach the end of the game by accident at around 70% of puzzles and didn't know it was the ending until … it ended.- so disappointing the ending is. The game conveniently autosaves just before entering the ending, so I came back to check unfinished businesses. It looks to me that the game can be finished just at above 50% of puzzles/explorations. I didn't enjoy this game, nevertheless I completed it - Oslo syndrome, I guess. There is no story, just random quotes and symbols regarded as wise and - what most important - I didn't find out who the witness is and witnessing what? That being said I feel The Witness deserves no less than five stars but without recommendation. ------------------------ Clandestine Puzzle Council bulletin XXVLMC, vol.23, line 12, column 5, 2027

It was exactly the game I was looking for in pushing my boundries. I probably did 85% of these on my own, occationally needing a nudge to get the logic they were going for. It loses a star because of some of the unnessary punishments they add. A good example is a puzzle involving an elevator. It's made hard enough going up, but make an error, and it sends you back to the bottom...soooo slowly. There's enough trial and thought to almost all the puzzles that adding a 2min reset to getting it wrong is just punative.