(From steam copy of game) As a tech demo, it's gorgeous. As a video game, it won't grab you as much. It took me 4 hours to do everything you can do in the game, and that wasn't a great number of things. There are a few kinds of puzzles but they are all pretty simple, the main one being reconstructions of past events. You move around looking for clues in an area, then once you've found them all you have to figure out what order each clue "happened" in. It's a very interesting premise for detective-style gameplay but really, it never goes beyond that. No, "narrative" is not an excuse. It's become such a buzzword now that anyone will use it as an excuse for a game not having gameplay or a good hook. Just like "experience". How about this one? "Talentless". To clarify, this DOES have gameplay, I just wish they'd developed the ideas further. Maybe in a sequel?
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.
Yes, it looks great and the sound design is amazing. We all know that by now. I'm not very far into the game but this needed to be said if reviews are to be actually informative and not just gush and give 5 stars. Nobody is talking about some of the technical stuff, so here it is. 30 fps lock, like Nuclear Throne but more of a problem than with that game. I've lost the character in the action more times than I can count already and it's caused a LOT of deaths. It just doesn't stand out enough from everything else to easily tell what's going on when zipping around, slashing and dodging dozens of enemies at a time. Combined with the low fps it makes it hard to follow. The cursor is also not visible enough, it's just pure white with a lot of transparency, so that ALSO gets lost a lot and caused a lot of deaths. You need to know where the cursor is not only to aim the gun, but because when you dash you will dash towards it. Making it brighter or stand out more would have been a big help, or even also having the mouse lock to near the character, like Galak-Z for fast aiming would have been great. Combined with the previous two issues, you also get knocked down from certain (read: many) attacks, can be killed very quickly (there are even a lot of insta-kill traps) and when you die, any items or collectibles in that room DO NOT SAVE. No, having a screen that shows every time the game launches saying "Use a controller" is not an excuse to not properly make the game playable on the PC's primary and native control method. Most of all, please fix the cursor.
I was gifted this game on steam by a friend and while the idea provides a couple of hours of enjoyment at best, there's not much content to back it up. However, you will get a CONSTANT stream of internet "humour" and garbage references which completely kill the game. It's not funny or tasteful, it's just disgusting and charging money for it is absurd. If you're going to make something, MAKE SOMETHING, don't use everyone else as your crutch.
