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.
