The Witness

I love puzzle games but this is terrible. Hundreds of repetitive maze puzzles and a lot of walking in between then to pad the time. There's like 10 times too many puzzles than it should be. 7 mazes displayed on some stand? Well okay, done. The cable lights up and enables a few more mazes on another stand. What will it be now? Oh they are the same type again... You will be doing this dozens of times for every maze type. There's also bu­llsh­it like puzzle turning itself off after a wrong attempt to waste your time. There's "environmental" puzzles where if you stand in a specific place, like merging two rocks into one, you can make a maze out of scenery but it's one of those ideas that sounds good on paper but in practice you can never be sure if player will ever stand in the right place to be able to see them. Sometimes I suspected something is there but when I wanted to activate it it wouldn't work because I didn't stand in the exact place dev wanted even thought it looked fine for me and took a few times to make it work. No explanation and having to figure out the rules of puzzles on your own is bad design. The difficulty should come from the puzzle itself, not from having to read the mind of the creator and guess what did he mean by this. Sometimes there are hints but they are in another area just to pad the playtime. It also causes an issue that when you don't know how to solve something, you don't know if you're just not thinking hard enough or if you should go somewhere else and maybe you will find some hint. Maybe you've already seen it or maybe there's no hint so if you go somewhere you will just waste time. Terrible design. Because the puzzles just aren't fun and they are interrupted by walking if you don't have a maze fetish there's nothing to keep you playing. There is no story, no characters, no lore. If the game wasn't a walking sim and just a game with level select instead then you could at least have some sense of completion. The way it is you don't know which puzzle brings you to the ending and which is just filler. The game insists upon itself. You can find some voice recorders with quotes of Einstein and others. Cringe. I paid $4 for it and I feel ripped off. Jon Blow has never made a good game. At least this game doesn't look like diarrhea like braid. It's a shame reviewers will always give his slop good reviews because they are afraid if they don't like a pretentious puzzle game people will say they are stupid. Because of good reviews he thinks "500 mazes the game" was good and now is making "1000 sokobans the game". Yawn.