The Witness

This game is weird, which usually I would really enjoy. In this game though, it's weird in a really pretentious and boring way. The game itself is really pretty, and the setting is quite lovely. It's so peaceful and at times cryptic that I kept expecting something spooky to jump out at me, but it never did. I think the first two hours or so of gameplay are the most magical and exciting. Learning the basic mechanics and exploring the vast island were incredibly fun and engaging for me. The experience did go downhill, though. This game really thinks that it has a lot to say about the meaning of life, but it really really doesn't. The setting wants you to explore and find hidden things, but often when you do you are rewarded with audio logs of a person reading a "meaningful" quote that can often go on for ages. Like, 3-7 minutes, with no indication of how long it will be before you start it. It absolutely destroyed the flow of gameplay for me, as sometimes I would stumble across one and stop to listen to it, only to find myself listening still, five minutes later, having forgotten what it was I was trying to do when I found it. This can be fine in some cases, but if you're pondering a puzzle when you find one it can completely interrupt your thought process. Coming back to listen to them later can be rough as well because they are often quite hidden or out of the way. The puzzles are all interesting, and they intend for you to learn their mechanics through completing easy puzzles and slowly increasing the difficulty. This is fine in some cases, but there were a few areas where the puzzle mechanics were completely lost on me, even when I would leave and come back after a few days with a fresh mind. In these cases there is not much you can do other than brute forcing or keep coming back with fresh eyes if you don't want to look up a guide. it can be quite frustrating. I tried my best to play without any walkthroughs so I kept leaving and coming back to the puzzle areas that I didn't understand. This meant that the last chunk of the playthrough naturally became the most frustrating and unfun, because I was left struggling with nonsensical (to me) puzzles that I absolutely couldn't wrap my head around for the last few hours of the game. I finished the game feeling annoyed and unsatisfied after struggling with one of the puzzles in the final sequence of the game, which completely ruined any atmosphere built up. I do think that this game overall does a good job of creating many different puzzle variants using the same base mechanic of using the grids, but the nonexistent guidance of the game can become frustrating when you feel like you've exhausted every solution or strategy to solving them. I often found myself having to retrace steps and re-explore areas over and over just to find one thing that I happened to miss on my first go-through of an area. This frustration absolutely detracts from the experience, and there was truly nothing more irritating than spending half an hour wandering and searching for some kind of small missed detail only to be met with a four minute audio log philosophizing about God. I really wish that you could pick up the audio logs and keep them in a notebook or something and listen to them at your own pace. Overall the experience ended up feeling very tedious and frustrating, and the sheer volume of puzzles became somewhat exhausting. It would take many many hours to complete every single puzzle in the game, but a lot of that time comes from the kind of hidden puzzles that expect you to keep a left click going for almost an hour. I think maybe if you played an hour or two per day over a period of weeks or months, it would be a better experience, but I don't know how realistic it is. I think that overall I would give this game a 4.5/10 that can be fun if you ignore certain aspects like the audio logs, but especially with the creator being a crazy pro-trump nut I think that I would give this game a pass.

I stared at a line for 45 minutes. Walked away. Came back. Looked at the same line from a 45 degree angle. Literally moonpied my Batman huggies. 10/10

one thing I’ve witnessed is almost $40 missing from my bank account and this quickly prompted an “aha! eureka!” moment. interesting puzzle. game? not as much. conundrum? jigsaw? the crux of perception? hmm. I feel like Jonathan Blow tried to convey some thought-provoking messages but could have found some better, more refined ways to transfer them. by this I mean that many answers rewarded by solving puzzles are by no means a result of labor but instead a crude copy-paste which instead of providing satisfaction to the player ends up generating awkwardness and second-hand embarrassment. would it have been so hard to at least apply rotoscoping to some of the featured lectures? perhaps it’s just my own subjectivity but I don’t feel like forcing players to consume real-world content under the pretense of a video game is justified. not only are some of the puzzles actually unreasonable in terms of time investment, but the in-game audio optimization and overall pace make playing it feel dull, repetitive, and thankless. the atmosphere and overall artwork are commendable but its sheer pretentious aura put me off. the soundtrack has nothing to write home about. additionally, some sound choices and environmental effects can effectively bewilder you and cause either unwarranted fear, or ridicule. I do recommend The Witness for its rawness and philosophical interpretation of post-modernism and metaphysics though I must stress that the elaboration falls short, and you could surely do better with saving yourself the money when plenty of content on Internet Archive is at your disposal to educate you through videos of Carl Sagan, Andrei Tarkovsky, Alan Watts, Richard Feynman, etc. ⚠️ [b] PHOTOSENSITIVE and MOTION SICKNESS warning [/b]⚠️ adjusting settings won’t do anything about it, and there are no sensitivity controls. 🐰❓

Игра доказала что я амёба. А так в целом игра пойдёт.

特别纯粹的一笔画解谜游戏，有探索、有知识锁，游戏过程中的尤里卡时刻也很多。游戏对于一笔画这个谜题设定加上不同环境的配合让人眼前一亮，常常让我惊叹这一笔画竟然还能这么用、这么设计。只不过这游戏确实是给纯粹解谜爱好者设计的，除了解谜、探索和发现新知识本身的愉悦之外，没有其它正反馈，也有一些较为冗长无聊的部分。尤其是我很晕这个游戏的 3D 第一人称视角，导致我对探索跑图几乎没有什么耐心（所以后期我找了个 Youtuber 游戏实况跟着他的游戏轨迹走，找到谜题再打开游戏，避免我自己探索了）。 这个游戏感觉是偏科特别明显的游戏，在解谜发现和游戏艺术里面达到了极致，但是其它方面相对平凡。 推荐给骨灰级解谜游戏爱好者。 8/10

Le jeu est pas si mal mais à certains gros probleme qui le rendent énervants chose qui est aux antipodes de ce que l'ont recherche dans un jeu de puzzles , de plus les puzzles vers la fin sont compliqué mais de la mauvaise raison , par exemple mettre des puzzles aléatoire avec un timer , c'est une très mauvaise idée et certain puzzles dans leurs réalisation sont soit épiléptique soit donne envie de vomir . tout de meme un 15/20 mais j'peux pas le conseiller à des gens qui serait + la cible . ah est d'ailleurs ca vaux pas 40 euros dutout , j'lai eu sur un bundle et j'suis Choqué du prix , c'est abusé la vie .

This game goes for quantity over quality, the puzzles are all pretty similar, but hey there's 523 of them so there you go. I called it quits out of sheer boredom after completing 250 of them. The vast majority of the puzzles have nothing to do with the environment, so the 3D first person setting serves as little more than a fancy background for an otherwise boring maze puzzle game. Some of my favorite games are puzzle games (Talos Principle, Antichamber, Manifold Garden, Portal) all of which have extremely creative puzzles and didn't feel repetitive to me. I got bored pretty quickly with the puzzles in this game.

A very heavy focus on puzzling leaves this in a hard area to give a flat recommendation to, especially with how specific a few are and how much you will be in scratching your head over them, something which is done better by other games in its class. Still, the general design is great, the game looks gorgeous and the sound design compliments everything very well. Definitely a game to pick up on sale if you like a good puzzle game (while this is a "MetroidBrainia" like outer wilds/chroma zero/tunic/animal well etc. the self discovery does take a back seat to the puzzling and compared to those games feels very underwhelming), otherwise buy at your own risk. (This is a mixed review, however for the point of how specific the target audience is it's a not recommend.)