The Witness

Guy who has only played The Looker, playing this game: Getting a lot of "The Looker" vibes from this...

4.7★ You are The Witness in this amazing puzzle game. Play it. Now.

I hated this game. TLDR: The puzzle design often (but not always) feels frustrating and tedious. The thing in place of where a story would be is pretentious nonsense that barely exists at all. And the game seems fully intent on actively wasting the player's time. I think good puzzle design considers the path a player will take to reach a conclusion or solution and a great puzzle game deliberately designs everything around that path to guide you down it. Sometimes the Witness does this and does it well. The introduction is quite good, starting the player on a physically narrow path to push them to learn the line drawing logic that is the actual first step towards playing the game. Then the opening area presents some simple example puzzles and the idea that puzzles may not always have to be done in a specific order. Good tutorial but the moment it ends the design quality takes a nosedive. While a small few other places within the game endeavor to teach you an idea and encourage you to engage with it's application these areas are rare leaving several important ideas untutorialized and making a lot of the game and it's rules feel random and arbitrary. Despite the game encouraging you to stare at its circle and line patterns until you're literally seeing them in the world around you it never teaches you about the perspective based puzzles that make up a third of the game. And no, that one time the game centers your camera on the wrong rock because you need to step back and do the puzzle sideways so that some other random rocks in the background line up, doesn't count. Several puzzles like this make me feel like I need to read the dev's mind to find the solution. Not to mention the occasional one off puzzles like the one that looks like a radar next to the town or the puzzle in town that is actually lying to you by putting an unsolvable star pattern puzzle on a door when the actual solution is a perspective puzzle. Perspective is not a puzzle! It's waddling in little circles waiting for the solution to reveal itself. It's not solving anything. It's just time consuming monotonous effort. Speaking of monotony several puzzles use waiting as a mechanic. SEVERAL PUZZLES use literally standing around doing nothing as a mechanic! The windmill puzzle involves staring at the blades of a windmill while they slowly turn. A boat puzzle requires you to set the boat on its course, run into position, and then stand there waiting for a single chance at that puzzle. A cloud puzzle requires standing in the exact right spot and looking at the exact right clouds at the exact right time because one of those clouds is literally the only thing in the entire game that moves on its own without you interacting with something and it's on a 14 minute cycle. You have 1 chance to look at the sky from the perfect vantage point every 14 minutes. The eclipse puzzle genuinely involves standing perfectly still for 55!? real life minutes. Full disclosure, nothing else in this game passively wastes your time to quiet that degree again. "The Challenge" however, which you need to complete to even unlock the eclipse puzzle, actively wastes your time to an infuriating degree. "The Challenge" is a sequence of 14 semi random puzzles that must be completed in 6 minutes and 30 seconds. Ignoring the fact that the entire rest of the game is so dedicated to slow, patient progress that it doesn't even have music so you can embrace the ambience, a change of pace is not inherently a bad thing. However I have two main problems with it's execution. First the types of puzzle are not random. This is a good thing. Learning through repetition is a core part of both puzzle games and Time Trials. But, the order of these puzzles puts column puzzles, one of the rarest and most difficult puzzle types in the game, at the end giving you almost no ability to actually practice them. Secondly the details of each puzzle are randomized. Again this is fine. Solving a puzzle and then writing the solution a second time but fast isn't really a challenge. But, that randomness also extends to the difficulty of each puzzle and the range of difficulty is insane. I put hours into this stupid "Challenge". Grinding out puzzles and getting more and more familiar with solving them at speed. None of it mattered. The only reason I completed "The Challenge" was because I got lucky enough for the game to randomly decide to give me an easier selection of puzzles. Learning doesn't matter. Practice doesn't mater. I just bashed my head against a wall until it crumbled through perseverance alone. A strategy that the rest of the game actively discourages with a seemingly randomly implemented mechanic of puzzles deactivating on every failed attempt, forcing you to re-input the solution to the previous puzzle in the sequence to get another try. This mechanic is as effective in it's intent as it is yet another massive WASTE OF TIME! There are gems of quality in this game. Moments of understanding or realization that every game like this aspires to achieve but they are mired in an ocean of profound tedium. And what is your reward for the effort? What is the driving force that lures you forward? What is the end of this story? NOTHING! Both "endings" to this game are as vacuous and meaningless as the pretentious nonsense it monologues at you in place of where a story would be in almost any other game. The only story, the only dialogue in the flaccid soundscape of this musicless game is 49 audio logs. 6 of which contain behind the scenes conversations between the designers of "the experiment" with such glowing insights as 'that one time a guy asked a coworker if she wanted a sandwich' and meta commentary on all of this random nonsense coming across as "inauthentic" because 1 acknowledgement of your bad presentation just 180s it into genius! The other 43 audio logs are 1 hour and 16 minutes of thematic quotes. Just voice actors reading the writings of Albert Einstein and Nicholas of Cusa. This review has more emotion, more substance, and more words written into an original order than the Witness has in it's entire game. The quotes, the writings, the words, the ideas of these famous thinkers about the nature of knowledge and science and the universe and god all originally exist IN CONTEXT. The Witness provides no context. It does not engage with their contents or meaning. It has no thoughts about these quotes. It says nothing. These words, as presented, have the profundity of being framed and hung on the wall above your toilet that you might contemplate them during your daily bowel movement. I hated this game.