The Witness

Я обожаю эту игру. Небольшие советы: Все головоломки проходимы Каждая деталь, каждая головоломка, каждый уступ для чего-то нужны Лучше не открывать гайд впринципе, правда. Лучше дропнуть игру, чем разочароваться тем что не заметил очевидную деталь и из-за этого не смог пройти игру сам

This is a genius game. My only gripe is the sometimes very pretentious audio recordings of people philosophizing. It feels like the game is presuming to tell you what ideas you should subscribe to. But those few moments aside, this is a brilliant puzzle game and a beautiful work of art. And the puzzles get very challenging.

No tutorial, and you have to figure out how each type of puzzle works by either observing your surroundings, or understanding the mechanic at each puzzle. 100% dopamine each time you start understanding each puzzle.

This is a very well designed game The puzzles are clever, and the main mechanic is exploited to 100% Problem ; it's not fun The idea is great on paper, but falls flat very quickly. An exemple of that is the moment you realize you can "interact" everywhere, not only the screens. Great moment, but then you start to "interact" with everything that looks like a dot and a straight line and it's... not an enjoyable anymore. You start to fight the game engine just "to get through" some puzzles (the underwater archeology caverns, or the boat / landscape ones). This theme of "great at first, tedious after" could resume the entire game. The audio puzzles (chippin birds) in the forest for example ; At the beginning, you're left wondering what's the goal of that specific screen. You see the speaker. You hear the birds. Then you realize. That was really awesome. And then you realize that you will repeat that neat mechanic for the next few screens, with an non-interesting increasing difficulty (the phone ringing ? Come on man, that's so cheap). Through the use of that simple mechanic (draw a line on a screen), the game feels sooooooo grindy and repetitive. Do puzzle => Open door => Do puzzle => Open door. With no variations. The whole game is like that. And the cherry on top ; the puzzles, despite being litteraly parts of the environment, are not narratively intersting. What do I mean by that ? Well, maybe I'm dumb (in that case, my bad for being piss-finished), but I just can't see where the game is going. There's this whole "being witness of something", realizing slowly how the island works through epiphanies that are more frustrating than fullfilling (I get way more "f*ck I'm glad that's over" than "Oooh sheesh I get it now that's neat"), and gibberish about the sense of things (sorry me no smart). But why screens with lines to trace ? What's the point of THAT mechanic in particular ? I don't get it. Jokes aside, the game seems to sound way more clever then it really is. Be humble man, no need to quote a random philosopher to get some street cred. Start by making good puzzles in your puzzle game. Pros ; [list] [*]The art style is really beautiful, I love it [*]The way the player character moves, it's smooth af. Looks like it is navmesh-based, with how you move on rocks and all ? [*] That's it [/list]

Played through on console back in the day, had me feeling a little like Charlie Kelly (part of the charm). Other than that it's a lovely game with nice puzzles. Will need to revisit the rest sometime while it's still out of memory, but there are other ones like this that may be worth going through too

This game started as boring at best, and a waste of time at worst. The final area is an absolute accessibility nightmare. Do not play this game if you have any kind of photosensitivity.

If you are looking for ONLY puzzles this is a great game. If you are also hoping for a story - well, you're not going to get what you want. There's hints here and there, but there's no clear narrative. You have to do all the optional content to get what crumbs there are - find all the recordings, do all the puzzles, complete all the obelisks. Even with that, I was disappointed there wasn't more insight into a world that clearly has some worldbuilding/backstory that the developers decided they didn't want to share. I will say it has incredible design - just about everything in this game is there for a purpose. A lot of things that have you thinking 'hmm that's interesting' probably ARE more interesting than just for looking at - it might be a clue for nearby puzzles, or part of something else. For all puzzles, there is a way to solve them, and you don't HAVE to guess. If you think you don't have the information you need then you need to look around (possibly, look around while standing in a different place), or maybe go do puzzles somewhere else first and then come back.

I refuse to play a game without sensitivity controls

The Witness insists upon itself at times but I still enjoyed it quite a lot. There's something very satisfying about learning the nature of each set of puzzles. Admittedly, I did look up one or two answers after hours of searching for the right angle on a few individual screens. But I don't feel like I've committed some great sin, for the puzzles are plenty and their cunning will test you more and more; even after you've gotten the logic down.

The Witness is an invasive game to the mind. A puzzle game with no instructions and simple mechanics. Yet it ever so prevails in the headspace of the player. It's ability to so clearly indicate the rule behind each puzzle without any command can not be understated. When people talk about difficult games, somewhat ironically, they talk about mainly action rpgs or metroidvanias where the player explicitly grows stronger as the game progresses. Nothing changes in The Witness you are the same now leaving as you were entering, in terms of the pc. Only the player grows. Your angle at which you see the world or put simply your percecption is the thing that changes. In that aspect it's a very forward thinking game as what it teaches the player is more valuable than what most games could get out of a hundred playthroughs. Not just the idea that you can succeed given enough time and enough effort but an entirely different approach, often a literal new line of sight is required to solve these puzzles. Very rarely some don't even guide the player into the expected solution but you are able to solve it regardless by taking in everything. All the puzzles that you solved before it and everything it taught you about the function of the game. It took me over thirty hours to beat this game (most likely more due to how much you end up replaying the puzzles in your head) because it is such a captivating experience. There are puzzles outside of a grid you have to solve, some hints lie in the audio or environment. This is such a beautiful world, oozing with life and put together so articularly it could be confused for a schematic for a rocket ship. It is more than worth your time and attention if you be patient and let yourself figure out the puzzles and when you see something you don't understand you look elsewhere to do more puzzles not just because they're intrinsically fun but also in the fact that every puzzle really does help build your repertoire of angles that you can see the world in. After all we are only a Witness.