The Witness? More like Pretentious Myst, amirite?
All jokes aside, this is a very good puzzle game that does overstay its welcome. It took me 20 hours to beat it without a guide, but I could've shaved many hours from that had I realized how many puzzles were optional, and while the game isn't excessively large a sizeable portion of my time way spent running from one corner of the island to the next either because I forgot how a certain mechanic worked and needed to see a finished example (I'd recommend taking lots of screenshots to save yourself the time of running back) or because I wanted to take another crack at something I had put off hours ago. The world is open to explore from the start, so most of your playtime will be aimlessly wandering and solving whatever puzzles you find. If you encounter one you don't understand, you can go somewhere else and come back later once you've learned more of the puzzle mechanics. Some of the puzzles are so obtuse that even after successfully brute-forcing them I still had no idea how they were meant to be solved (I successfully forced my way through 4 out of the hundreds of puzzles in the game without having any idea how I was meant to solve them).
Some of the later puzzles are incredibly difficult, but outside of some absurd optional ones the difficulty is never unreasonable. Sometimes you just need to take a break for a day and come back less aggravated and the solution will come naturally, but by the time I reached the final gauntlet inside the mountain I was hoping every puzzle I encountered would be the last one so the game could finally end. Though the actual ending was a tad anticlimactic, as the game likely expects you to go back and solve everything (which I will not do).
