The Witness Review (AM DERG)
I've struggled to decide whether or not to recommend this game for months.
The Witness is an experience that stuck with me for all of the wrong reasons.
Nearly every part of this game's description is an abject lie.
It does not respect your time.
It does not respect your intelligence.
It does not respect your wallet.
Johnathan Blow, to spite the people who searched for a deeper meaning in Braid, crafted a bloated, $40 puzzle game with lengthy audio logs. He forces you to stand in place should you want to listen to them - and of course you would - after all there's supposed to be clues, a mystery to be solved. So you listen, for minutes on end to philosophical drivel in hopes of something meaningful. But they're all stock quotes from various philosophers, cherry picked to link thematically to the game's paper thin meaning. None of them shed any unique or meaningful light onto the island itself until the game has the gall to simply dump all of that onto you at the very last minute in the most patronizingly stupid resolution possible. The kind of cliche resolution that people make jokes about.
There is plenty of filler content, and a great deal of time can be spent simply waiting in order to solve certain puzzles - again in the vain hope that they'll lead to something of value. They do not.
If you want to simply solve puzzles with no connective tissue between them, that is perfectly acceptable - there are plenty of other games which do so. Picross is a fine example.
But The Witness wears the skin of something bearing some semblance of a story and delivers nothing.
While the island is pretty, and the puzzles come together nicely and occasionally with satisfying solutions that make you go A-ha - a fair few of them do not. A lot of them do not. A lot of them are simply you going through the motions of you satisfying the game's desire to see that you've learned its lessons to the point that they become almost predictable in escalation, and the solutions equally so.
The Witness has no payoff.
In spite of all it tries to elevate itself, it is nothing more than a mere puzzle game.
Maybe that's the game's true message - a joke aimed at people who search for meaning where none exist.
If it is, that doesn't make it brilliant, even if it wants to be.
It just makes it $40.