The Witness Review (Sprongle)
The Witness is a nearly perfect environmental puzzle game for the first 15 or so hours. It's puzzles are very well designed, there are a truly shocking number of secrets to find around the world, and the environment is genuinely visually stunning. The game is far from perfect however. Over the span of a single hour, The Witness went from my all time favorite puzzle game ever, to something I genuinely couldn't imagine picking up again. It's end-game puzzles are either extremely obtuse, pointlessly frustrating, or both.
My advice to those considering buying The Witness are:
1) Don't try to 100% the game. Hell, don't even try for 90%. Get as far as you can while still having fun. The moment you stop having fun is when you should put the game down, because it'll genuinely drive you insane.
2) If you get stuck on a difficult puzzle, don't hesitate to look up a hint or solution. Chances are the game didn't communicate what you need to do in order to properly solve it, and there's no sense in ruining good experiences with nearly impossible puzzles.
3) If you come across a puzzle with symbols you don't recognize, that's the game telling you to go somewhere else. While the game is technically "open world", it tries to lock some sections behind difficult and unfamiliar puzzles.
4) The Witness has no accessibility options, so if you have a sensory impairment (specifically hearing, sight, or color blindness), many puzzles (including some needed to progress through the game) will be entirely impossible to solve without help.
If I could just forget the entire last section of The Witness, I would, and this would still be my favorite puzzle game ever. But I can't, so all I can do is recommend others not make the same mistake as me. Don't try to 100% the game. If you can buy it on sale, do it, and only play for as long as you can handle. Leave the game there, and remember the good parts.