izigame.me

The Witness is, at its core, a puzzle game where you literally draw straight (or not so straight) lines to solve each puzzle. And basically, it’s quite a decent puzzle game, I’d say. If you just do the minimum required to finish, it will remain the same decent puzzle game you initially thought it was. The level design is pleasing to the eye, and the ambient sound doesn’t require any additional music; it all plays quite calmly, without unnecessary hurry or nerves. I’ll come back to that last point later.
Now, imagine you’re the kind of player who hunts for all sorts of easter eggs (the game will poke fun at this closer to the end, which I’ll also mention), and you start noticing those very easter eggs that you naturally want to collect. I’ll say right away: if you’re expecting some sort of reward for finding them, don’t bother—this game isn’t about giving you anything for your efforts, because the only ‘reward’ you get is the time you spent.
You’ll start noticing tape recorders scattered around the world that can be activated, giving you monologues, typically quotes from books, lectures, or works that touch on various themes like nature, science, religion, politics, human consciousness, and so on—basically, things fans of ‘truly smart people’ love to emulate. “This game has a deep subtext! We’re talking about the nature of human thinking here!” you might think, and maybe you’d be right. But personally, I couldn’t buy into that idea, and all those scattered quotes felt more like a way to waste the player’s time under the guise of ‘profound ideas,’ because the game doesn’t really make you reflect on anything. It doesn’t give you, as a player, anything to care about; it just reads you these dull lectures from the past. And of course, if you collect them all, you gain nothing except a sense of personal satisfaction that you found them, plus a bit of pseudo-intellectualism or a feeling of emptiness from having wasted your time.
Next, the second thing you’ll likely notice is that there are puzzles lying on the ground that lead nowhere but initially create a bit of mystery that you want to solve. Much later, closer to the end of the game, you’ll encounter fairly challenging puzzles based on a mechanic you’ve encountered all over the place but probably haven’t understood yet, since there was never anything truly difficult in those earlier puzzles to help you gain real experience. And this will come back to bite you.
To top it all off, the entire world itself is also composed of puzzles. That wall over there looks just like the familiar little starting circle for a puzzle, plus a line, and the end of that puzzle. You try to use it…and it works, damn it! Yes, the whole world is filled with puzzles not only on panels but all around you—flowers, clouds, buildings, stones, rivers, and absolutely everything are puzzles, even shadows. And then you become obsessed with finding all of them. To keep you from completely losing your mind, the game provides Black Obelisks in each main location. They give you hints about roughly what these puzzles look like and where you can find them. You figure out the rules of the game and set off in search of them all. In theory, this is a very cool and interesting idea. With great enthusiasm, you roam the world looking for these puzzles, watching each Obelisk fill up, and using the logic the game taught you to track down the remaining ones. And then…you find an Obelisk where you’re missing about five or six puzzles, and you start desperately hunting for them throughout the world. “After all, before I finish the game, I must find them all!” you think, making a huge mistake, because those missing puzzles are hidden at the end of the game, which you don’t intend to reach yet, as you don’t know where the true end is—when should you stop and look around for new puzzles, and when will you solve a puzzle only to be shown “Thanks for playing!” because it was the last one in the game? This is a major design flaw in this mechanic, because on the Obelisk, these puzzles aren’t even placed at the end symbolically, but rather somewhere in the middle, which you’d never expect. And there’s also the fact that some puzzles require you to sit for 15 minutes or so, just watching your screen until the image lines up, while others require you to start the puzzle and only after an hour of real time can you complete it—don’t miss your window, or you’ll have to start all over again and wait yet another hour. Another way to waste the player’s time.
Next, there’s a movie theater in the game where you can watch various video clips. I won’t go into the scientific value they try to convey, but the point is there are supposedly about seven of these clips hidden in the secret corners of the world. Then comes the fourth one… I hope you can guess, from the Obelisk experience, that it’s located in…that’s right, the end of the game, where you’re required to complete a certain ‘Challenge’ to unlock this mid-game video—an hour long—which ties into one of the puzzles in the game and is incredibly frustrating.
Speaking of this ‘Challenge’…it’s a subject of heated debate, but it’s specifically what pushed me to write a negative review instead of a positive one. The Witness is otherwise very calm and measured: you can take a piece of paper and a pencil, doodle, and think things through. But the ‘Challenge’ shatters all that with a roughly five-minute time limit in which you have to solve 14 random puzzles, generated anew each time, leaving you no chance to prepare. “You should have played the game honestly, then you’d have no trouble,” you might think, but 10 of these puzzles are essentially the same ones from the very beginning of the game—anyone can solve them. As for the last four, it’s likely only the second time you’ve ever encountered that type of puzzle, and their difficulty spikes tremendously. Any mistake forces you to start over from scratch, with the same 10 not-too-hard-but-annoying puzzles that you need to clear again just to even attempt training on the last ones. And for training, at best, you have three minutes left if you managed to blaze through the first 10 in two minutes. At that point, it’s more luck than logic: either you somehow solve a puzzle practically without looking, or you get so stuck that it’s easier to restart than to keep wasting time on it. And as someone who doesn’t like time limits, this game-changer really turned me off and left me thoroughly disappointed in the game.
From that, I can say the game might be decent and could keep you busy with puzzles for a few evenings, but going for full completion only leads to disappointment and regret over the time spent. That’s why I can’t recommend buying this game.