The Witness

2024-12-02
Tremendous wankfest by a Blow(hard). But even as a notorious Puzzle Hater I had some good fun here.

The complete dearth of instructions of any kind is pretty tremendous. You start with very basic puzzles you have to implicitly understand the rules of and then gradually move up and up, synthesizing concepts from across different puzzles till...well, till you hit a wall. And at this point a true Puzzle Enjoyer would walk away from the computer and noodle on the various number-based, color-based, or perspective-based conundrums encountered and let their brain subconsciously decipher a way forward. But I just throw up my hands after a bit, Google some hints, and go "Really, that's the rule you wanted us to figure out?" Ah there are many such moments for the Puzzle Hater.

Sure there are things to nitpick here. The fiddly shadow and light based puzzles that occasionally such precision that even having the right answer I'd think I was wrong. The wankery with the poetry and music--I mean come on, dude. I've read War and Peace but you don't see me banging on about it. And, well, that's it. It's a terrific puzzle game. Which for me means it was kind of just fine.

2023-02-06

I actually went in expecting to kind of loathe this game because generally speaking puzzles are not my favorite part of video games. I've even loathed parts of Zelda, a game series known for good puzzles, due to its puzzles. But you know what? There are some really good puzzles in here. The way you start with the simplest possible "puzzle"-- if you can call it that--and move up to incredibly complex puzzles is really cool. The really impressive bit is there are no instructions. The only speech or text in the game is flavor, little recordings of people reading quotes from various books (a pretentious touch). You have to infer the rules of the puzzles by solving them.
This approach is hit or miss. I think I would often get like 80% of the rules for the puzzles but even missing that 1/5th meant some were basically impossible till I looked online and someone explained things. Could I have figured it out on my own given enough time? Absolutely. And the biggest fans of this game do have 50-100+ hours played in the game. It's clearly a game you're meant to walk away from, noodle on, and come back to. That's not my style so I was always going to clash with it.

My biggest complaint on the puzzles is the puzzles that require you looking around the environment. Not the environmental puzzles but the ones involving shadows and lighting. That require incredibly precise positioning in the world to solve. These I found fiddly and imprecise and for some of the shadow ones it seems like you'd need a large piece of paper to work through them. At best they felt like too much work and at worst they were fiddly to the point that I had to use trial and error to solve them.

The world is gorgeous. The layout of the levels is very cool. How it all links together is fantastic.

Ultimately though it was too hard for me. I ended up using a guide after finishing about 1/2-2/3rds of the puzzles myself just to speed through the end. And the ending ends by sending you back to the start. A very funny ending to a very odd game.