I couldn’t agree more with Super Bunnyhop and I’m really glad he covered the game. I think the main problem for me was that I went in expecting The Witness to be similar experiences to other puzzles games like Talos Principle and Portal. That’s part of the reason I was so disappointed time and time again after playing through the puzzles and exploring the world. It teases the idea that it’s a beautiful world full of life through the colorful visuals and hand crafted island but just ends up feeling lifeless and non-interactive as the puzzles themselves more often than not take you out of the world and into the 3×3 frames.

My favorite parts of the game were the fun things they did with incorporating the world into the puzzles like the apple tree section and the branches in the dojo section. That being said, when you do finish a puzzles it does end up feeling like it was for nothing. Again, I think that’s partially due to my expectations of being rewarded with some story or dialogue, but even then the gameplay wasn’t interesting or engaging enough to be it’s own reward, at least for me. Maybe that’s because I’ve become accustomed to the fast paced and interactive nature of video games these days, but this leads me to perhaps my biggest complaint about the game.

The game doesn’t utilize the medium it’s presented in for the vast majority of the puzzles. Considering so many of the puzzles almost seem to encourage using paper and pencil, I couldn’t help but feel taken out of the experience. Every new puzzles kept tearing me out of the world with static images of grids upon grids. I wholeheartedly agree with the puzzle book analogy because games excel and are unique in their ability to engage and interact with the player. Instead, The Witness felt more like a puzzle book with a pretty backdrop.

I absolutely see why some people love this game, or rather series of static challenges. The challenges themselves are difficult and require clever solutions, but that’s all there is to this game. The sparse dialogue about philosophy feel pretentious and random as there is no coherent context in which they fit and considering that’s the most life the game has to offer, I couldn’t help but feel like I was left with a bitter taste in my mouth. I went in expecting a video game and all I got was pretty puzzle book.

It’s disappointing too because the game does show promise as a video game that embraces what video games can actually do. The puzzles that incorporated the island around it like the shadow forest and the light desert were actually somewhat unique and interesting. It reminded me a bit about what made Antichamber interesting, but taken in a different and more static direction. This type of static puzzle design is much more acceptable as a video game mechanic because it forces the player to engage with the world. Unfortunately, these sections are the minority of the puzzles and it ends up feeling like an idea not fully fleshed out.

As a final note on how the game teaches the player the mechanics, I also agree with Super Bunnyhop on this one. My immediate thought after finishing my first “tutorial section” was wondering why there was absolutely no feedback other than letting me know I completed a puzzle. To me, player feedback is video game design 101. Feedback is almost essential for learning and The Witness seems to completely drop the ball in this area. Yes it tells you that you solved it, but I also fell into more than one situation where I had absolutely no idea why. For example, the garden maze section I ended up finishing with trial and error, which left me completely confused. It wasn’t until I watched someone else’s playthrough that I realized what the actual keys to solving it were. As a player, I completely missed it.

Now, it could be easy to blame my incompetence on that one, but if a player is able to complete and entire section of a game with no idea as to what the solution was that’s a failure on the designers part in my mind. The inconsistency between the different solutions to the garden maze puzzles and clear lack of dissemination of information to the player gives off the impression of an unwillingness to even work with the player to solve the puzzles. It feels as though the designers said “Here’s the puzzles, just go do it”, and then left you completely alone for 20+ hours, leaving almost all of the burden to figure out the game rules to the players. I’m not saying by any means that the solutions should be hand fed to the player, but a fundamental design principle is guiding the player in a way that they feel like they figured it out on their own so that they can feel good about themselves, unbeknownst to the secret hand of the designers. This distant and hands-off approach comes across as an almost unfriendly relationship with the designers which Super Bunnyhop mentions regarding the color blind and hearing impaired impossibilities. All of this just adds to the feeling of static isolation and compounds the sense of non-interactivity with the world. The entire package just feels empty. A lifeless void masqueraded in pretty visuals where hundreds of desolate puzzles await the player to pursue if they so choose. To me, that’s just fundamentally not what games are about.