If you were to look up The Witness on Steam right now, you'll find a puzzle game with a price of €36,99. I'll tell you right now, it's not worth that price, but it thankfully goes on sale often at prices that are actually reasonable.
I think you should buy the game when it's on sale, unless you don't want to give your money to its main creator Jonathan Blow, which would be understandable when considering some things he said during COVID and his thoughts on today's sorry state of the USA.
With that being said, there will be spoilers for the game right below, so please consider playing it before keeping on reading!
Mind mazes
At its core, The Witness is a 3D game where you will find places featuring a dot as well as one or multiple slider ends, and your goal is to connect this dot to one of those ends by creating a path that does not break.
This is practically the same concept as the mazes you may have completed when you were a kid, and the game's first puzzles especially are very reminiscent of those. Rather quickly, some of the puzzles featured on panels will need you to follow additional rules.
The first supplementary rule you're likely to encounter is the one where you need to segregate the blacks from the whites. Like actually, the word "segregation" quickly popped up in my mind while playing the puzzles featuring that rule, and I wasn't alone! Point is, when such rules come into play, simply going from Point A to Point B is no longer enough.
Learning how those rules work requires trial and error, as those rules are essentially explained by the puzzles themselves and not through words, which is always a good thing on paper. In execution, I think it mostly succeeds too!
Apparently, some players bashed their head through puzzles that are easily accessible because they thought those puzzles were introductory puzzles meant to explain new rules, when in reality, those puzzles were meant to keep players that did not encounter those rules beforehand away. Thankfully, while I also found those puzzles early, I was quick to give up on them and to let "future me" handle those.
Giving up
How you approach this game depends on who you are, and that's something I really like about it. Personally, it usually took me several visits to an area in order to complete it. For specific examples:
- It took me 4 visits to even understand how to get started with the desert area (though after that, I did everything in one go)
- 3 visits to even notice the birds in the section with the birds
- 3 visits specifically for the final puzzle of the treehouse
- 2 visits for the symmetry island and the part with the apples
- Many through the monastery with the shutters and the swamp with many colours
That is to say, I tend to give up on something when I start to find it annoying, and I very often revisit it later on to successfully deal with it most of the time. I did not revisit the shipwreck and was not successful with the indoors place where flowers "grow", more on those quotation marks later.
A streamer I like to watch is Joseph Anderson, who happens to sometimes make game critiques, and one of those was for The Witness in which he described his experience with the game, and it seemed to me that he (unsurprisingly) was pretty stubborn and did areas in one go, quite differently from me.
There's a video in the Windmill where a certain blonde woman talks to a crowd, telling them it's good to give up, to "stop looking for what you want". This was the 2nd (and last) video I discovered, and I found myself roughly agreeing with her, at least in the sense that it's good to avoid tunnel vision, that stubbornness can prevent discovering new tools or perspectives. At least, that was my interpretation.
In his critique as well as in his watchalong of his own critique, I remember Joseph Anderson being very critical of that lady, as he seemed to have interpreted the video differently, I think namely because of additional context. That woman actually calls herself Gangaji, a spiritual writer and an adept of whatever Neo-Advaita is that is notable enough to have a short Wikipedia page about her, though I actually did not hear about her until after having played The Witness.
It is interesting to me that I ended up with a perspective that comforted me in how I play, instead of trying to think about the context in which the video was recorded, which would have likely made me watch it from a cynical point of view.
Audio logs and videos
The first and other video I discovered was a long, voiceless one which mostly consists of a man trying to bring a lit candle from one wall to another. I liked the long single shot, and I felt like the last shot was pretty cool, but what I felt most was confusion, as to what the context behind this video was and why this was in the game, and really not much more than that, so I immediately looked it up once the video ended.
Turns out it's the end of Andrei Tarkovsky's Nostalgia (1983). I did go out of my way to learn that Tarkovsky's movies have lots of symbolism, but essentially all of it is lost on me, an uninitiated, really. To me, this video was only useful to make me learn the name of a famous movie director!
Scattered throughout the game among other things are audio logs, all of which (I believe) are minutes-long quotes from famous people such as Einstein. An audio log with a quote from 1975's Russell Schweickart (an astronaut) about his perspective from above Earth's surface, can be found on top of the game's mountain.
So of course, that audio log is found at the highest point on the game's map. 1874's William K. Clifford's quote regarding a certain shipowner can be found in an audio log on a shipwreck. 4th century BC's Zhuang Zhou's quote about a boat can be found on a crashed boat. There aren't that many boats or ships in The Witness, I swear!
The point I want to make is that the placements of some of these audio logs are smart, but I think the same cannot be said for most of them. In fact, I don't think the existence of some of the videos or of the audio logs can be fairly justified.
They're mostly a waste of time to listen to, if not for practicing focusing and not losing track of what is actually being said. It is fun to pay some attention to not miss some of the sneakier audio logs, they almost feel like a reward sometimes, albeit a somewhat lame one.
A thing they kinda do is add a sauce, add something to the mood of the game, and I think that something might be life! Allow me to explain.
It's all so lifeless
During my playthrough, I slowly came to the realization that the island felt very dead to me. Despite spending hours in-game, the sun or the clouds never moved, no animal/wildlife (like a bird) could be heard* or seen, not even an insect though I don't normally expect to see insects in video games in the first place.
*(ignoring sounds presented as artificial, such as those that are presented like a recording)
No other human could be found and so many things on the game's map were in ruins. Yet, everything felt so convenient, improbable entrances existed, electricity never malfunctioned, the sand never rendered puzzles impossible in the desert, nor has the water rendered any puzzle inaccessible in the shipwreck, as far as I could tell.
Obstacles (shadows, objects in perspectives) that made puzzles harder existed because the puzzles were built with the obstacles in mind, there literally would not be a puzzle if the obstacles did not exist. Oftentimes, the obstacles actually feel arranged for the sake of the puzzles.
Worst of all are obviously the tree branches, they did not grow additional centimeters, they did not break, they never ever moved due to the wind or some other force, and only work because of that and because what compose the sky is entirely immobile. After some hours, nothing, not a single thing to me felt natural in this map.
Is that criticism? Kinda, yeah. The game ended up creating this unnerving atmosphere for me, in retrospective I almost feel like I got bait-and-switched when taking into consideration the 2nd video on the game's Steam store page which is a showcase of the island from a bird's-eye view. That atmosphere doesn't really work for me if it wants me to contemplate or think about puzzles or perspectives or things that aren't very intuitive.
Interestingly enough, there are still aspects of the environment that I really like, and I don't think it's necessary for everything to be dead for the aspects I like to work, in other words, I don't think everything being so dead is some sort of worthy sacrifice. Let's talk about what I like about the environment.
The environment is a puzzle
Earlier, I purposefully tried to be vague when I had to define how the puzzles were in The Witness, I avoided saying that the puzzles could only be on panels, because the most impressive puzzles this game has to offer are entirely in the environment, which often depend on your literal perspective.
Like seriously, it is really impressive to me all the puzzles and cute touches hidden in plain sight in the environment, how the game wrapped how I viewed the world, how I imagined puzzles in real life or in other places on my computer screen, recently still as I walked beside a tree, I tried looking at its branches from different points of view, different perspectives to potentially spot anything that could suddenly become obvious!
I admire video games that take simple concepts and manage to do so much with it. From my understanding, the environment took a while to be designed, so it's not like a simple concept means it was simple to implement for the developers. From my perspective as a player though, I have to say "good job" for hiding so many things in plain sight.
According to Steam, it took me 23 hours to finish this game (on the 26th of January while sick) although I have only reached the normal ending, I did not bother restarting the game to deal with the puzzles I chose to ignore or to find more secrets in the environment. It's worth noting there's little incentive to deal with the latter, they never rewarded me with anything, as far as I could tell.
Still, it's impressive it did hook me for 23 whole hours despite the rather simple premise of solving mazes! However, I do have some criticism to give when it comes to some of the puzzles themselves, namely when it comes to accessibility.
Accessibility, or lack thereof
The most I was personally affected with this game's accessibility issues was thankfully only during the puzzles where you need to play with either the light reflection or the shadows of tree branches or man-made objects, as I was playing with my graphics settings on the "Low" preset, but had to move to the "Middle" preset for a better experience, thankfully frames per second do not really matter in this game.
I'm thankful there are graphical options at all even though their presence in 3D video games is a standard nowadays. I'm also glad the game could run on my Linux system, although the Wine and Valve (Proton) teams are the ones I should send my thanks to, as it doesn't run natively.
However, if you're hard of hearing or colourblind, the game has no settings that would allow you to have a shot at some of its puzzles, and I think it's very much a shame. Don't get me wrong, you don't need to do all the puzzles to get the normal ending, but I don't think that matters much.
In a game where the usual reward for solving a puzzle is more puzzles, being locked away from some of them is a difficult fact to swallow. Why its only accessibility setting is whether or not a reticule should appear is beyond me. Then again, this doesn't really affect me.
Conclusion
Going into The Witness with as little knowledge as I could was a nice experience, one worth thinking about from time to time, and therefore I can recommend it to some people without much of a second thought.
But thinking of its useless media (videos, audio logs...) is somewhat irritating, maybe some people like it over the game's puzzles somehow, but I don't want the people I recommend the game to to think that this is one of the reasons I like this game. I recommend the game for its gameplay and for some of its more subtle aspects.
That game has more content than necessary, and will very likely hook you for a surprising amount of it, but definitely not all of it. What the game does is interesting, but finding things and solving puzzles is something that gets tiring, and that's okay with me.
The Witness also has other problems in my opinion, all of which resulting in me not feeling like playing the game again, unless there's an update one day. The discovery really is what's best about it, that can't be overstated!
So yeah, I think you should play this game, safely pirate it if you feel like your money would end up in bad hands, and don't forget about your rights to have a refund if the game ends up not being for you!