The Witness

Most of the puzzles in the witness are fantastic, with really satifying apiphanies and reasonable ways to understand hard puzzles by doing other puzzles elsewhere in the world. However, this game does have a core issue that it does nothing to solve. There are certain puzzles where if you don't get the idea, you will be stuck, in many cases indefinitely and in most of those cases it will create an absolute barrier towards progress. These puzzles often double up as being very one dimensional meaning once you figure out the mechanic (often required for the first puzzle) the puzzles become "find where the designers wanted you to stand". As if that was not enough these puzzles also often come with the issue of punishing you for getting them wrong by locking themselves and requiring you to go back to the last puzzle which still has the solution and redraw it in the most direct example of a game punishing a player by wasting their time I have ever seen. There is an argument to be made that due to the games open world nature these kinds of mechanics ok because if you get stuck just go to another puzzle. This is secretly a trap, because you need to do almost every area to complete the game if you do walk away from areas you don't understand and are never expanded upon elsewhere what actually ends up happening is when you want to complete the game you have 1 or 2 areas you won't be able to get meaning you either will spend hours trying to figure out anything, or cave and look it up. Either way you go into the endgame frustrated and mentally fatigued. I really wish steam had a middle ground, because I did enjoy several parts of this game throughly but that frustration going into the endgame tainted my experience enough to send it slightly into the negative.

I didn't really care for this game. If I had to guess, I finished about 80% of it, before I decided I could not be bothered anymore. Discourse abut the game led me to believe that this was a puzzle game that tests out-of-the-box thinking, which attracted me to it. My experience with The Witness was, unfortunately, the contrary. The core puzzling gameplay is maze drawing, which is in itself not very interesting. The game expands upon this core by, in each area, introducing a new mechanic that expand on the existing formula. Figuring out new mechanics was overall very fun and satisfying. Is is therefore unfortunate that only about 15% of the puzzling consists of figuring out new mechanics, whereas 85% of the puzzling consists of applying previously learned mechanics in various ways to the maze drawing game. Usually, requiring about as much out-of-the-box thinking as a sudoku or crossword puzzle. It is really cool how this game teaches you to understand a certain puzzle mechanic, not by explicitly describing its rules, but by gradually exposing you to harder and harder puzzles featuring said mechanic, implicitly building your understanding. I did encounter one instance where the game failed at this, however. One series of puzzles taught me a straightforward understanding of a mechanic, but I eventually found a complex puzzle I could not solve. I revisited previous puzzles to falsify my understanding of the mechanic, but to no effect. I eventually resorted to looking for the answer online, and found that the correct understanding was much more counterintuitive and convoluted than expected, breaking a rule that had seemingly been previously established. Strangely, the puzzles that follow it slowly guide you to the correct understanding. It seem like an oversight, but it amounted to a very frustrating experience. For the rest of the game, I also found the non-puzzle aspects of the game mediocre at best. The world is pretty, yes, but it's also quite lifeless and, for lack of a better word, shallow. The music didn't stand out to me as being particularly good or bad. I severely disliked the hidden voice notes and video clips, which amounted to nothing more than out-of-context pseudo-intellectual pseudo-spiritual mumbo jumbo. I have the distinct impression the developer felt the need to add something resembling a theme to the game near the end of development, and it being too late to fully flesh out a story, simply threw a bunch of deep-sounding wisdom at the game hoping that something would stick. I don't regret buying the game for eight euros. If I had bought it at the original price of 36 euros, however, I would have been massively let down.

This game is intentionally designed to waste your time. Everything is comically slow, from animations to movement. There's one puzzle that [b]you need to stay still for an actual hour[/b] to solve. Another puzzle has a window of opportunity once every 14 minutes. Videos and cutscenes are ridiculously long, we're talking 10+ mins for most of them. It's not even over. I've never played a puzzle game that does a worse job at establishing ground rules than this one. The devs decided to chain most puzzles just to make it more tedious when you inevitably attempt trial and error. If you fail one, you have to go back and solve the previous one again. Braid is one of my all time favourite games. I thought their second game would be just as good. I wish I could go back in time to refund this game. What a waste of time.

TLDR: The game is pretty, and decently fun, but if you have any difficulty whatsoever with telling colors apart or audio processing, do NOT play this game. I've played a little over two hours, and found one section (so far) of color-based puzzles and one of audio puzzles that require you to track rapid changes in pitch. The color section is fairly straightforward; the audio section involves picking out high-mid-low notes from ambient birdsong. There is, of course, no accessibility mode. There are subtitles (allegedly) but I have them on and they've never triggered. I can't return the game since I've played too long, so I'm just going to have to use a walkthrough to get past the parts I flat-out can't play.

the game itself is interesting but no matter what settings I try, I can't play for long without severe motion sickness kicking in. so for me, it's sadly unplayable. no game is worth feeling sick to your core for hours after just playing for 20 mins.

I really love the Myst games and The Talos Principle. But for some reason I don't like The Witness. The Myst series features obscure, technically difficult puzzles, but they are more grounded in the world and story. The Talos Principle features totally abstract puzzles divorced from story, but they are more kinetic and interactive and intuitive, more like engineering puzzles than anything. The puzzles in this game have the obscurity and technical demand of the Myst series, but without that series' story anchoring. And it has puzzles that are full-on abstractions akin to The Talos Principle, but they lack the kinetic, hands-on fun of those puzzles. As the rules and variables of these line puzzles start to stack up, I simply wasn't having fun trying to hold all the spatial and logical geometry inside my head all while knowing that my reward would simply be another puzzle, and possibly a much harder one, immediately after. Whatever the underlying mystery to all this is, the game wasn't presenting me with any really intriguing carrots to motivate me to continue. That said, this game is clearly meant to appeal to a specific kind of gamer, someone who enjoys difficult puzzles for their own sake and who specifically likes applying algorithmic switchboard logic to solve problems. But I wasn't getting either of the two conditions I need to find these kinds of games fun, so it's just not for me. I might still occasionally dabble and poke at the game out of stubbornness, but I doubt I will complete it. I'll leave this review positive, though, since I think it's an objectively good game for the people it's intended for. At the end of my reviews I like to do a little funny bit as a palate cleanser, so enjoy the following: [spoiler]( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)[/spoiler]

The game was unique and very fun to play when I first played in however I was unable to complete the game because it required speed at the end and being 81 it is very hard to have that necessary speed any more. The puzzles were pretty tough but that is the beauty of the game.

把整个世界当成手机解锁模拟器玩 二编：需要带脑子 三编：有些地方就算带脑子也没用