The Witness Reviews
The Witness is an outstanding game, one that slowly reveals its brilliance and assumes the players intelligence rather than guides it. It is an absolute must play for puzzle fans.
The Witness is a masterpiece of video game design. It presents a mysterious and fascinating world to explore, full of puzzles that will confound the player, but also delight them as they figure out the solution. The island setting is both fun to explore and endlessly enjoyable to look at. The game's true achievement though is in how it teaches the player its intricacies, with minimal intrusion and subtle hints, allowing for a great feeling of accomplishment when everything clicks into place.
I'm so caught up inside the world of The Witness that it's hard to think about anything else. It is one of the best games I've ever encountered.
I admire a lot about The Witness. It is a beautiful game. It is a clever game. It is a big game. But all of its elements, mazes, exploration, and philosophy didn't really come together to express some greater theme. Unless I was meant to question why I hurt my brain to solve a series of difficult mazes for no real award.
The Witness is one of the most fulfilling games I've played in yonks and it accomplishes a rare feat. It's varied, playful, elegant, mysterious, challenging, and intensely focused all at the same time.
First-person puzzler set on an abandoned island is about perspective and perception, logic and learning, and applying an analytical eye to the world
Brennan Dyal lives in Baltimore, and actually likes it. When he's not playing games, he's disappointing his teammates on the basketball court, or going to Popeye's in disguise so they don't ask "Weren't you just here yesterday?"
A daunting, confounding, maddening, and beautiful game
The Witness is one of the best exploration puzzle games since Myst.
It's a brilliant, beautiful, masterfully crafted work, and the more you discover, the more apparent it is.
The Witness is a profound experience, unlike any other and certainly intimidating in its refusal to give away its secrets for free. However, those with the inclination to buy-in and delve deep will find a trove of excellence, in the way it utilizes simple mechanics to convey greater themes. One of the most cohesive and intricate releases you can find, but not for the faint of heart.
The Witness is a game that will genuinely have you punching the air or laughing out loud, just from correctly drawing a line on a grid. If that isn't the mark of a truly special game, I don't know what is.
Some fans of Blow's earlier work seem to have been hoping that the mazes they saw in the trailers are just a veneer for a deeper, mind-blowing experience, but really the world and whatever narrative you can find in it are dressing for an incredibly impressive collection of puzzles. Whether or not you find a deeper meaning at the end, the journey will have been worth it.
If you have any interest in logic puzzles and want to explore a pretty interesting world, the Witness is a must own.
They really don't make 'em like this any more. The Witness is an amazing game that you'll love to hate for its challenge, cursing it, wondering why you made the purchase, and then something will click for you, and it'll become one of the best games you've ever played.
The Witness is an example of superlative game design. Carefully crafted and mentally challenging. Everyone should dive into this world, it is the perfect game for several players to sit on a couch and solve. It will make your head hurt, it will tease your brain more than any game before it, but it also delivers satisfaction in solution better than anything else before, and perhaps after it. Play this game.
The Witness is an excellent puzzle game, featuring many complex yet fair puzzles, a great atmosphere, an interesting narrative method and a lot of content. With no handholding whatsoever, The Witness certainly is not a game for everyone, but those who are up to the challenge will feel enriched once they solve most of the puzzles included in the game. After all the delays, Jonathan Blow and his crew fully delivered.
The developers have managed to impart the rules of the game without a single bit of text other than the controls for interacting with the mazes and how to sprint.
With the involvement of Jonathan Blow, there's been a lot of chin-stroking and borderline pretentious articles going up about The Witness - understandably, given it's such an arthouse project. But there's no need for that here: the game is very good, and if you've even an inkling you might enjoy solving 600-plus puzzles in a gorgeous island setting, we'd heartily recommend The Witness.
The Witness revives the puzzle-solving portion of your brain that's lain dormant since Braid.