The Witness Reviews
Blow does it again. Exquisitely layered puzzles populate a world that will keep you guessing.
Following on from the massive success of Braid, The Witness is an engrossing and hugely satisfying experience that should solidify Jonathan Blow as one of the very best active game designers.
Big, beautiful and rewarding, Jon Blow's enigmatic puzzle epic is virtuoso game design - and only a fraction too clever for its own good.
The Witness has a power and pull that carried me throughout the more than 40 hours it took to complete it for the first time, and that, even now, beckons me back to confront the mysteries I left unsolved. Its graceful combination of tangible goals, obscurity, and freedom creates ample opportunity for small victories and grand revelations alike. For the most part, its themes weave themselves beautifully throughout the gorgeous world and wide variety of puzzles, but even when it breaks subtlety in favor of a more heavy-handed approach to exposition, it never detracts from the truly fulfilling moments The Witness offers in terms of solving its physical puzzles and unlocking its deepest mysteries.
As brilliant as it is infuriating, The Witness' ingenious puzzles all too easily have their shine worn away by length and a constantly extending complexity.
Fun and inventive challenges wait around every corner. If you want something more than a barrage of thoughtful puzzles (like a story), you should look elsewhere
In both structure and detail, The Witness is an original, difficult, and ultimately rewarding puzzle game.
The Witness is uplifting and frustrating
The intricate puzzles and tantalizing secrets of this starkly gorgeous, mystical island are enough to lose yourself in for dozens of hours.
A meditative masterpiece of virtual architecture and puzzle design.
more, everything about the game—its puzzle structure, its philosophical leanings, its mysteries—eventually comes together in pretty arresting fashion. Part of this is thanks to the game's multiple layers of puzzle-solving gameplay. We've been asked not to say more about that part. Players may need as little as an hour or as long as two weeks to figure out one of The Witness's coolest parts, but however and whenever players get to that point, it's a pretty clever one. (Some of the game's most incredible aesthetic trickery comes as a result of this part of the game, by the way. Kudos to Thekla for pulling it off.)
Asking The Witness to be a traditional video game is essentially asking the impossible.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 colossal achievement in puzzle gaming, with a very cleverly conceived setting and story, but the lack of variety and reward becomes stifling.
A daunting, confounding, maddening, and beautiful game
The Witness is an intentionally simple game to grasp, but enjoyment almost feels proportional to patience. These puzzles are absolute brain-breakers, so anyone that doesn't have the patience for them will get no enjoyment out of The Witness. I was certainly on the verge of being one of those people, but exploring the sheer beauty of the island and learning more about its central mystery turned out to make returning worthwhile.