The Witness

The Witness is a 2016 puzzle video game developed and published by Thekla, Inc. Inspired by Myst, the game involves the exploration of an open world island filled with natural and man-made structures. The player progresses by solving puzzles, which are based on interactions with grids presented on panels around the island or paths hidden within the environment.

Good Qualities

 * 1) Great graphics with a simplified art style that eliminates enough detail but keeps the overall shapes to make objects clearly recognizable.
 * 2) The game features several types of puzzles:
 * 3) * Mazes
 * 4) * Hexagons: These feature tiny black hexagon-shaped dots where the line you draw must intersect with each one along the way before reaching the end point.
 * 5) * Black & White Squares: You must use the line to "separate" the different colors. Squares don't have to be paired with all the squares of their same color, meaning it's okay to isolate them by themselves if necessary. Squares just can't occupy the same space.
 * 6) * Multicolored Squares: Behave in the same way as black and white squares. They must be separated, or walled off, using the line you draw, but because puzzles that feature multicolored squares usually include more than two colors, the challenge here is to section off more than two spaces.
 * 7) * Symmetry: Puzzles that feature a second entry point that draws a second line to mirror your own. Solving symmetry puzzles are all about finding the right path and avoiding dead ends so that both lines can successfully reach their separate end points.
 * 8) * Blocks: The line must partition yellow blocks so that the shape of the partition matches the shape of the groups of blocks contained within it. Tetris block puzzles require you to draw tetromino shapes with your line while making sure the symbol for that shape occupies a space inside the shape you’ve drawn. Multiple blocks can occupy a single partition, and they can be moved around within the partition. At times, you’ll need to combine two shapes to make it work, in which case it’s important to remember that the shapes you’re drawing don’t necessarily need to "contain" their corresponding symbols. As long as both symbols are within the space of your combined shape, you can rearrange the shapes themselves in any way that fits.
 * 9) ** Some of these puzzles will include groups of hollow blue blocks also appear within the cells of a puzzle and remove blocks from groups of yellow blocks. This can include overlapping blocks or blocks that are outside of a partition. If the number of blue and yellow blocks are equal in a partition, the partition will be valid regardless of shape. The outlined blue Tetris-like blocks can cancel out blocks from Tetris shapes, allowing you to modify the shape you need to make. Think of them like "negative" blocks capable of subtracting pieces from tetrominoes
 * 10) * Stars: The line must separate the stars so that each colored star is paired with exactly one other puzzle element of the same color, which can include other stars, blocks, or jacks. Unlike squares, stars can be grouped with stars or blocks of other colors. Stars must be separated into pairs if they’re the same color, but can be grouped with other pairs of stars if they’re all different colors. In cases where there are an odd number of stars, it’s possible to substitute a square of the same color instead. Since it acts as a replacement star, that square must be isolated from any other squares from the same color to count as well.
 * 11) * Jacks: This symbol acts as a way to subtract one element from a puzzle, but the symbol has to share a space with the element you want to subtract. While this rule is first introduced using red and green squares, it can be used to eliminate any rule from a grid, including black hexagon dots, Tetris blocks, and stars.
 * 12) * Triangles: Triangles appear within the cells of a puzzle. In order to complete the puzzle, the cell containing the triangle must be surrounded with a number of lines equal to the number of triangles within the cell.
 * 13) * Environmental: Several puzzles revolve around environmental clues that vary depending on where you are.
 * 14) The game has an interesting way of using perspective as you can look at things in a way to make it look like something else. For example, in the Town you can a rock figure with his hands out, and while it may seem like nothing, if you look at its shadow, you'll see three rocks that are aligned with the shadow to make it look like the statue is juggling.
 * 15) To further enhance this, there are hidden environmental puzzles that are found all across the island. These puzzles usually start with a large circle, travel a path, and end with a half circle.
 * 16) You can find a boat that works as a kind of fast travel.
 * 17) There's a hidden ending at the very beginning that explains what's happening. If you align the sun using the gate from the starting area, you open a path that leads to what looks like a hotel. When you finally reach the end a cutscene plays revealing the player to actually be a developer testing a virtual reality project.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) The game gets really repetitive after awhile since there are so many repeat puzzles. In fact, there are 650 puzzles which includes the hidden environmental puzzles. Fortunately, you aren't required to find them all.
 * 2) The Challenge is easily the hardest puzzles in the entire game. A particularly nasty set of panels activated by a record player that plays classical music. In addition to all of them being randomized and extremely difficult, you have to finish the entire series before the music stops; let the music finish or pause the game and you have to start the entire series over again.
 * 3) There is no replay value since there are no unlockables in the game at all. Not even for finding all of the environmental puzzles.
 * 4) The game doesn't properly teach the player as to how the puzzles work, because the game is so open. This can easily frustrate players as even if you know how the puzzles work it can still be confusing.
 * 5) False advertising: According to the game's description on Steam, it mentions how the game "treats your time as precious. There's no filler; each of those puzzles brings its own new idea into the mix. So, this is a game full of ideas". This is false, however, because (as mentioned previously) there are tons of filler puzzles all across the island and it doesn't treat your time with care.
 * 6) The lie about it treating your time wisely can be proven by the fact that one of the environmental puzzles involves playing the video, "The Secret of Psalm 46", where you have to line up the white circle at the beginning, draw the line, wait an hour for the black circle to line up at the end in order to finish it. This is because you can't just skip to where you need it to be like the previous videos, you're forced to wait!

Reception
The Witness received "generally favorable reviews" according to the review aggregator website Metacritic. Despite this, others like Joesph Anderson believed it to be a very flawed game critiquing the lack of meaning, lack of rewards, confusing puzzles, and called it repetitive. He also mentioned he believes "Johnathon Blow is fucking with us", theorizing that Blow made the game to see if his fans will love anything he makes no matter what.

Videos
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