Victory Game Center

Justin McElroy wrote: The question I've gotten most frequently from co-workers when they find out I'm reviewing The Witness is if I've gotten to "the hook" or "the twist" yet. The assumption is that a simple sequence of hundreds of maze puzzles can't be the next project from the creator of Braid, a game in which narrative was so essential that it was inextricable from the mechanics. Surely it can't be that simple.

It is.

Oh, don't mistake me, there's a beautiful, defiantly colorful world to explore, and plenty of little hints of how it came to be. The Witness is loaded with "plotmosphere," a useful if pat bit of neologism that would probably make Blow cringe. But, mechanically speaking: The Witness is maze puzzles. Full stop.

Curunir wrote:

Bryan wrote:People shouldn't be comparing this to Myst. Within the context of first-person puzzle adventures, this sounds like the antithesis of Myst to me. Story is the backbone of a Myst game, and the puzzles, each of which is justified therein, serve only as friction. Witness looks like random puzzles, for the sake of puzzles, in a vaguely pretty place. But I haven't played it yet. Maybe I can take another mortgage out on my home.

Exactly. Where the Myst series had an actual story and a lore to its worlds, and a meaning, however obscure at first glance, to almost all of its contraptions and puzzle pieces, this seems like a mobile puzzle game with almost 700 levels that got packaged along with pretty graphics and some hugely pretentious philosophy and is now sold for 40 bucks. And everyone seems to think this is somehow a huge achievement.

The Witness is not a puzzle adventure game. It's a puzzle game with incredibly rigid mechanics, no movable set pieces and only one valid solution to each of its 650+ levels.

Calum Marsh wrote: the game is Jonathan Blow.

Calum Marsh wrote: There are no hints or tips in The Witness. There are no arrows to guide you, no manuals to consult, no winning strategies to be apprised of. There isn’t a whisper of instruction. There is nothing between you and the puzzle. Scarcely are video games so simple, so pure. If most games are like blockbuster movies, The Witness is a symphony.