Review: The Witness

I feel like after playing the witness I learned a lot more about myself than I did about my character this island this game Jonathan Blow and even the development marketing and intended audience of the witness itself because after 40 hours spent solving puzzle after puzzle of left brain logic teasers with barely any kind of an aesthetic rapper presenting them making up my own story of introspection was about all I could do to make the trip interesting for example I learned I might have a learning disability this game takes the average slur spouting seasonpass buying pre-ordering video game player 16 hours to complete and it took me 40 I also learned some new Photoshop keyboard shortcuts but most painful of all was that I learned that I am not the kind of player this game was made for because I could not stand the witness finishing a first run of this game without a strategy guide was like pulling teeth it was one of the most frustrating boring and unsatisfying experiences I've put myself through since the start of the channel somehow this game conjured up an unintentional swarm of negative emotions that I don't think I've felt since X rebirth but I realize that that's just like my opinion man people who are into puzzle games seem to be liking the witness but unfortunately for me I've never been a fan of these slow-paced stop and plot puzzles existing just for their own sake but I know I am like a lot of people who got really frustrated at the puzzles and old adventure games there's nothing like filling balloons with cement to stop an excellent story dead in its tracks Jonathan blows omage to Myst has the same kind of island that slowly opens up into the same process of wonder and discovery but mist was an adventure game and the witness is a puzzle game a puzzle game of connecting the dots and solving the mazes clicking and dragging a line to the end of a tunnel hundreds of different times in dozens of different ways as a collection of maze puzzles it's not unimpressive the island itself is the collection of over 500 something at a modest estimate of these flat 2d puzzle panels which really encapsulate smites about the game a high quantity of puzzles backfires the value of the game if the puzzles themselves aren't fun to complete and fun is something I found very very elusive during my trek through the Witness rules are conveyed not through words but rather by a series of ambiguous symbols that could seem to mean just about anything until you play through a small series of tutorial puzzles that are supposed to clue you into how they work except for me a lot of times that just didn't happen the island is meticulously crafted to incorporate these puzzles and quite a few shocking surprising ways but when it comes down to the matter of putting hints and signposting into the puzzle layouts and their placement the game as a whole just fills woefully under designed partly because most of the early tutorial puzzles of a given section can be beaten by dumb luck there's simply not enough room on these grids to prevent the player from accidentally triggering the solution and moving on without learning which really hurts them later but at the same time there's also not enough room on these grids for the players to really experiment with what counts as a success and a failure early on during those critical learning stages learning these symbols is like learning hieroglyphics by way of trial and error except a lot of them seem to be designed more to look all clean and pretty on the board rather than actually convey what they mean and it's not just ambiguity there's also an inconsistency to how the game presents its rules sometimes new mechanical relationships show up without previous examples sometimes a new puzzle will work with an entirely different rule set than all the others it made me feel like an idiot more often than not because of the game having this huge conflict between lateral and logical thinking most puzzles are about mentally juggling a bunch of complex rules that are all self contained and telegraphed on the board but a few are instead about looking for environmental clues and in both cases I would just find myself stuck looking at the same screen for tens of minutes bewildered at what I was doing wrong the process of solving puzzles here is a positive feedback loop by way of negative emotions at the beginning of playing with any new mechanic you're testing out a possible hypothesis dozens of times until moving on to the next wrong potential solution once you're done being told you're wrong faced with another problem that looks given with what you know utterly and crushingly impossible compared to the last the experience of playing this game just did not make me feel good at all more often than not the feeling of finally beating a frustrating puzzle I was stuck at wasn't an aha instead it wasn't all how the hell was I supposed to know that and that feeling of always being roadblocked of always being wrong and always being stuck that that's just not fun eventually you get to a situation that comically visualizes so much of my problem with this game there's an area where every literal step is blocked by a new problem each one is seemingly impossible as the last and that that isn't fun that isn't engaging it's a sheet of math homework it's way too dense and the puzzles get way too hard way too fast and way too small of a space and before long you're juggling way too many conflicting rules all at the same time remember that puzzle and undertale where you got all the different colored tiles with different relationships to one another depending on their placement depending on their color which changes depending on where you previously stepped an undertale that was a joke but the witness doesn't joke around even if it really wanted to stick to the challenge of using puzzles that are almost that complicated without using a single word to explain them I can still think of ways it could have done it better ways it could have used the audiovisual feedback of video games to give the player at least a little bit more support maybe for the earlier puzzles in the beginning the failure flash could also highlight the particular part of a symbol that points to the player's error may be the failure noise could have been pitch shifted to let the player know how close they were to the solution maybe there could have been less invisible walls to make all the backtracking you got to do go faster and maybe there could have been a lot more instances where the puzzles just weren't constrained to these flat screens in fact all these screens are why I think this game is generations behind portal antechamber or even braid unlike those games the vast majority of the puzzles in the witness' aren't organically built into the level design whereas those other games make use of simulated space time in physics most of the witness's puzzles are so flat and archaic that they could easily work exactly the same on a piece of paper speaking of which paper itself wasn't enough a second head sitting with me on the couch helping wasn't enough either as it turns out the most useful and efficient tool for solving these puzzles was Photoshop countless trips back and forth from the TV to the computer were needed so that I could slide around solutions in Photoshop that's because unlike portal antechamber and braid most of the puzzles in the witness' are flat and motionless enough to be worked on in Photoshop 90% of the puzzles in this game don't use the wonders of animation and moveable depth to make a huge collection of mind-melting new challenges instead you could have this same image follow the same rules if it was on a page in a book the small percentage of 3d environmental puzzles that are there come too few too late and their execution is so specifically demanding of the player that they feel kind of like pixel hunts although these moments are occasionally impressive they just don't make up for the 40 other hours of environmental inactivity where you're teleported away from the island on to a separate screen with a separate control scheme utterly divided from the other half of the game but what really had me nodding off and what made me want to turn the game off and do my taxes instead is the complete lack of a narrative reward for finishing these puzzles there's an incredibly threadbare story to it all there's no identifiable characters and certainly no easy explanation behind what's going on the result is a feeling of a game that's depressingly lacking in energy heart and soul there isn't even any music the island may be pretty to look at in screenshots but in motion it is utterly lifeless the developers sheer dedication to Spartan puzzle solving means that the clouds don't move no animals scampering the bushes nor is there any ambient background sounds of wind or insects the island is dead silent and lethargically still it's a sterile purgatory of Placid barricading puzzles and I don't know if it's just me but I picked up on an unsavory undertone of bitterness and mean-spirited inaccessibility if you don't see colors or hear tones the same way the developers do the games - impossible it was still one of the toughest games I've ever played regardless and I didn't feel any sense of reward or gratification for the trouble a lot of puzzles just seemed to unlock absolutely nothing on completion there presumably just there to teaching mechanics you may already know and some of the most difficult puzzles just unlock shortcuts to places you've already been despite its roots the witness is a very different kind of puzzle game it's a more expressive more interactive and immersive version of a puzzle book a simple clean collection of puzzles made by man for people who just really really love puzzles and the idea of packing that into a video game with an allegorical message is certainly going to be more appealing and exciting for people younger than the age demographic for new york times crosswords I don't bemoan this games existence I can get why some people like it it has its place but it's just totally not my jam it just does not excel at the qualities I look for in a videogame its core concept doesn't push the medium forward braids intricately animated Rube Goldberg machines did antechambers crazy fourth dimensional movement based rooms also did portals portals did and there was also a fun story to boot but the witness has fewer interactive tricks up its sleeve plus a complete lack of a narrative reward to act as a carrot on the end of its stick but that's just like my opinion man all week I've been hearing most of my friends enjoy this game well I've just been confounded at how they managed to complete it in a couple days without a guide this kind of puzzle the line maze with invisible implied boundaries is one that I'm awful at and it's just about the only puzzle in the witness maybe you'll like this puzzle better maybe you'll just be better at it than I was maybe by watching this review you'll already have picked up on a few hints to make your experience better but for me going through this game blind having watched no footage of it nor reading your reviews nor looked up any guides to help me my way through it felt like hell

Channel: Super Bunnyhop

Views: 250,062

Keywords: The Witness, Blow, Jon, Braid, Portal, Antichamber

Id: hDxxwFLs0d8

Length: 11min 5sec (665 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 04 2016