I must state right away: I do not consider myself a very intelligent person.
Whenever a puzzle game starts getting harder and throwing more difficult puzzles at me, I tend to get stuck very fast. And when a puzzle game keeps giving me hard puzzles after hard puzzles, with no breaks in-between, I become more and more frustrated and eventually just plain angry.
I really wanted to give The Witness a chance, but despite my best efforts, I simply couldn't play the game for more than 1 hour a day before it was starting to just get on my nerves. After a few days of failed attempts to continue playing it, I officially throw the towel and conclude that The Witness isn't a game I can find enjoyable.
So yeah, the puzzles' difficulty ramps up pretty damn fast. But do you know what's worse? The rules of some of the puzzles are not even explained! Or if they are, then the "startup" versions of them are so well-hidden that you are more likely to come across the hard ones first, and be unable to figure out what kind of answer they want from you. And sometimes, a puzzle TRIES to explain its rules to you, but fails. Like that one puzzle where you're supposed to divide the board into groups of two stars. I didn't figure THIS out until I looked it up in a walkthrough...
What's worse is that there is no real incentive to keep solving the puzzles. Solved a puzzle? Here, have some more puzzles! Or rarely, a recording of some philosophical babble that is devoid of context. The game keeps throwing more and more puzzles at you in ridiculous amounts, and there is no real reward for doing them outside of maybe some short-lived satisfaction.
Worse still, the puzzles themselves don't even feel like something unique to the game. All throughout, I kept comparing TW to The Talos Principle - both have exceptionally pretty visuals, puzzles that feel disconnected from the narrative, and fauxlosophical babble. But TTP at least had unique gameplay that felt interesting and engaging. The Witness feels like a free online puzzle game with an obligatory, heavily overpriced HD graphics DLC.
TL;DR: Unless you eat puzzle games for breakfast and don't mind paying 40$ for a nicely designed island with difficult puzzles scattered around, with not even any music playing (which really sucks the fun out of solving a puzzle), you probably won't enjoy this game.
A game only for the very patient and very intelligent people.
I must state right away: I do not consider myself a very intelligent person.
Whenever a puzzle game starts getting harder and throwing more difficult puzzles at me, I tend to get stuck very fast. And when a puzzle game keeps giving me hard puzzles after hard puzzles, with no breaks in-between, I become more and more frustrated and eventually just plain angry.
I really wanted to give The Witness a chance, but despite my best efforts, I simply couldn't play the game for more than 1 hour a day before it was starting to just get on my nerves. After a few days of failed attempts to continue playing it, I officially throw the towel and conclude that The Witness isn't a game I can find enjoyable.
So yeah, the puzzles' difficulty ramps up pretty damn fast. But do you know what's worse? The rules of some of the puzzles are not even explained! Or if they are, then the "startup" versions of them are so well-hidden that you are more likely to come across the hard ones first, and be unable to figure out what kind of answer they want from you. And sometimes, a puzzle TRIES to explain its rules to you, but fails. Like that one puzzle where you're supposed to divide the board into groups of two stars. I didn't figure THIS out until I looked it up in a walkthrough...
What's worse is that there is no real incentive to keep solving the puzzles. Solved a puzzle? Here, have some more puzzles! Or rarely, a recording of some philosophical babble that is devoid of context. The game keeps throwing more and more puzzles at you in ridiculous amounts, and there is no real reward for doing them outside of maybe some short-lived satisfaction.
Worse still, the puzzles themselves don't even feel like something unique to the game. All throughout, I kept comparing TW to The Talos Principle - both have exceptionally pretty visuals, puzzles that feel disconnected from the narrative, and fauxlosophical babble. But TTP at least had unique gameplay that felt interesting and engaging. The Witness feels like a free online puzzle game with an obligatory, heavily overpriced HD graphics DLC.
TL;DR: Unless you eat puzzle games for breakfast and don't mind paying 40$ for a nicely designed island with difficult puzzles scattered around, with not even any music playing (which really sucks the fun out of solving a puzzle), you probably won't enjoy this game.