VideoGame Well... I Enjoyed it At Least
But allow to me say I'm also in complete agreement with why others may not enjoy it. A lot of the puzzle "rules" are unintuitive and take a lot of trial and error to figure out without any sort of guide, not to mention the amount of critical thinking needed for puzzles that either utilize multiple rules at once or have gimmicks so obtuse that you need a lot of patience to understand can cause a lot of headaches.
But that said? Yeah, I still enjoyed my experience, to the point that I went out of my way to 101% the entire game. Once I got past the "headache" phase of the game I felt more free to explore in any way I wanted than most current open-world games today. Plus the variety of how the grid puzzles are presented makes it feel a lot fresher than one might realize. Not only that, but in order to get the main ending you're really only required to activate at least seven beacons, so if you're not feeling one area you can very easily visit another location to try and activate that beacon instead. And once you beat the game for the first time? You can try and revisit other areas that you either didn't complete, or just didn't find, adding a very commendable amount of replayability for such an obtuse and cryptic game.
This game, again, is not gonna be for everyone, but if you want something you can play at your own leisure that both tickles your brain and offers a lush, beautiful island to explore, then I think you can get some mileage out of this.
VideoGame 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.
VideoGame Do I recommend it? Yes. But it's not the "eighth wonder of the world" some people say.
Let's see: it's a game that is part exploration and part puzzles. The exploration part is OK, without further ado. You're on a desert island with several biomes, with beautiful environments (seriously, the game is visually GORGEOUS), and if you look closely at the environment you can find everywhere "easter eggs" that are very interesting to see. Besides, you find everywhere objects which suggest that the island was previously inhabited, which makes you feel like you are on the island of Lost, and there is a great mystery behind everything... Unfortunately, the game never gets to explain anything, it barely has a story, and what little it has ends up in the overdone-as-hell All Just a Dream. That's why I say exploration is just OK: all those hints don't lead to anything.
Regarding the puzzles, that is the strong point of the game. There are two types of puzzles in this game, some that involve drawing lines through grids following rules, and others that, without going into too many details so as not to give too much spoilers, focus on the environment. I give my opinions about the puzzles: POSITIVES -The environmental puzzles are probably the most original part of the game, and they reward the player's exploration and observation skills. Clearly a pro point. -There are people who say that they find the line-drawing puzzles very repetitive, that they end up becoming very tedious. I think this happens to some extent with all the puzzle games I've played. I frankly prefer what this game does: focusing on one mechanic and bringing it to its end, than trying to include many different mechanics and, in the end, none of them being polished because they tried to cover too much. The truth is that the game manages well to take a mechanic as simple as drawing lines, and always finding a way to make each puzzle different from the previous one. -It is a game that rewards lateral thinking and the ability to rethink problems. I think it's very positive that the game has such an ability to make your head explode based on such basic mechanics. NEGATIVES -The game follows the premise of not explaining how the puzzles work, but rather letting the player discover it for themselves. In general it's well done, but there are some points in which the rules aren't explained completely well and you have to take a logical leap to understand them and be able to solve the puzzles. At these points you can get very stuck if you aren't able to make that jump, and from what I have seen in LetsPlays, usually it's always at the same points, which suggests that these points could perhaps have been designed better. -The game is not linear, it is like a Metroidvania, but the tools are your knowledge of how the puzzles work: many times you come across puzzles that you cannot do yet because the rules are explained to you elsewhere. The concept is very well thought out, because this way you can solve the puzzles in the order you want, but in practice it isn't entirely well carried out, because you can find puzzles that you don't know if they're being taught there, or you must go look elsewhere for the tutorial; a problem that is magnified considering that several of the areas near the starting point are precisely those that require going through several others before. To understand it better, imagine an open world RPG, where the initial area is level 1-5, but among the surrounding areas there are areas of level 5-10 mixed with areas of level 40-50, and the game doesn't give the option to see the level of the area until you have encountered some enemies and they're beating you up. -There are some puzzles that are physically impossible for certain players. There are some puzzles that involve differentiating colors (impossible for color-blind people), and others that involve differentiating musical tones (very difficult for people with bad hearing). Although it is not necessary to complete all the areas to access the final area, the final area has many colored puzzles, so a color-blind person will have to use a guide no matter what to complete the game. -There is a challenge at the end of the game, which is based on puzzles similar to the ones you've been doing during the game, but generated randomly, and are timed. The concept is very well thought out, it's a brilliant idea, kind of "now test everything you've learned, without using guides or anything", but I think it could've been put into practice better. To begin with, the difficulty curve of the challenge isn't very well thought out, since it goes up progressively, but they put for the easiest ones at the beginning, the puzzles with the player's most practice because you have been doing them throughout the game, and they put for the most difficult ones at the end, the puzzles with the player's least practice because they were introduced to you recently: it's less of a curve and more of a steep cliff. And apart from that, between the difficulty of the puzzles changing a lot from one attempt to another, and the fact that they introduce other things that have nothing to do with puzzles, such as navigating through a random-as-well maze, the challenge ends up being less mastering the resolution of puzzles, and more waiting for the RNG to decide to give you some easy puzzles and a maze with a direct path. -Personally, I don't care that much, but since it's a very common criticism and I can understand it, I'm going to mention it. Since the game has no story, solving puzzles offers you no reward other than unlocking more puzzles (if anything, unlocking some videos, I'll talk about that now). It's not a problem if you simply want to solve puzzles for the challenge, for mental exercise, etc., but if what you want is to feel rewarded for every step you take...
And then, to finish: this game is VERY pretentious. They tried to go deep and metaphysical by including a lot of audios and videos. The audios are quotes from philosophers, scientists and theologians without any type of context and with nothing to do with each other, and the videos are fragments of interviews, talks, films, TV shows, etc., also without context. There's really nothing deep about the game because it doesn't do anything with all those audios and videos, they're just there, there's no type of analysis, there's no exploration of the content, or anything like that, it doesn't say anything other than "people has different points of view." One could argue that the fact that they're there, although it adds nothing, doesn't hurt either, but when you see that the game costed on release $40, I can't help but think about what price it would have been if the developers hadn't gone to the trouble of buying material copyrighted by the BBC to add false depth to the game. Seriously, if what you want is a game that addresses philosophical subjects, check out The Talos Principle.
I highly recommend this game if what you want is to spend some time solving puzzles just for the sake of solving them, since they're very good puzzles and you will really enjoy the challenge that they will pose to you. I don't recommend it if what you want is to have a feeling of progression, reward for each step, a game with a story, etc. And if what you want is a game that makes you think about philosophical subjects, it's better to play The Talos Principle.