The best puzzle games have a moment that can only be described as a pleasurable “click.” You’ve been looking at the puzzle, thinking about it, frustrated by it, maybe you linger on it for a few days. But suddenly, your perspective shifts, and it just all lines up beautifully, like the tumblers in a lock, and it makes you think about the other puzzles in the game differently. And while The Witness has more than a few problems, probably the most damning one is that for a game crammed with puzzles, you don’t feel that click often enough.
Artistic Achievement
Visually, this game is solid, but it won’t break any graphics cards. That said, the game does have a very tight, disciplined art style and design that’s pleasant to look at. That said, by necessity it’s a bit generic, although they do impressive work with subtle graphics cues like reflections and shadows. Also, why puzzle games insist on using a held, synthesized note for anything is beyond me, so you might want to hit mute.
Innovation
Essentially, this game is a series of locks; you trace a path through mazes with various conditions imposed on them, ranging from conditions in the maze itself to hints scattered around the environment. A nice touch is that for puzzles where the conditions aren’t immediately obvious, or you’re not sure of the solution if you look around there’s usually some sort of hint or answer within your line of sight. Yes, the title of the game is a clue to how to play it. It’s reminiscent of Pneuma: The Breath of Life‘s mechanic in some ways.
Execution
There are some great moments in The Witness where you can feel that “click” and you’re on a roll. Each area is themed around a particular solution; as you might have guessed from the title, you generally have to look at things a certain way to solve the puzzles. In some areas, sussing out that theme is really all you need to do, and the puzzles come together smoothly. It’s also, crucially, a lot of fun to poke around and find what the game is hiding in its nooks and crannies. Often, that’s the only way you’ll progress, although sometimes instead you’ll find an oddball plot hint or just a hidden area.
That said, there are a host of issues here, and worse, the way they’re presented makes it seem like these problems are deliberate. That game is so focused on aping ’90s adventure games that it’s bringing the annoyances from those games with it. This game’s design is so focused on tiny details, it misses out on the broader strokes that bring a game together. For example, the total lack of any useful map or fast travel system is going to put a lot of people off, and it desperately needs some sort of in-game screenshot or note-taking feature. Keep a pad and paper handy, as you’ll need it to diagram out a majority of the puzzles and write out the rules of how certain puzzle conditions work. It also doesn’t help that sometimes the game feels the need to be snotty, like when it shuts off a board because you entered the wrong solution, and makes you go back and redo the solution to the previous puzzle.
More than that, though, the puzzles are the only draw here. Each area is well designed, but it doesn’t really gel into a larger whole even after you figure out what the game is really up to. As a result, there’s no sense of impact when you complete an area, even as you get further into the game and really do start changing things around.
Similarly, there’s no sense of stakes to the plot, such as it is. Once you poke around you’ll quickly piece together the broad strokes of what happened on this island. Even the hidden logs you find don’t explain what’s going on, instead offering up long quotes from various scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers. It feels like the game knew it had nothing new or interesting to say on its chosen topic, so it just throws some quotes at you and hopes you won’t notice.
The net result is a game that can feel as if it was designed more by the team to amuse themselves with how clever they are rather than for other people to play. Even after what Thekla is actually going for comes into focus, the game feels more demonstratively clever than the thoughtful story it wants to be.
Staying Power
There are claims floating around that this is a 70-hour game. I’m skeptical of that, but there’s no shortage of meat on this particular joint, and if you like puzzles, this game has them by the bucket.
Bullsh*t Factor
There’s no DLC incoming, but some may be a bit skeptical at the $40 price tag. I will say that at $40, if you love puzzles and logic games, this game is worth the money.
Final Thoughts
I wanted to like The Witness more than I do. It’s fun to wander around and crack some of the harder locks the game throws at you, and as it comes into better focus, it becomes more interesting. Unfortunately, a repeated theme here is that this game mistakes “clever” for “intelligent.” If what you did had more impact, if the plot was more compelling than yet another lecture about how science can’t be divorced from morality, it might be a different story, but The Witness is ultimately too focused on its trees to build a forest pleasurable enough for every gamer to want to take a walk through it.
Verdict: Worth A Chance
This review was conducted with a PS4 review copy provided by the publisher.