Recent reviews by Wrecked Angle

The main thing I think this game suffers from is over promising. Had this been sold for half the price on the basis of "I've thought up some interesting mechanics to stick into a maze/grid puzzle, here's 500 or so of them" I'd have probably quite enjoyed solving a few dozen of them. The problem is that The Witness promises intrigue and a story which it nevers delivers on.

The puzzles are okay but being limited to just pathing a line through a grid means that solutions at times are pushed past what is reasonable and mechanics are introduced which are just plain bad. There are parts to game where you need to use sound to solve puzzles but this isn't always made obvious and later in the game some puzzles have their difficulty increased by using flashing colours and disorienting, moving grids. A bit cheap for a thinking-mans puzzle game.

The game does have some nice sections and some of the more enviromentally based puzzles are satisfying but they can't make up for the lack of depth or the missing narrative which gradually saps your enthusiasm. The environment is pretty, and the world design is interesting to discover but I can't help wishing they'd given us some way to interact with all that beauty.

I think most players will walk away from The Witness thinking what a great experience it could have been but feeling short changed by the promise of solving the larger mystery of the world and not entirely impressed by some of the games tricks for artificially stretching the difficulty of the puzzles.


Additionally, I found it very interesting to look through the other negative reviews of this game and notice how many others that don't usually review games have made the effort to express their disappointment of The Witness. I know hype sells but the blurb in 'About This Game' saying "discovering clues, regaining your memory, and somehow finding your way home." is basically a bare-faced lie.