This is one of my favorite games of all time. The only thing you must know about this game before going in is that it requires two things: patience and an enjoyment in solving puzzles. The environment is beautiful, the puzzle design is often satisfying and it showed me a new perspective on the world. I originally played this game for free from xbox live gold. I liked the game so much I have encouraged friends to play it, purchased it as a gift for others and bought the game for steam. One of the hardest puzzle games I have played and expect around 20 hours to complete the main game with an additional 15-30 to experience the entire game. Careful for spoilers as the game is based around the fact that you avoid them.

Good game. Nice puzzles. Except the audio puzzles. ♥♥♥♥ the audio puzzles. 8/10.

im too stupid for this game and i hate it, but i also love it for that, overall a great puzzle game, sadly i am not worthy of its secret ending, would still recommend if you like puzzles

😵🗡️😡‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ 👀

The team created a beautiful island and they do a pretty good job introducing the rules of the puzzles without text or instructions but for each good design choice there's another choice that is just frustrating. This game is also not good for anyone with accessibility issues. That combined with what to me feels like a relatively shallow and pretentious attitude when the game speaks to the player tainted the experience for me. There are parts of this game that are compelling enough that I finished the game but I can't recommend the experience. At this point I feel that there are games that do a better job playing with very similar concepts in the same genre.

The Witness has cracked the top 10 favorite games I have played. Even got a couple of friends into it. Now I highly recommend not following a tutorial otherwise the end of this game is gonna come back to bite you take it from me. But for the playthrough I watched it taught me how to complete puzzles the best I can but I still got stumped at the timed stuff. Still the world is awesomely modeled. A lot of people think of it as pretencious which I disagree with the naration spoken across the map is very nice to listen to mainly if you are a fan of audio books. Did not full 100% this game but for the amount of times I played it on multiple platforms I feel as tho I did. Hope you can give it a try even if its not the tipical game genre you like playing.

This game has already been filleted to death, but I thought I'd add my two cents as a puzzle enthusiast. Spoilers I suppose.

Let's start with what the game does right. The conceptual approach to tutorials in the witness is second to none. It's what this game deserves to be remembered for, and luckily it already mostly is. A solid understanding of what the player might attempt on every panel is omnipresent, and the map is well designed to funnel the player into good experiences. It's a theme park for your mind, culminating in a good final area that lets you show off what you've learned.

The first major criticism is that the game does not respect your time. Slow moving objects are common, with some particularly egregious sections (desert basement). Time challenges you can fail and retry exist near the end of the game and in my mind this is a no-no for this type of game. The run speed could stand to be a bit faster, and some areas are really sparse with panels. I get forcing the player to slow down so they notice more environmental puzzles, but for every player that had a good experience with that, there was a player that was already in tune with the environment that suffered for no reason.

The second major criticism is that this game is tonally incoherent, and that comes off kind of arrogant. The "story" is pretentious hot nonsense. The audio logs and movies are irrelevant. The gameplay has zero through-line to the game's theming (the environmental puzzles do not qualify). Two routes could have been taken - either put in the effort and make a real backstory complete with lore (why am I doing tetris shapes in a color swamp?), or own it, and accept that you're here to deliver puzzles and maybe have some pretty scenery. The puzzle design is not SO genius that it justifies throwing up one's hands and leaving the explanation of the setting to the player. Unfortunately, a small army of people initially disagreed with that. For most of those people, this is the most puzzly game they ever played. I pity those people.

Dev is also a bozo sometimes, reflecting the above.

Has many redeeming qualities but please play anything else. 6/10

I wish I could give a mixed review, since I like the puzzles. But I'm also annoyed by the color puzzles, since I'm running redshift and other people may be color blind. I also think $40 is overpriced for this kind of game.

Simply the best game i know: incredible puzzles, incredible atmosphere, incredible easter eggs, incredible mystery, incredibly beauty, incredible difficulty, incredible satisfaction, when you understand something.
The only thing that holds it back is that you can hardly play it multiple times, but only that makes some of the above features possible.

Game's good, I'm just dumb and can't figure out the majority of the puzzles. No, seriously now, jokes aside. The game is kinda good, what put me off is that suddenly the game thinks you are some kind of genius and stops giving you hints of what to do. I got past maybe half or almost half of the game, but then when I got into a new location/city/biome, the very-first puzzle didn't have any kind of hint of what I am expected to do to solve it. Even if it's an entire new mechanic, I kept scratching my head and looking around but, yea, none f*cks were given by the devs, so I give it a zero amount of f*cks too. It was fun until it wasn't anymore. Uninstalled.