So I think this might be the most hours I've put in to something that I really ended up just hating.
But I think that may have been the point of the game.

Hear me out.
You know how Andy Kaufman wanted to put static into a TV broadcast cause he thought it would be funny to screw with the audience? I think this is a video game of that.
I'm embarrassed it took me so long to catch on, but it boils the frog slowly and lulls you into thinking it's being clever.
It didn't realise this was the case until I found myself "solving" a "puzzle" by literally standing locked in place, listening to an annoyingly pretentious narrator talking about how he used to work at radio shack and realising I would have to stand there for about an hour of him doing this until the moment the "puzzle's" solution became valid.
At that moment I was like "Oh... I'm the butt of the joke. I'm being f***ed with," and I stopped the puzzle, closed the game, and realised I'd been the butt of the joke for over 50 hours.

I don't know if I should be mad at the game for messing with me or if I should respect it for doing such a good job. Either way, I feel stupid for letting myself be duped. Kind of that feeling you get when you're stuck on a puzzle for a long time and then notice something super obvious that makes it trivial, but on a huge scale.

Anyway, I wouldn't recommend playing this game. Zero stars, or maybe five stars.

I have never been more conflicted in how I feel about a game. The Witness is fantastically artistic, pretentiously cryptic, amazingly detailed, monotonously simplistic, ridiculously challenging, rewarding, frustrating, exciting, mysterious, I could go on. Half of the puzzles have great learning curves, are environmentally creative, and full of "Eureka!" moments. The other half are frustratingly difficult and leave you trudging through them at a snail's pace until you give up and use a guide. There are plenty of hidden secrets and easter eggs across the aesthetically pleasing map (I adore the overall art design!), and it's a great feeling to stumble across them. However the game gets in its own way with how heavily it obscures them. Some of these secrets are the audio tapes, where the game totally lost me. I'm sure there's a narrative in them somewhere, but they are all ridiculously self-indulgent and obfuscating. Overall, the allure of The Witness wore off for me far before I finished it. Then it came back after reaching a certain point, then it lost me again.

not worth it