Recent reviews by Mega Potion

Combines the exploration of Wind Waker, the monkey catching of Ape Escape, and the puzzle-platforming of Prince of Persia, all combined with wonderful PS2 style graphics, music, and character designs.

After a short tutorial/training ground, you're let loose on a pretty large world full of smaller platforming challenges and one large "dungeon", and are free to tackle them in any order. The goal, while never explicitly stated, is to collect all the fish and all the coins.

I didn't collect everything, but enjoyed what I played and am definitely looking forward to the full release, but I do have some criticism:

The game is just too hard. Not hard in a challenging way, hard in a frustrating one. Your movement abilities feel a little shorter than they should be - your jump feels like it needs to be ever so sightly higher, your wallrun feels like it needs to last ever so slightly longer, and your grapple range ever so slightly further. Missing a pole or the edge of a platform by a millimetre feels pretty bad, even more so when it ends up setting you back a few minutes.

Your platforming needs to be perfect or you'll fall all the way to the bottom of whatever tower you're climbing and have to platform your way back up. Or worse, you'll die and get sent all the way back to a checkpoint. Some ruins have shortcuts that normally loop back to an existing checkpoint dark souls style, but they're spaced too far apart.

Navigation is difficult. Just finding which ruins you've been to was a pain, since there's no map, everything is brown, and they all look similar from a distance. The compass was also useless - I was convinced it was pointing me towards an objective, but it just points north.

When you're in a ruin, the correct path isn't obvious. There's one that's all about grind rails, and no matter what I did I couldn't get onto the upper level. I always fell short of grabbing the ledge and eventually just gave up.

I made it to the top of the dungeon-temple and thought that was a good stopping point.

I love the art style, the Low poly characters and environment, the low resolution textures, the great animations. I love the MIDI style music and sound effects, and I love the way the HUD moves around. I just wish it was a little easier.

Quick review for The Talos Principle 2.

Not sure what I can say that other people haven't. It's excellent, but much easier compared to Talos 1.

New mechanics are fun (except item swapping.), locations are gorgeous, especially South 1, plot was fine, and the main group of characters are likeable.

Secret Stars are easier to find and solve than Talos 1 with the exception of Pandora West 2 - no idea what the intended solution was for that one - and the Prometheus ones aren't puzzles. The reward for getting all of them absolutely isn't worth it.

Looking forward to a DLC or expansion with harder puzzles.

I've been waiting to play The Witness since it was announced. I wanted to like it. I really did.

But I didn't. Instead, it was a huge disappointment.

If you listen to me, maybe you can avoid the same mistake. Or not. Maybe you'll love it. This is just my opinion, after all.

Let me explain.

The problem I have with The Witness is this: It's not fun.

The island itself is wonderfully crafted. I haven't seen an environment this colourful and well designed in a long time. You can tell that a lot of love went into bulding it, making everything line up just right or cast shadows in the perfect spots to do some fantastic perspective tricks. Maybe some branches will look like a pair of eyes, or maybe some statues will line up just right, that kind of thing. And while the island looks small, it feels absolutely enormous. You can go from one end to the other in a few minutes, but each area feels huge. The aesthetics of the different zones are absolutely beautiful, too, with each area having a distinct colour scheme and biome. The glowing wires that link all the puzzles together are really cool, as are the lasers that shine from each finished area. Visually, it's amazing.

There are some areas that I saw but never went to. Locked doors I never opened. A whole underground left unexplored, and many more hidden things that I didn't notice and certainly don't have the drive to seek out. The island holds lots of secrets.
Unfortunately, the island also holds lots of dull, lifeless line puzzles.

A puzzle game lives or dies on the quality of its puzzles. The Witness, without doubt, contains more puzzles, and in a higher density, than any other game I can think of. The game does a fantastic job of training you and making sure you understand how the different rules for each puzzle work, and all without a single word. It's just a shame that they're not fun.

You see that trailer up there? Those line puzzles in the first 20 seconds or so? That's it. That's the game. Hours and hours of doing that.
You might have seen people sarcastically quoting critics, saying "It's nothing but line puzzles!" And they're right. No matter how you slice it, every single puzzle is based on drawing a line from a start point to an end point, usually on a grid. Usually there are some rules to follow. Maybe in some you have two lines, or maybe you have to group colours together, or maybe the grid is a different shape, that kind of thing. It doesn't matter. The beautiful world is wasted as you run around looking at lines and grids on a screen. Or maybe the grid is on a wall. Or maybe on the floor. Maybe it is the floor. It doesn't matter. There is no variation. I could print out every single puzzle in the game and staple them together and miss out on absolutely nothing.

When're not puzzling, all you can do is walk around the island in silence, searching for line puzzles or audio logs. And there's always a puzzle lurking somewhere, ready to jump out and bore you to death. Your reward for finishing a line puzzle? Another line puzzle. Maybe that line puzzle you just did will open a door to some more line puzzles. Maybe it will move a platform so you can get to even more line puzzles. Or maybe a panel right next to the line puzzle you just solved will pop open revealing yet another line puzzle. It's endless. And even though each puzzle is unique, they don't feel it. Each puzzle blurs with the one before it, an endless stream of the-same-but-different. As soon as you complete a puzzle, you either follow the wire to the next one or watch another screen with another puzzle turn on, over and over without end. Another grid, another line. There was exactly one "A-ha!" moment for me: the hedge mazes. These were easily the best puzzles in the game. Why? Because they're just barely connected to line puzzles at the end of them.

Scattered around are audio logs and videos of some people spouting philosophy and Zen teachings. You could try and listen to them, but why bother? There's no story.There's an allusion of one, I'm sure - A logo shows up again and again on various items - but there's nothing to give it form.

After a few hours of lines, my initial enthusiasm faded rapidly. I went from, "How do I solve this?", To "Oh God, not another one". The puzzles quickly go from being novel to being a chore, and some puzzles will shut off if you fail them, requiring you to go back and re-solve the previous one to reactivate it. Some of the puzzles seem to exist for no reason, too. There are strings of puzzles in some of the areas that just end. No follow up, no shortcuts, nothing. The puzzle chain just stops and leaves you wondering why you just did all that, especially when the skill that it teaches you is never used again.

After 10 hours, I'd had enough. At first, I started looking at hints to see if I was moving in the right direction. However, boredom quickly gives way to frustration, and I used a walkthrough to find how to get the remaining 3 of 7 lasers to get to the final area, and then to get through final area itself, where the puzzles start at incredibly difficult and end at impossible.

And when you beat the game, what do you get? A vague idea of anything that happened? Nope. Game over, the end.

Finally, the biggest problem I have with this it is the price. £30 is absurd. Avoid this, unless, after reading all that, you're still convinced you want it, wait until it's much, much cheaper. Like, 1/3rd of the price.

Despite all that, I don't hate The Witness. It's not a bad game! It's well put together and the island is nice to look at if nothing else. It's just not the game I thought it would be.

If you want to play a better first person puzzler, go and buy either:

The Talos Principle

or Fract OSC

Or hell, even Myst