This game is amazing.

I haven't enjoyed a game like this for a long time, feel giddy and happy every time I had a eureka moment.
The puzzles and progress as you learn and understand things around you is amazingly crafted.

I honestly recommend this for anyone interested in puzzle games and mental challanges.

I didn't trust the art-snob critics either, but it really is as good as they say it is.

I enjoyed this game very much. It's thought provoking with its audio and imaculate with its visuals. The time that was spent in judging the diffuculty and creating variety in the puzzles is shown by how well the game flows between those puzzles and from one area to the next.

If you're an individual who likes thought provoking conversation and eureka moments, you'll love The Witness.

A great puzzle game with a very discouraging first 2 hours. At first you'll say, "Surely the entire game won't be solving mazes?" And it is. But 4 things happen along the way (no spoilers):

1) There's dozens of rules for how the mazes work that you'll need to teach yourself, unlearn, relearn, and combine.

2) Some mazes make physical changes to platforms that you need to navigate and the multiple solutions to a maze is how you select the position.

3) The mazes get REALLY hard. Like, "10 minutes of poking at it, take a break and sleep on it, graph it, run around the map staring at it from different angles for 5 minutes, go do some other puzzles, come back, AH HA, poke at it for 10 minutes, solved!" hard.

4) There are puzzles absolutely everywhere that you can't see until you know what you're looking for. And then you get paranoid seeing bits and pieces of them, trying to make your hallucinations connect together into a complete puzzle.

Through all this the game becomes pretty excellent and is constantly surprising when you least expect it. The major puzzle areas are pretty open to tackle in any order. The island itself looks great and there's some amazing visual surprises that are fun to discover. Everywhere you look you have to wonder if you're seeing all the hidden layers.

There's hidden recordings and videos of real deep quotes/essays. Some are interesting and some are sort of philosophically embarrassing. This is the weakest part of the game for me, but they can be ignored entirely. I think they're just things that Blow finds inspiring and that's fine. I feel like I have my own interpretation of what the game is saying, but don't believe there's a plot or story to be uncovered. It's just a self contained exhibit to interactive art. The ending has a tiny bit of meaningful closure, but I don't think it works as a climax or reward. The whole final section is intersting, but a little obnoxious with how it indroduces difficulty.

It played it a little at a time over many months and love many parts of it. It's got some of the most mind blowing and beautiful things I've ever seen in a game. It has literally made me say, "OH ♥♥♥♥, I JUST GOT WITNESSED," several times. But its for a very niche audience of people who will have the patience for the puzzles and revelations. But it has its flaws: slow start, meandering VO, meh ending. I recommend it. If you gave up on it early I recommend you go back to it occasionally to see if it clicks. If you love classic puzzle games like Sudoku and Picross, this is once of the most insanely polished package of puzzles you'll ever see. If you hate those kinds of puzzles, stay away.

Thanks Mr. Blow for pouring your life into this game! The craft and dedication shows, and there's nothing else like it.

If you get through this game without using any guides whatsoever you're probably mensa material or some ♥♥♥♥. This game gives little direction, sometimes this is annoying but it adds to the mystique of the island. However, maybe I was wrong to exepct this, but I thought it would be a more story driven puzzle game like The Talos Principle or something. I want to know who I am and why I'm solving all these crazy hard puzzles. What did I witness? I just wish the game wasn't so barren of any information, both the puzzles and the story. Don't buy this expecting a story that will keep you solving puzzles, and don't buy it if you don't like challenging puzzles because you'll just get frustrated. The puzzles are well done, but a lot of the time I feel like a good amount of the difficulty comes from ignorance of what I'm trying to accomplish. Sometimes the puzzles that are meant to teach you about new challenges are so small you can complete them by chance. Also, sometimes I just didn't understand a section and had to give up. The island is beautiful and designed very intelligently. I recommend it, if it's on sale.

I like pretty much everything in this game. The Witness has been praised for it's environment and that praise is well deserved. Architecture and the different biomes work very well together and create this beautiful island. The environmental puzzles work geniously with the landscape. The puzzles on screens are awesome and very challenging and I like how the game teaches with only the puzzles. I also like the freedom to go try other puzzles if one gets stuck on some particular puzzle. The two endings I got were pretty and fullfilling. Overall I think this game has great atmosphere and really good gameplay.

Unparalleled puzzle game with gorgeous graphics and plenty of things to do. Expect to sink over 12 hours just to finish the 'main' storyline. Possibly one of the best puzzle games I've played, and I wouldn't say I got close to finishing it. The Witness managed to turn progression into an artform.

You wake up on a deserted island trying to find out what's going on, and you do that by solving puzzles that are somehow mysteriously scattered around said island. What's interesting is the fact that there's one 'type' of puzzle really (solving the maze), but there are tons of variants of this thing, using enviroment patterns as a clue in most cases. Gorgeous graphics (I would describe it as 'mad max fury road-ish crazy colorful stylized'), pace depending only on you (there's no 'timer' or anything like that and you're free to explore the entirety of the island right of the bat), mostly visual way of immersing you in the world (only spoken narration that I found were those tapes that you can listen to, found in random places) - all of that creates an unique videogame experience that I felt only few times in my life. And I'm not even close to solving the mystery, I have barely scraped the surface of this game, but I'm definetely going to press onward!

That said, I have few problems with The Witness:
1) after a certain amount of solved puzzles you hit a brick wall and you don't have a damn clue how to solve a single puzzle that's left. So you just walk around like an idiot desperately trying to activate one of those damn panels, getting pretty ♥♥♥♥♥♥ off at the situation at hand :)
2) invisible walls. They were placed so that you can't 'cheese' the puzzles just by doing some 'platforming'. But it's both blessing and a curse. Sometimes there are situations where you would like to just drop down. Instead, what you're forced to do is to walk around few meaningless enviroment obstacles, following the walkway serpentining around the hill. And while we're at it, I would LOVE to see something like teleports from Enter the Gungeon scattered through the island. They would make the 'walking sections' so much more bearable...
3) on the default, recommended graphical settings (so everything on high, vsync on, etc) the framerate varied from meh (about 30 fps) to absolutely inacceptable (1-2 fps in a certain spots on the map!!) And it's not that I have a totally crappy PC. It can easily handle games like CSGO, Dark Souls, GTAs, Bioshock, etc and yet, The Witness makes it hiccup... Setting everything on medium and turning vsync off worked totally fine though.

The last question is (putting the 'problems' aside) - is it worth to buy it for 40$? Yes and no. If you are puzzle games fan - absolutely! But if you struggled in games like Portal or Talos Principle (which are much easier, while still being quite challenging), you will get stuck immediately and you will become frustrated, because the game doesn't give you a damn clue about what to do next.

So yea, The Witness, unique experience, not for everybody.

This game is a work of art that pushes the medium of games forward. It explores communication directly through game mechanics and the phenomenon of epipheny. It's incredibly fun, rewarding, challenging, and personal. The island feels like a crystalizartion of the incredible 7 year journey jonathan blow and his team went on to make this game. A manifestation of their collective internal states made into a virtual world you can inhabit. The sound design is the best I've ever encountered in any game, and the visuals are stunning.

Playing this game is an enriching experience.

Easily the best game of 2016