The Witness (puzzle game): Interesting but becomes boring and repetitive
The Witness is a game that I acquired for free because you are entitles to 2 free games on the Playstation network every month (PS chooses the games, not you unfortunately) and this was one of them. I likely never would have paid for this game because for the most part I don't think puzzle games are worth paying for.
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When you first start playing The Witness you are given nothing in the way of a tutorial and it is easy to understand why: There isn't much to the game. You walk until you find these panels and on said panels is a puzzle where you use only the directional pad to steer a line from one end of the puzzle to the other in order to unlock said panel.
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As you might expect, the puzzles get progressively more difficult and the really painful part about it is that sometimes you'll be looking at a puzzle with a bunch of dots all over it and there is no indication or tutorial on what those individual dots actually mean or how you are meant to interact with them.
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like this for example: You are meant to get from one side to the other, but have to do certain things based on the "icons" in the puzzle itself, yet we are not ever told what the icons actually mean
The puzzles stayed fun for me for a couple hours and then it kind of became tedious and uninteresting. You will encounter entire towns with a bunch of panels and also somewhat interactive environments and have to look around and play detective to try to figure out WTH you are supposed to do. In this way, it is quite similar to games like MYST, which other people loved but perhaps I am not smart enough to have ever enjoyed.
The music is good, the environment is crisp and has a lovely art style, and the gameplay is extremely simple (just 2 buttons are used for the most part.) However, the game kind of loses points for not having any real story: Who am I? Why am I on this island? What is the island? Nothing really happens like this and your progression just opens up more areas that has more complicated puzzles and that is pretty much the game. I have completed nearly 100 puzzles at this point and my PS4 is telling me I have completed less than 5% of the game LOL.
For the right kind of person, at the right kind of price, this might be an ok title. For me it seems like it should have been a mobile app (and likely will become one eventually) but dodges entering that category because you walk around an island in 3D for much of the game.
Even if you want to cheat and find the solution on youtube or Reddit (good luck, as the puzzles are not labeled or numbered and apparently there are hundreds if not thousands of them)
I think that if you really like challenging puzzles that sometimes make your head hurt then this game might be for you. For me, the lack of real story and repetitive nature of it all was a game ender.
On a scale of "Urgh!" to "Wowsers!" I give The Witness and overall score of.....
That is pretty lame. At least Myst and Riven had a good story to them. If the story sucks it is going to be pretty lame though. I still say they need to remake the later Might and Magic games. I liked pretty much everything about those games from VI on. The gameplay, the story, the character development, even the use of NPC's was pretty awesome in the later games. Travel was cool and in VIII you got to be the way OP dragon, so that was pretty cool. I still have them running on a Windows XP virtual box and I have thought about streaming the gameplay on them from time to time, like a retro gaming thing...