When it comes to puzzle and mystery games few do it as good as The Witness. This is one of the most breathtaking and engaging games that I have played this generation and it is easy to see why when it was first released it won so many awards. If you like puzzle games then, you really owe it to yourself to play this.
How to Download The Witness
You can download this puzzle game from Steam. Click on the Download button below the review. If you like such games, check out also our review of We Were Here Too and another one of The Talos Principle.
The Game Review
There is a “story” to The Witness, but I would say the game is more about the mystery than giving you a narrative. Do not get me wrong, this mysterious island that you are on is truly amazing and the different statues and things you find just make you want to know more. However, the whole mystery of it all is really what is driving you forward the whole time you play the game.
The way you do progress and move forward through the game is by doing puzzles. The Witness has hundreds and I mean hundreds of maze-type puzzles that are on these terminals all over the island. These are some of the trickiest puzzles I have ever had to do in a game, but each and every puzzle is 100 percent fair.
This is one of the cleverest games I have ever played when it comes to teaching a player “its rules”. There are many occasions (including one close to the start of the game) where you are simply not ready to do a puzzle. This is not meant to frustrate you, but teach you that in The Witness it is ok to walk away from a puzzle if you are not ready to solve it.
I will admit this took me by surprise and my first instinct was to stubbornly stick it out until I figured it out. That though is the wrong way to go about it. By exploring more, I found what I had to do and what these new symbols on the puzzle I was stuck on were all about. The early part of the game has you mainly doing puzzles that shoot light to a mountain on the island.
This is rather clever as it has you going all over the island and this island is quite spectacular. I feel that the visuals of The Witness are actually very underrated. I loved every inch of this island and just when you thought you had seen it all, it would surprise you or you would discover something that you walked past a million times actually has a secret behind it!
If you want a game that is going to give you hours and hours of gameplay, you cannot go wrong with this. You are easily looking at least 50 hours to just get through it. However, if you want to fully do everything that there is to do in the game. Well, it is not an exaggeration to say that you are looking at 80, 90 or maybe even 100 hours of exploration and puzzle-solving!
It has been said in pretty much every review I have read about this game. But The Witness really is a masterpiece of a game. It is so very, very clever in the way that it is designed that it makes you want to keep on playing. It offers a solid challenge, but it is also one of the fairest puzzle games that I have ever had the pleasure to play. I actually played this game together with my wife and it was a fantastic experience.
