Recent reviews by Reality~

"The Witness" is a puzzle perspective game that captivates players with its minimalist design, and very “challenges” & “repetitive” puzzles.

One of the best aspects of the game is its visual style. The graphics and game direction are beautiful. Each area of the island is meticulously designed, offering a unique environment to explore and puzzle to solve.

The gameplay is you need to solve tons of the drawing line puzzles integrated with some rules that are scattered throughout the island. These puzzles range from simple line drawing to complex pattern recognition tests. The rule of each puzzle integrates into the environment, which causes you must pay attention to the surroundings, as clues to solving puzzles can be found in the world.

The difficulty of the puzzles is inconsistent some of them are very easy, and most of them require so much brain energy. Moreover, you need to understand the rule integrated into each puzzle, you can try to boot-force it, but it will require a lot of time.

The story, you can gain more information when you find the voice recorder scattered around the world.

Pros:
Beautiful and immersive visual design.
- Visual and World Design
- Hidden puzzle, some puzzles are seamlessly integrated into the environment.
- Bigbrain moment if you can understand each puzzle element.

Cons
- Lack of guidance, some puzzle you can’t solve at first because you don’t know the rules of that series but after you find the beginning one you will understand it (maybe). However, sometimes the tutorial puzzle isn’t located near that puzzle which makes you need to go to another location and hope you can't find and understand it then you need to go back and solve it, so it becomes a backtracking simulator. Moreover, you can’t jump or even drop down from the different height levels.
- Even though the puzzles and mechanics in the game are varied, the gameplay loop of solving puzzles to unlock new areas repetitive over time. Some puzzle has nonsense difficulties like the last reflection puzzle at the lake and the cave you need to remember the solution and put it into the console.
- The steep learning curve, sometimes the game uses different rules in the same puzzle like the branch and shadow one. At the start of the series you need to avoid the shadow but after you solve multiple of them the rule changes to stay inside the shadow instead.