The Witness Review

The Witness Review

The Witness is a puzzle indie and exploration game, this The Witness Review features how great this game is with all its colorful environments, challenging puzzles and mysteries and on top of that how amazing adventurous gameplay this game has. The Witness is truly an awesome game that I have played in puzzle-adventure genre. The game is so tough with its puzzles and mysteries that sometime it really puts me in state of confusion and uncertainty that what should I do next to solve the puzzle/mystery.

You will start the game without any tutorial or instructions because there is no need for that you can walk run and only solve different puzzles by interacting different objects in similar way. So the game is all about exploring your environment to understand it, solve mysteries/puzzles and finding a way to get back to your home. You have no memories that how you got here and what causes your memory loss. One of the best thing about this game is that it makes you special and intelligent or it would never be wrong to say that it assumes that you an intelligent being. The game require patience and critical thinking for lots of puzzles and it will definitely reward you for this.

In this island you have various environments/places to explore such as colorful forests, barren deserts, and mountains. You will find different panels covered with puzzles and mazes each with different level of difficulty and complexity. You will interact with these panels, guide a “Line” inside maze where you have a starting and finish points and you have to link these two points to solve the puzzles. But that’s not it, some puzzles are more challenging than just linking start and finish points, you may have more than one start points or finish points or you may get other complex structures to solve these mazes. All these puzzles activate platforms, doors or power sources.

The Witness is remarkable game and it never tells you how to solve these puzzles, you will have to come up with your own solutions, reasoning or thinking. At the beginning of the game you have much simpler puzzles to start with but as the game progresses the complexity level of these puzzles will increase. At the later stages in the game there are more complex panels each with its own rules, colors, shapes and patterns. And the game will never instruct you on how you can solve each different set of mazes.

The Witness game has almost 20+ hours of gameplay and it’s really outstanding how the game keeps every puzzle engaging so that you don’t get bored. As you make progress in the game you realizes that puzzles and mazes are part of the environment at later stages in the game where puzzles are more complex, you need environmental hints to solve puzzles. And some puzzles have 0 clues and hints instead these puzzles affects your surroundings in different ways.

The island is open from the start and you can explore any part anytime, which is very vital and important. The area is divided in different structures and each place has its own set of rules symbols and in puzzles. When you feel that one set of puzzles are too high in difficulty level and you cannot solve then you can leave that area and move on to next with different set of rules and puzzles.

The island is not an open world adventure for the sake of exploration but instead you keep learning about your surroundings and every puzzle you solve or put down due to difficulty will help you understand your environment little better. We are not going to discuss any puzzle with you that will only soils that adventure that awaits you in the game but if you are stuck at some point in the game you can refer to our “The Witness Walkthrough” for hints and clues to solve difficult puzzles. One thing I should say about the game and puzzles is that the game will never reveal the full maze it just gives you the handful context or a small push so that you can easily comprehend what is before you.

Most of the puzzles in the beginning may seem of little meaning but as you progress to the end you will see how different parts of the island are connected. You will then see the bigger objectives, the game whisper and communicate these ideas in an amazing way giving you clues to move in one direction or another.

The “End” is a blur concept in The Witness, you may come to an end without solving all the puzzles. I somehow managed to complete 530 of these challenging puzzles and saw the end but I know there are more puzzles out there that I haven’t solved yet and I have no idea how to reach them and what they present.

The game, The Witness is not linear, the puzzles and mysteries are scattered in the island in various ways to approach. But you will definitely find a story in the game pushing you to the end, that’s what made this game beautiful. There are more than one way to the path that leads to “End”, all puzzles, mysteries, environments and the island as a whole looks phenomenal.