Funny, good points, well presented. I enjoyed the game so I'll give a defense or two. Couterpoints that occurred to me watching this: 1. Lots of people who played this ended up using out-of-game tools to work out various puzzles. But if you watch a few different playthroughs, you'll see that they differ almost completely on _which_ puzzles demanded this. Some people could do the mirroring and rotation tasks in their mind's eye effortlessly, but needed to keep elaborate notes for the chromatic-light rooms. Some people know their RGB/CMY color wheel so intimately that even the busted elevator cable didn't slow them down, but were too tonedeaf to discern pitches for the sound puzzles. I'm a musician and I found those ones trivial. But it took me embarrassingly long to make anything happen in the treehouse complex. Since so many of the puzzles' core challenges are perceptual, and since players are so wildly different from each other in physical ability as well as what their brains are wired to notice right away and what they overlook for hours, I don't think there could have been any way to tune the difficulty so that the challenges are all tractable with only your own faculties... except by making them all really, really easy. Which would suck. So some of the puzzles were inaccessible to colorblind people, some of them were inaccessible to deaf people or people with poor pitch perception, some were inaccessible to gamers with twitchy-3d-shooter tunnel vision who are unable to see anything that isn't moving, and some to players with weaker spatial reasoning who can't easily rotate or flip shapes in their heads, or who don't sufficiently understand the geometry of light sources, surfaces and reflections, etc. All of these obstacles can be worked around, one way or another, using out-of-game tools as you did. A colorblind person's 'correct' way of solving that area would probably be no different from your way of solving the invisible-reflection problem. In that sense, I think the game was designed to put all of these obstacles on roughly equal footing. (I also think they intend to take the 'meta' into account: it's assumed that players aren't playing in a vacuum, and that when they get stuck enough, especially if they're a content-seeking completionist type of player, many will end up looking up hints or solutions, and it isn't the end of the world if they do. [Especially if they know that a disability might be making it literally impossible to solve on their own.] And if they aren't completionists, I guess that's why you don't need to get every laser to reach the 'normal' ending.) 2. I understand being frustrated by how slow-moving the game is, but again given that the core challenges are more about _noticing_ things than about figuring things out with cognitive brute force... I think that the too-slow elevator is a hint aimed straight at those who need it most. Asking yourself "why is this dang elevator so slow?" is meant to make you reexamine your surroundings and wonder what they're trying to make you notice. A high-speed action gamer who never stops moving, is always frantically whipping their mouse around from viewpoint to viewpoint, strafe-running to save time, leaning on the Shift key all day, is likely to miss critical clues in the environment. And insofar as the game is constantly punishing you for being in too much of a hurry, these "forced slowness" moments seem to me, intended to give you a chance to see things that you'd otherwise sprint right over. To my thinking, they are almost charitable. You know that cliche'd thing from TV and movies where, maybe the 2 protagonists are on the run from a monster or something, and one of them has spotted it, and the other one is too busy talking or focusing on something-or-other, so the one character just grabs the other's head and turns it and makes them hold still and look? Y'know, this maneuver: ua-cam.com/video/22Ju9XYdT8A/v-deo.html That's what J.Blow is doing on the excruciatingly slow elevator or moving platform or whatever; he's grabbing your head and holding it still for a minute and saying "look". If you're stuck there for three quarters of a minute and you have nothing to do except pay attention to your surroundings - and maybe even do some random experimental mouse-clicking to while away the time - you might accidentally make a discovery which you'd otherwise have no hope of making. 3. I'm not sure, but did you make it through the whole game without spotting the environmental puzzles and the underground labyrinth and so on? Because you said you were going to spoil the whole thing, and then you didn't mention a whole swathe of the more hidden challenges and content at all. If you didn't encounter any of that, I'm not surprised you were underwhelmed by the game. But if the Witness has one central message, I think it's to humble and chastise our tendency to assume what we see is all there is, and remind us we should never be *too* confident that we're not overlooking something right in front of us. IMO, the moral of the whole game is kinda "If you didn't see anything there, maybe that's *not* because there was nothing to see."
Great points, agree with you. I also think it’s funny that most (seemingly) neurotypical people struggled with the slow pace of the game, while I, having ADHD, found it incredibly relaxing and soothing and really enjoyed it. I think most gamers are averse to letting go of previously held beliefs of what any game should have, I went in blind and let go of any assumptions and embraced it as a new experience. I also didn’t use a single guide or walkthrough.
00:52 Funnily enough, actually it's right there at this point where I see how GREAT The Witness is going to be: because it's conveying it's puzzle mechanics and conditions brilliantly without so much as a single textbox. I believe The Witness is masterclass in "conveyance", it's sheer brilliance in teaching, I love when games do that. Not many games are able to achieve that as well as The Witness does.
I'll be honest that was the reason I hated the witness, the "tutorial puzzles" that lay out the rules for whatever new gameplay mechanic is in the area can easily be misunderstood and you end up slamming your head against a puzzle 5 tiles later because of a specific edge case that makes sense if you understood the mechanic the way the game expects you to, but if you don't understanding why you're wrong is extremely annoying because reducing the possible variables to test things one by one is very hard. I almost wish you could create your own boards to try out stuff.
@@Yo-ji4ud The thing about this is you're expecting the tutorials to teach you the entire set of rules and edge cases in an unambiguous way. This is not what they were designed to do. The tutorials are there to help you formulate your own hypothesis about how a particular set of puzzles. They're not there to make sure your first hypothesis is correct. That's something you have to do for yourself. Failing a puzzle with an answer you're "sure" is correct is a prompt for you to reassess your hypothesis. What did you misunderstand? What else could be the answer? How can you test? That's supposed to be one of the most engaging parts of the game.
@@Yo-ji4ud to expand on what Fabio is saying, this is the point and message of the game that the video author seemed to have missed. The game is about the process of scientific discovery. Getting us the player to participate in it in this virtual world and take those skills with us out into the real world. The audio and video messages along with the end credits part make this clear.
@@tvorryn idk if it's a bias of mine but i don't think the game's message ends with "scientific inquiry". At least as an experience I think it goes beyond and into the "witnessing" in the name. It uses the useful, laboral looking for solutions gameplay to set the mood and drag you into the playful, curious just looking around to find stuff gameplay. More than looking around to figure out how things are it kinda teaches to look around just to see what is.
I love the witness, I actually replay it regularly. It's the only puzzle game I legitimately really enjoy replaying start to finish (except the light-reflecting puzzles and the music puzzles, those can mostly fuck off). My favorite part is that it feels like a metroidvania, but instead of the in-game character gaining new abilities, *I* the player gained the new abilities. And upon restarting the game, I have all the abilities still! New game+! I've still not found every puzzle in the game, and I don't really intend to. I like stumbling upon new ones every time I replay.
I just finished my fourth playthrough of it, this time getting just about everything. There's still new stuff I notice each time. @skillo6399 , the puzzles are still challenging enough even if you know all the gimmicks, and it's fun to try and see how fast you can beat the game each time
@@skillo6399I enjoyed it even though on my first playthrough I had to look up what some of the gimmicks were and you can replay it once you forget what they were
It's funny, every point you made here are the reasons I love the witness. How fitting, given the game's emphasis on perspectives lol. Life is tedium and beauty and time and work and differing beliefs, and all I think the game tries to do is reflect on that with it's soup of objectively nothing but subjectively so much. You can choose to emphasize or pursue any one of the aspects of the game that feels most important to you, like the environmental puzzles, or the panel puzzles, or the "true ending," or finding all the audio logs. I lowkey love that it wastes your time, it makes you sit and be patient. Anyways, I'm ranting and no one asked. I love the video :)
I find it rewarding to figure out the puzzles myself. I could be on a puzzle for half hour just looking at it going crazy until something in my brain clicks… probably why I enjoyed it and you didn’t
I think I liked The Witness in the same way I liked Dark Souls: it's not just about solving the puzzle/beating the bosses, it's about learning how to solve/beat them even when they start leaning on the unfair side. The frustration is only there to make your triumph better in the end. I remember being as excited about getting to activate a lazer as I was beating a tough Dark Souls boss, because it had been a hard journey to get there.
I'm with you. The challenge is in the riddle, knowing the information is there and having to see if you can find a novel approach to understanding what is happening. When this game came out, I put almost 40 hours into it over a 3 day weekend. I was hooked from start to finish. The work of having to twist my thought process was addictive, I couldn't let it go until I finished everything it had to offer.
@@MondayHopscotch exactly, it's a great puzzle design It's what all great puzzle work on Show, not tell It's pretty much a standard Textboxes are not only ugly, but also bad
@@MondayHopscotch I have a very strong hatred of riddles. I find the 'gotcha' nature of them so deeply unsatisfying. Games like Opus Magnum are IMO so much more fun, since it actually feels like solving a puzzle and not reverse engineering the twisted intentions of the developer.
So, I never used paint or any external programs when I played the game. I’m not sure I would call it intentional that the puzzles are solved easily outside of the game, but I do remember some of the areas being very intense with regards to keeping track of stuff in one’s head
I used paper extensively to solve many problems and it was great! I don't get the criticism. The dude really calls it "cheating", omg, it's the dumbest point I heard so far, but I'm still on minute 2, it can still get worse.
@@bajjanitor I find it really weird this dude forced himself to constantly do an ALT TAB to MS PAINT and use all sorts of screenshotting and image editing to solve these puzzles. This is fucking weirdo zone. Like, I'm sorry, is doodling a thing only the "poors" do now? Is it something not sufficiently "in fashion"? I don't get it.
The thing about The Witness is that it mostly appeals to people who thinks imagistically over people who think conceptually. As someone who thinks and reasons with mental images, this is the type of game that was taylor-made for me, the same way I can understand why it can get tedious to more verbally-minded people. Also, I don't think any point about the game being slow at points is valid considering this isa game that revolves around the idea of mindfulness, of letting yourself get immersed in the tiny things of this gift-to-the-senses hand crafted virtual island.
I disagree entirely with you about the game not wasting your time. The game *very much* wastes your time. If the second most common complaint is over and over about wasting your time, odds are it is legitimately wasting most people's time. Mindfulness is fine, but this game totally wastes your time.
While I consider it one of my favorite games, I can't really knock anyone for hating it; I do have some points though 1. Is there really a problem with using resources outside the game? (As in paint, photoshop etc.) 2. I'd argue the water in that part with the reflection puzzles goes slowly to give you enough time to check different screens 3. I agree the part of the review you showed IS funny and kind of ridiculous, but it doesn't seem fair to show that's the only reason people like this game 4. I genuinely think the game looks good, especially from a color perspective, it's very vibrant 5. While I agree games should be accessible for everyone (I'd say a game like Celeste nails it on the head), I don't really think there would be a really good solution for the sound one, writing captions would just give a away the answer 6. I really like basically every environmental puzzle, they're just so fun to find Some parts I agree with 1. The game really is too slow sometimes, that part when you instantly run to get off the boat is very relatable 2. It's definitely a little bit too convoluted at times 3. I do agree that a colorblind option would've been nice I can't blame you for making this video though, the game has always been divisive
(Year late but who cares) what I find funny about the water level is that it starts painfully slow but then accelerates immensely as soon as you get to the solutions
The hearing section was so hard for me, I did the first ones with the birds, but then when the cellphones and other animals appeared I wasn't able to hear the bird anymore, not even using earphones or turning up the volume, I had to look up a walkthrough
Like many of the recent comments here, I saw your channel recommended recently, and was curious as to what your take on The Witness actually was. To add to what your video mentioned: The accessibility issues are in my opinion one of the worst things about a game that I otherwise do love. I've read before that apparently this was a discussion in the game's production, and that Blow thought that it was worth having the game exist with the issues, rather than remove the puzzles that were problematic (and presumably adding accessibility options he considered to be too much of a deviance from the game's "vision"). I keep expecting someone to create a patch for the game that adds options such as Color-blind mode and Captions, and am somewhat amazed that it hasn't happened yet. Some stuff that I think you overlooked (possibly because you were already turned off from the game): - The "Solve puzzles from outside the game" is definitely an intended experience. The game has a built-in Screenshot button listed in the options, and you can then open a folder with the images. I do think that the game would have been improved if they had included an in-game method of making notes though. - The "slowness" that many people complain about, which is usually what is considered a waste of people's time, is almost always telling that someone didn't get far into the Environment / Secret puzzles. This is what many of the biggest fast of the game actually loved about it, and for many people, there's a big "reveal" feeling and excitement as they seek out the hidden puzzles, and discover that every "slow" area feels almost too fast as you are trying to solve the puzzle. Overall, I think that the game is one of the best "knowledge-vania" games to-date, but I also believe that being one of the first to do what it's doing, it has a lot of flaws that other future games can learn from. If you haven't played it, I highly recommend that you check out Taiji, which was made by a different developer as a "spiritual successor" to The Witness, and focuses in a lot more of the "good" of the game, while also trying to avoid the "bad". Thank you for the video!
I don't think the lack of an color-blind mode is what drags the game down overall, you're still able to finish the game by activating only half of the lasers, color blind people can spoil themselves the solution of the puzzle they literally can't solve on the internet. The thing is, if there would be an color blind mode, it would've rendered a whole section useless and probably break a couple of other puzzles, blow explained they tried to experiment with ways how to implement it in a way that color-blind people get their own exclusive puzzles, but it was scrapped cause they didn't manage to pull that off. I don't think in the end anything was lost, cause on color-blind mode the puzzles in question would've ceased to work anyway. So either you ignore it, which is totally possible or you consult the internet. I can pretty much understand that as a designer you have a particular form of aesthetic to your game in mind, of course accessibility is desirable, but if their is some sort of trade of regarding the artistic direction, it shouldn't be mandatory. I don't think that alone justifies abandoning creative ideas just because people with disabilities wouldn't be able to experience them. Either if you see gaming as entertainment or art, it's an luxury problem.
@@Ageleszly Tbh, this seems like a terrible take imo. I'm not sure how familiar with colorblindness you are? I'm guessing "not very" based on your response, because there are a lot of ways that colorblind-friendly options can exist, and there's can even be varying degrees of options based on different forms of colorblindness (and there are known color pallets that allow even the most extreme versions of colorblindness to see differences). Also, the take of "Eh, they can just look up solutions, or ignore it" is pretty much a cop-out. If you're going to go that route, then *at the very least* one can implement something in-game to give the solutions (such as a menu option that states something like "unable to solve color-based puzzles" that would then have the game show solutions to them when you go, or some sort of thing. The point is, there's not really a good reason that *nothing* is done about it, and saying that "nothing can be done without losing the vision" is just not true.
@@DwarfWoot Like I said an option to simply tell you the solution might go against the aesthetics of the game to be as less descriptive as possible. Being available for everyone might already spoil the solution of certain sections just by recognizing the option. Or some activate the option per accident, without knowing what they're doing. Other peoople might be inclined to cheat themselfes if they get stuck, something which Blow really advised people not doing (it's easier when its directly available in the game), so why should he doing it? It's his game, his artistic choices. Options always affect everyone just by being available, any good game designer knows this, that's why people think very hard how they lay out options or communicate it, there is always an effect. Jonathan Blow made a statement to this on his channel just search for "Jonathan Blow on accessibility" By denying there can be any good reason for his decisions you aren't interested in having a discourse over all, you just want to be in the right and this is rather counter productive. Ironically this goes even against what the game is trying to communicate. I think in the the end you inflate how important such an option for the game truly is, as its only affect an optional portion in the game for an extremely miniscule part of the players, who still can easily skip it by not pretending the internet doesn't exist. Should any good idea be scrapped, just because a small subset of players might be not able to play them? You basically restrict the freedom of expression in game design. Even with colorblind and tone deaf options, the game might be still not accessible for cognitive-restricted people, so you could basically never stop by adding more options to basically let the game explain itself, but then you're just adding a huge pile of things the developers hopes for you to ignore, as its all serves as an distraction for normal-abled people, while everyone else might fair better, by experiencing a different game more catered to their sensibilities through their inherent design or at least seek some help by lesser disabled people. In the end it doesn't matter that much as it's only one game of many. So there is a trade off here, but you just don't acknowledge it.
there are a lot of valid points here, but did you know there is a time challenge at the end of the game? if you are screen-shotting to work out the puzzles, that would force you to try something new. i dont think having memory as an aspect of puzzle solving makes for an inherently bad puzzle, but it could definitely have the fun / challenge removed. i'd say its a similar situation to save-scumming. sure a lot of games even let you quick load / save - its 100% intended by the developer, but doing it too much can ruin your experience. as someone with a particularly bad memory, i thought i'd do terribly, but managed to surprise myself when i tried. a large part of the fun for me was seeing how the different puzzle elements interact with each-other after learning their rules individually. this definitely can lead to bad experiences like the ship, where it's not obvious if you played the invisible line or audio section a long time before, but it comes together well in other parts of the game.
"Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game." That quote is the first thing I thought of while watching this video. I am so glad I didn't think of using paint to solve the puzzles. The game was so much fun without it.
*Totally Agree on...* - Sun Temple Bad - Sound Jungle Bad - Game Frustrating *Respectfully...* - Taking Notes Ain't Cheating - The slow bits conceal the fun puzzles. Just another code to decipher. - You can see the mazes from above. The answer is right in front of you. The elevator is a fake/bad ending. The Challenge is how you get 100%. *Get Good* (I'm subbed you legally cannot be mad at me.)
Seeing the mazes from above is not sufficient to solve the panel. You cannot see the audio cues, for instance. You still need to memorise, screenshot or draw at least some of the individual solutions.
@@BigDBrian That is correct. While that puzzle was very easy for me to recall from a glance from above, if you have to go back and take notes that's not cheating. I think we all can agree on that.
@@AJGexe Of course it's not cheating, the point is it's tedious. Personally I saved a few screenshots the other day. I don't think this puzzle detracted much from my experience, but it didn't improve it either. It's at least a bit satisfying for it all to come together.
@@BigDBrian I was very satisfied when it all came together. The thesis of the game is that the solution was staring you in the face all along. This one adds the bonus of you making the solution for yourself unknowingly. Genius!
I've used photoshop on some of the much later puzzles, but most of them I just mentally visualized and solved it that way, which is why I found them super fun. I can see how if you're someone who struggles with that, the Witness will not be very fun.
even if you can visualize the puzzles, they are obtuse to the point of frustration even when you know exactly what you have to do, it's often very annoying to actually do it suffice to say, i gave up halfway through
the design philosophy behind the witness is genius. you basically have to learn how to learn, and essentially end up learning how to speak a new language by the end of the game, and there are no explicit instructions anywhere. it's a huge feat, imo. i guess you either find the puzzles fun or you don't, and i found them really fun. also the environmental puzzles are so awesome haha, to say "they're shit" is such a weird take. having them there is definitely better than not having them there. they get so bonkers and creative
These people do not deserve good games. Sometimes people wonder why the gaming landscape is so terrible, and I just point to videos like these to hammer my point: the problem may reside in part in the developers hands, but mostly, it's the "consumers" who suck. Absolutely terrible.
@@LuisManuelLealDiasthis "game" with a slapped on youtube video ending is not worth 40 bucks. This is a playstore game that should be 4.99. Outer Wilds does this so much better, Stardew Valley does it better too, even the shrines in ghost of tsushima are better communicated through poetry. okay okay compare the shitness puzzles to the puzzles of inscryption. You are insecure about people not liking the first linelike game and thats just naive. This is actual consumer slop made by a guy fucking with his fans, how can you lack the ability to see that perspective if you've learned all about it by playing the witness? That game was a numb brain game I played while I watched Jerma streams.
I got The Witness for free a while ago on the Epic Games store, so I will be a bit biased towards that. I think it's not *terrible* but it's not *stellar.* I think the whole perspective thing is mostly a decent twist, yes it's "obtuse difficulty" to throw something between you and the panel, but my thought process is that it's something different compared to a flash puzzle game on Armorgames or something. The environmental puzzles I feel like are pretty fun since, to my knowledge, you get nothing for completing them. They are there just to be like "Oh hold on, I think I see something." HOWEVER, I hate how things move so slowly *because* of the puzzles needing them to move slowly. Moments like the bridges in the swamp area make me go "Alright, I'm done for now" when I see one taking 50 seconds just to be *halfway* done. I'm not great at giving scores, but I'd say *maybe* a 3/10. Not a horrid 0/10 or a great 8/10, just an "Eh" rating. It would've been a 4/10 however Jonathan's reaction towards accessibility features bumped it down for me. The one case I'd imagine using a pen and paper would be the greenhouse section, purely because of the elevator which you need to *predict* the next color for. Plus the giant maze in the courtyard. Basically, it feels like one of those games you'd play if you had no better options, whether because you beat Portal 2 for the 60th time in your life, or because you already learnt all you could in Outer Wilds and want a weird "modernized puzzle flash game" experience. And even then, it'd only be for a few hours until your patience runs thin and you leave.
As someone who loves The Witness, this video is great. Funny stuff, and you made many good points, especially about the accessibility issues. I think I've heard Blow use the justification that all the puzzles are optional, so if you can't figure a particular section out, you just move to another one. Well, that, and any accessibility features would compromise the design, but I don't think either of these are reasonable justifications. I had a brief google to see what the experience of playing The Witness is like for deaf people, and found a good reddit post. This person used a spectrogram app on their phone to solve the puzzles after looking up where they were online, but had this good criticism to make: "I was willing to give Blow the benefit of the doubt on this one. Perhaps he didn't have the time or resources to implement an alternative, but from the interviews I've read, it seems more like he valued creating a specific experience over accessibility. The complaints about audio and color puzzles notwithstanding, he apparently didn't even want to put the option of having a reticule into the game. What is disappointing here is not the lack or inaccessibility of any specific feature or puzzle type, it's that he doesn't seem to even understand what accessibility is. It's not about making things non-essential and leaving them exclusive. It's about providing a way for players to progress in a different way if it can be done by providing a reasonable accommodation." "The Witness somewhat gets away with it because it is, after all, a game about sensory perception and environmental awareness, so some sections would have had to be redesigned. But these sorts of barriers are not a fun experience for me and only remind me of similar access issues IRL that have consequences far beyond solving a puzzle. To put it another way: The Witness is a game where puzzle solving is a metaphor for our epistemological construction and understanding of reality (as the dictaphone recordings would seem to suggest), and the fact that certain disabled players can't access parts of the game is almost like saying abled people are the most qualified to comment on the nature of reality. The lack of accommodations feels like uninspired thinking at best and insulting at worst, and makes the game seem kind of pretentious and hollow when it waxes philosophical about its own message."
@@bajjanitor The designer can curate a very specific experience for a general audience, and then provide means to help other people with different needs access this experience. Accessibility needn't compromise design.
Not only that, but it feels like John Blow has a very limited knowledge on what accessibility options can be or the limitations of accessibility at the time of development. It rly feels like John is a pretentious individual who thinks the world must operate the same way he sees it.
3:35 but......there is lol what are you talking about? every single area in the game is full of new and interesting ideas that keep evolving in new and interesting ways. just take the desert as an example, you seem to dislike that the puzzles involve finding the right position to see the solution in the glare, but i don't see why that would in any way be poor game design? having to infer where the glare would appear from the angle of the pannel and the light source in each specific room is imo a very engaging gameplay loop and the witness never stops throwing curveballs at the player to test if they are paying attention (like the room where you can change the lights or the one with the raising water, which were both very well designed btw). sure its not the most complex idea out there and this area as a whole is very short compared to the time it takes to complete the other but im pretty sure this was intentional as the desert is one of the easiest areas to acess after you complete the symetry puzzles in the begining of the game (i mean its literally impossible to not see lmao). i get why you would dislike it but you seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding that the puzzle IS finding out the right way to look at them. idk its just overall super strange for someone to solve the pannel and then look at it like "oh see the solution is to just find the right angle to look at it" when its already solved and there is not much more left to do? its very reductive to just point at the solutions instead of the steps you have to take to find it. oh yeah and you were also right about how the game is not accesible to deaf and colourblind people but to pretend the way to solve that would just be adding options for to diferent colour configurations and closed captions almost makes me think that you werent paying attention at all to what you were playing, like, you realise you cant just fix it right? please tell me you dont
I played a solid 10hrs of The Witness and was very torn on how I felt. On one hand having to use a notepad with a game is something I really enjoy but with some puzzles the rules just didn't with me at all (especially the bird song ones). However many of the games that feel like tangentially inspired The Witness have gone on to become some of my favourites: The Pedestrian and The Outer Wilds. They're all similar in that progress comes from learning rules or information about the world and using that to progress as opposed to getting stronger etc
6:10 I took the final maze puzzle as an invitation to test my memory, and to my surprise I actually got it right in one or two tries. I think this is generally true of the game: If you think it's telling you to do something tedious, you can try the thing that ISN'T tedious. This is obvious with the panels that turn off when a mistake is made, but there's several other examples. For instance, you can do the final mirror puzzles by finding a viewpoint where both versions of a puzzle are visible. And in the desert temple, you should be figuring out where light will reflect so that you don't have to move the water repeatedly. And in the treehouse area, the game actually forces you to figure out an efficient path.) ...that said, it arguably wasn't executed very well. I agree the game was often tedious in practice, since it wasn't clear when to use what methods. It's definitely fair to call it a bad game (although it's one of my favorites).
Interesting perspective, I basically don't agree with any of your points, except that the game is inaccessible due to the nature of some puzzles. It didn't even occur to me to use tools outside of the game at any point. You can just use your head and in most cases taking notes is pointless because all of the information is small and directly in front of you. Learning the rules of each kind of symbol is just the setup. It's enjoyable too, but the real challenge is in exploring the solution space. To me a good puzzle game is one that is consistently capable of making you feel that you've explored every possible avenue of search but yet are still missing the solution. The witness consistently does this. Every single puzzle in every game can be mathematically reduced so this point makes no sense. The witness is also very varied despite everything being just drawing lines. You could say the game trolls you by throwing away a couple of important rules in the very final (and arguably optional) part of the game, but that doesn't really change the quality of the rest. To me it just sounds like you don't like this puzzle format. Perhaps because unlike baba is you or other puzzle games, these line puzzles are inherently stateless: you don't need to infer what's going to happen after a certain action is taken, you only need to care what line can satisfy each rule. Personally I'm tempted to say I might prefer the witness over baba is you because the search space is much more focused.
Absolutely right, I know he makes it clear in the end that he's just putting on a character and just dislikes the game a normal amount but this is absolutely a case of going into a game with entirely wrong expectations.
I played the game together with a friend via discord screensharing and found that it removed alot of the tedium you mentioned. We could look at 2 perspectives at the same time. Figured out the semantics together. Could look at high and low water at the same time etc. I found the game to be really fun playing like this.
I think we've already gotten off on the wrong foot, because I straight up did not think to use external programs or screenshot anything other than the theater codes. At the quadruple hedgemaze climax, I had already put so much effort into memorizing the previous mazes that I just kinda put them all in again at the end to finish it off, so the basic point that this video springs forth from is just completely unrelatable to me. I also find the core system to be engaging without any of the 3d exploration bells and whistles, and while my favorite parts are the pure puzzling swamp and treehouse village, I have grown warm towards the more gimmicky environmentally clued puzzles as well. I like that they act as a bridge into thinking of the shape and color of the world more like a game unto itself. I think it's extremely unfair to call The Witness's puzzles solely based on obfuscation and tedium. You're right that Stephen's Sausage Roll is better, though, you should definitely play it. The lack of accessibility is indeed a critical flaw that keeps me from recommending it to everyone, i believe some motion sickness accessibility options was added EVENTUALLY at the very least.
it's interesting seeing this video after your case of the golden idol one, since i think that one has given me the tools to express why i somewhat disagree with you. the witness may not be a great puzzle game, but i don't think it is one. i consider it to be more of an active observation game, and that's where it excels. the environmental puzzles for me were the meat of the game, almost as if the panel puzzles were just... misdirection. you do panel puzzles only so that when you can spot a circle in the surroundings without being told it's there. and this progression doesn't end there. there are interesting things hidden in the environment that aren't line puzzles to be solved, they're just there to be noticed. i'll spoil a few of these now, and i'm marking them as a spoiler since it's an aspect of the game you omitted in the video. there are some tree roots hanging from a rock arch that, in the reflection in the water underneath, look like a pair of koi fish circling each other. there is a tree that's filled with faces, if you just look at the branches long enough. the monumental statue reaching into the sky has a counterpart that, if observed from the right angle, it's reaching towards. the lake in the middle of the island is a functional map thereof. that for me is the point of the witness. it's not "the game escaped into the real world because now when i see a circle and a line i think 'hehe, witness puzzle'". it's paying more attention to the world around you and considering links and patterns in it. the puzzles are only there so that you can break out of them. (and the puzzles that are confined to the panel can be pretty good as you noticed. the swamp and the treetops are both pretty good examples of communicating a ruleset without any words) also john blow is a smart man who thinks he's way smarter than he is, and that his smarts apply to many more subjects than they do, which is the most annoying and obnoxious thing anyone can be. but that's neither here nor there ;)
Facinating how our gameplay differed. I can think of only one puzzle (in the tetris part) where i needed a piece of paper. All the other puzzles i didnt need one.
I loved the witness. I loved the idea that figuring out what the puzzle was is more important than solving it (this is the only criticism I disagree with, I am a fan of this aspect). I loved the fact that the game is like a metroidvania where the abilities you unlock are understanding how the symbols work which you learn elsewhere. Every criticism in your video (aside from the one I said I disagreed with) is 100% correct. I'm especially upset with Jon Blow about the lack of accessibility where you literally cannot beat the game if you have a common disability like colorblindness. The ship puzzle was INEXCUSABLY terrible. There's an environment puzzle that requires you to watch an hour long GDC presentation to solve it. The game wastes the ever loving SHIT out of your time and that only wasn't a problem for me because for some reason I had an insane amount of patience. But yeah there are a lot of reasons to hate this game, and even as a person who liked it, I think all of yours (including the one I disagreed with because I do feel that's a matter of personal preference) are completely valid.
also want to add that I got so pissed off at "the challenge" (a series of randomized puzzles with a time limit) I fired up visual studio and threw together a program to solve the puzzle type I was having the most trouble with so I could fucking beat it
I don’t know, taking notes and drawing clues used to be normal. It makes me feel a bit like Myst, the first Myst, anyway, which to me also always felt like the puzzles existed for the sake of being puzzles. (It even had inaccessible sound clues!) To be fair, it’s from 1993. I personally want to like The Witness but it gives me terrible motion sickness.
The game has DEVASTATING flaws in the accessibility department that kinda cripple it for real, but none of your other points really stuck with me. I was gonna write a whole lot of stuff and go down point by point but i think i found the main thing i found lacking in your review. As we all know "The Witness" is about observation. It's in the name, and the game is practically screaming it at you the whole way. The game doesn't give you tools to solve dilemmas with, all the rules come from _things_ in _places_, and the dilemmas are about discovering ways these things can interact to create correct paths, or just... looking at the things carefully. The big thing that made me enjoy the game a lot that i think didn't work out in your playthrough is I didn't stop at looking around in search of a solution (even though i spend a whole lot of time on that). No, the game isn't just asking me to look for the solution in the environment, it's asking me LOOK AT THE ENVIRONMENT. The "environmental puzzles" (which how the fuck do you go through the entire game and only find 4 of those) aren't "a thing that you can do while prancing around trying to find the actual gameplay", they are THE ENDGAME. Yeah the game has an "ending" sequence after you do the whole "figuring out" but it's quite obvious even if you didn't watch the movies under the mill that it's telling you to go see what's out there. The game did such a good job at making me want to look around that sometimes when i needed to go somewhere, i'd just click to walk ON NORMAL SPEED to be able to look around while the character gets to where i wanted to go (yes, click to walk is better. we know they didn't make it for "accessibility" and yes it's a better fit). Saying the witness is a bad game because the puzzles are badly designed and the game is slow is like saying that undertale is a bad game because the rpg mechanics don't lead to decisions and the bullet hell is too easy
@@StankFrengus he talks on and on about the "easy puzzles blah blah unaccesible blah blah i cannot understand a different point of view other than my own biased one blah blah" when the puzzles are not even the point of the game 😂😂
@@StankFrengus He did seem to use the word "easy" a lot while simultaneously proving he has no short-term memory or spacial reasoning skills. He struggled through the most simple of puzzles. If you agree with this video's take, I doubt you came close to finishing the game
The inaccessibility was definitely the biggest thing for me. My spatial reasoning, short term memory, and pitch perception are all very weak, and I'm color blind on top of it all. For me, so many of the puzzles were way harder than they should've been, not because they offered problems with interesting solutions to work through, but because I was mentally or physically not able to engage with them at the level that they demanded. Using outside tools didn't help me, it just made the things I wasn't able to do on my own even more frustrating and tedious. Even if you don't have to do every area to beat the game, having to skip whole areas because of something like that is still a miserable feeling. It's not like it had to be this way to offer interesting puzzles either; my favorite first-person puzzle game of all time, The Legend of Grimrock II, is full to the brim with so many different kinds of puzzles and secrets and riddles, and I could count the number of times that my disabilities caused me to struggle on a puzzle in that game on one hand!
I had a moment playing Braid many years back where I thought “these puzzles are really easy but I don’t have the energy / attention to input the solution”. It was no longer a puzzle game, it was a tedious data entry task. It sounds like the witness doesn’t respect your time either.
The thing is - the parts that you call needless tedium and time-wasting is the part that I consider the actual puzzles. In other words, yes, I found going down, figuring out how to drain the water, where to look, and then trying to remember the solution interesting. I didn’t copy the invisible line to photoshop, and when I finally managed to solve it I felt really proud of myself. I went up and down the elevator a dozen times, writing down the color changes trying to figure out how they lined up. And while I can understand the complaints being made, it also feels a bit like someone saying “this book of brainteasers is really easy if you look at the answers in the back.” I don’t think you or the people who agree with you are wrong, per se. I certainly don’t think using Photoshop is “cheating” I just think you either enjoy different kinds of puzzles or look at what the actual puzzle is differently. To me, the game felt a lot like when I was learning to program - I thought I understood how something worked, started making stuff on that assumption, then it turned out I was way off base and had to rethink my initial assumptions. And when I finally got everything perfect, I was super proud of myself. The one point that stuck with me in the lead-up to The Witness was Blow saying that he wanted the puzzles to require the player to interact with the island - yes, you COULD solve them 1 by 1 in a book, but they were supposed to compliment the island and vice versa, and I think he got that part right. As far as the ridiculous hyperbole of game reviewers, that’s a whole other bundle of stupidity. But I feel like the Witness is one of the few games that made me genuinely look at the world around me a little differently, rather than always taking everything I see at face value, sometimes it’s worth a second look to see what else might be hiding in plain sight.
I came here from another video recommending your channel. They said you were wrong about the witness. *I WAS LIED TO BY THEM!* I stopped playing the game when I had to do my Nth (it was probably approaching double-digits) minuteS-long reset of a puzzle. I knew what to do. I knew how to do it. The game was just fighting me and wasting my damn time. And so I stopped giving it my time.
My only problem with this game is that my brain doesn't working in a way which is efficient to solve puzzles and most importantly understand how they works (my brain can't work until given a proper fully baked explanation, which means ruining my experience with games like that, and i indeed ruined my experience with the Outer Wilds because i had all needed information but just missed it due to how bad my attention is and had to spoil some things for me), year after year i'm coming back to this game and tries again to complete it with resetted memory and more attention/knowledge, but still stucks everywhere and overwhelming my weak brain to the point it's just becomes a mental torture and not something enjoyable
People who can beat The Witness and similar games have lots of experience playing other puzzle games and also probably a deeper background in mathematics. I recommend playing easier puzzle games first before you get to the witness. You're basically a scientist in the witness doing research and finding discoveries, which is probably the most difficult thing in life.
As an obsessive explorer kind of gamer, I’d say that mediocre puzzles or not I loved the way the environment was built with all the little visual tricks and motivations for the player to look at things from all angles, mixing statues with shadows, reflections with objects, and combining lines through perspective despite them being spatially divided via automatic movement. I see additional program only value in the game to the parts that are definitely encouraged to overcome via out of game tools such as screenshots &pen and paper
Same here. The game is about looking at the worlds and seeing something that didn't jump at your at the first glance. That's is not obfuscation. Also JB mentioned they had an internal project to build an alternate color blind mode but that project did not succeeded.
I respect your opinion and you make some great points, I do however still disagree with most of what you said xD The fact that drawing lines on boards is so restrictive and the witness still manages to come up with new and fresh ideas every time is amazing to me. You've talked about how it is especially with the light reflection puzzles and that they repeat all the time. That part of the game is extremely short though and you basically showed every single puzzle that part of the game has to offer, meaning it cant have been repeated that often can it ? ^^ On another note, your bit with the water going down so excruciatingly slowly is one of my favourite parts of the game, since its also part of a meta environment puzzle. I love that this game just makes you think, because everything seems so stupid at first but probably has a purpose for something else. It makes you look at the game world with different eyes, always wondering if there could be something hidden. I also never had to draw anything outside of the game or go back to look at the 4 puzzles in the garden for example. And last thing, I actually dont get what your bit about the artstyle and look of the game was supposed to mean, the game does look great lmao I do agree with the accesibility problem however.
Thanks for watching! The Witness is definitely a nuanced game and not one I would have spent the last non-working-week diving into if I didn't think there was something there. Nothing mean was meant with the artstyle bit, I genuinely think the game looks very nice. I certainly wasn't looking to change any minds with this, but hopefully offer some new perspectives. Looking at both kind of responses to this video in such a short time shows this game is even more divisive than I thought it was, haha.
I'm in the middle of the Witness right now, and I spent the morning looking for comments. I'm finding myself getting increasingly frustrated at the puzzle difficulty, and the fanboys of the game aren't helping matters. When I see complaints like yours on Reddit, the general response is sneering along the lines of, "You CLEARLY don't understand this game. But that's OKAY." Many thanks for your review for helping me understand why the game is making me so angry. It's been fun as well, but right now I'm just getting pissed off. It's little things like: 1) How am I supposed to know how many lasers it takes before "something happens" on top of that mountain? Am I literally supposed to climb up there every time I activate one? 2) How would I just know about the audio cues for the mazes? 3) How would I "just know" about the environmental puzzles? There were literally no clues on the outsides of the obelisks, so how am I supposed to know about them? 4) How would I "just know" that the puzzle "plates" could change direction in the treehouse? And so on, and so on. (The sneering is on the way -- "Well, you need to pay attention to the environment, and you should learn from the tutorials, and yadda yadda yadda, maybe you shouldn't play this game if you're that stupid", etc. Yes, I've seen plenty of that. I've also seen plenty of people saying that they spent 8 hours on a SINGLE PUZZLE ... and that's just frickin' insane. Anyway, thanks for your thoughts, much appreciated.
I’m sorry, it sounds like the game was lost on you! It’s a little sad to see you give yourself a confirmation bias so far into the game. Just let it do its thing, man! The game tells you exactly enough to get an amazing epiphany once you do work things out on your own. Remember, you can only play the game once! It also may just be that the game isn’t for you. If you don’t ‘get’ sitting there for a long time trying to do a puzzle, and if the frustration you feel trying to work out a puzzle exceeds the satisfaction from solving one then this is probs the case. I should also mention that the feedback you’re getting about paying closer attention is absolutely valid. I’m not quite sure why you’re choosing to ignore it lol. Every point you’ve listed actually is very deliberately indicated somewhere: (the number of latches on the box at the centre of the mountain, and the puzzle close to it, speakers next to the tutorial sound puzzles.) I do find it slightly ironic to discard this feedback and refuse to change perspective in a game all about doing so.
I agree with some of your general criticisms. The temple gets repetitive quick, the jungle is a little obtuse. But you didn’t bring up the quote players at all, and if you paid attention, you might find that their content actually addresses several of your criticisms. For instance, have you considered that the game might be taking things slowly on purpose? Not to waste your time, but to teach you the value of patience when you’re working on anything difficult? There’s a quote from Einstein near the Sun Temple where he brings up that very point. Also, I don’t think it’s cheating to use some help when you’re solving the puzzles. But I don’t agree that the game is implicitly telling you to take notes. You can solve every puzzle in the game inside your own head if you’re focused.
If you want puzzles not in a video game I recommend sudoku and sudoku variants. I kinda scoffed at them for the longest time, but there's a lot of creativity and varied difficulties for everyone. Cracking the cryptic is a good channel to watch to check it out. I say bc watching this vid made me want to go do more sudoku instead.
Honestly true imo. I was looking for games on the "metroidbrainia" sub (shitty name btw) and was looking for an experience that could only really be had once, in the same vein as Outer Wilds, Obra Dinn, Inscryption, etc. Everyone was recommending the Witness, like always top 3 or 4 recommendations. Heard the game had to be experienced totally blind and that it was "a Myst clone" and I thought "y'know, I like Myst, this seems like a good idea". Then I got into the game, eventually realized it was all just line/grid puzzles, and by the time I was done with the Sun Temple, I realized I just wasn't having fun, and the core gameplay wasn't gonna change. And like, I can't believe this is what so many people consider peak. The puzzles aren't interesting, there's no plot. Everyone's like "GO IN BLIND GO IN BLIND", and I did, because I already made that mistake with Outer Wilds and got copped out of what is supposedly a life-changing gaming experience, but what was I even gonna get spoiled on, fucking line and grid puzzles? I get that the game just isn't for me. I want there to be a bit more substance to the games I play. But I just can't believe that this game is as highly acclaimed as it is. At least the parody game, the Looker, has a sense of humor.
I view The Witness as an interesting experiment, playing with a lot of ideas in game design and theme. Silent tutorialization, iterating on a single puzzle type, player driven exploration. The environmental storytelling, the audio logs, the unlockable video clips and the secret ending all hint at bigger ideas and explanations that somehow never come together into a single thesis. Everything about the game is both enticing, but also unsatisfying. Your reward for solving puzzles is always more puzzles. The entire game is built to get the player to ask "Why am I doing this?" I can only imagine Jonathan Blow laughing, because both he and the game are completely uninterested in answering that question. If the game has any thesis at all, it would be "I don't know, why are you doing this?" Which is deeply frustrating. Frustration is one of the core emotions the game is trying to elicit, on every level, 100% intentionally. This is why everything moves slow and wastes your time. The biggest offender is anytime you need to use the boat to solve puzzles in the environment. The game doesn't require you to do any of this. It certainly doesn't reward you. Everything about the game is driven by player curiosity. The designers can say "You did this to yourself", as if they had nothing to do with the meticulously crafted trap they lead you into. I completely understand anyone who loves the game. I also completely understand anyone who hates it, doesn't get it or doesn't see what the big deal is. I'm glad a game like this exists and I'm glad I played it. But mostly, I'm glad we have The Witness so no one needs to make a game like this again.
My experience was opposite yours. I really liked Braid, so I was excited about this game, but the trailer looked kind of boring to me. I thought a bunch of puzzle boards didn't look interesting at all, but again...I really liked Braid so I thought I'd have to try it. I really loved it...and was honestly surprised how into it I got. Sorry you didn't enjoy it, but to call it a bad game or badly designed doesn't seem right. Nice video though! Watched it to the end, you are entertaining 🙂
At 6:04 you Don't go back down to take pictures of them all. That is why you are on top of the tower to look from top down and see all of the answers from above and connect them
Spoilers for the game, the reason it takes so long to move things in the game is because there are hidden puzzles that change and grow as they move. Is that engaging? Up to you. Furthermore, surprised you didn't mention the best part of the game: the hidden puzzles throughout the island.
@6:20 I don't know If I'm just weird but well. I solved these mazes so I didn't have to go back. I just remembered and retraced my steps at the top. I think you did a little bit of disservice to yourself by overusing screenshots and paint
I know I'm commenting on a two year old video, and I am ABSOLUTELY not here to defend The Witness, but I have to say: I have never seen anyone say that "taking notes" is in any way cheating for a puzzle game. I think your points about accessibility and places where it didn't feel like the game was respecting your time were spot on, but I also felt like there were plenty of fine puzzles in The Witness that felt appropriate: puzzles where I had to sit down and rationally, logically determine what segments MUST be part of the solution, what segments CAN'T be part of the solution, why my solution always seemed to have the wrong parity, etc. In the end, I found the puzzles in The Witness completely fine -- not anywhere nearly the level of Baba is You, Portal, Patrick's Parabox, or even Braid, but completely fine. And for me, hunting for the environmental "puzzles" was a hoot, even if most of them weren't "puzzles" beyond having to go slow and sniff around at anything that looked suspicious. What got to me was the utter pretentious of making the game's only message, "You have to consider things from different perspectives!" and then making basically every single audiolog and every single video about a white person's perspective, nearly entirely Western perspectives with just a dash of Eastern perspectives for "variety." Want to hear something about Zen? Here's two quotes from the same British white guy. Want to hear something about Buddhism? Here's an entire video about a white woman's take on Buddhism. No, sorry, it's a white woman's take on a white man's take on Buddhism. Want to learn something about an indigenous people's perspectives? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha no.
4:36 the longness of the water draining is for a puzzle where the water is supposed to be half levelled, if it is more faster than that it will probably be very much hard nevermind its actually long
The gameplay reminds me of really old subversive flash puzzle games or html ARG games around about 2003, which were all about the obfuscation and breaking and rebuilding your assumptions about the rules of the game, rather than a more traditional puzzle. So it's more like another genre entirely, but unlike those old games the Witness plays very smoothly and is very pretty and in every way seems like a normal polished puzzle game. Those old games seemed glitchy and crunchy in their presentation so you immediately knew you were wandering into a chaotic and punishing world.
The Witness is a very niche game. It is a puzzle game with very little in the way of story and your only reward for completing puzzles is understanding. It is slow. It encourages mindfulness and examining alternative perspectives. It doesn't hold your hand. It is the opposite of what most content is these days. We have probably the lowest attention spans in history as a result of being spoon fed shorter and shorter content (tic toc, reels, shorts), making us all addicted to frequent, zero effort dopamine hits. The Witness is the opposite of that. It is specifically and intentionally crafted to avoid some things which are considered engaging game design. It is entirely unsurprising that not everyone enjoys it. But not liking it because you might need to use a pencil and paper is absolutely wild 🤣
Totally liked this game! Also think cheating is optional and not the expectation of the game as pointed out in this video. Sure, it must be dull to go through the game if all u do is cheat, but I think mostly there was an 'in-game' solution to be found if u just pay attention. Sometimes just so obnoxious of a solution, that the hassle wasn't worth it and I'd walkthrough it. But definitely it was there to be found. All in all, as many have pointed out, I think it is a game with a surprising amount of depth underneath a fairly simpistic surface.
For me, the game was terribly boring. The one with the birds singing was just painful for me. Look around, try different things, realize you've got to match the singing... oh that's clever! Now, I'm quite bad at noticing if the tones go up or down, so I needed several listenings for each note. And there are like half a dozen musical puzzles, all next to each other. So, after figuring out the solution to the puzzle, I got to spent like 20 or 30 mins just matching the notes. That's just tedious. And the rest of the game is just like that. The desert temple with its water and the musical puzzles are only two of many many possible examples.
Genuine question, how would you suggest making accessibility for the sound puzzles, personally I couldnt solve them due to my inability to remember what each tone sounded like, but also, oh well, a set of puzzles werent designed for me, theres no way to make it accessible without just, telling you the tones, and then there is no puzzle
I got bored with this game. I thought it was really cool and fun at first, then the further I got into it I started doing things like using my phone to take reference pictures of tedious puzzles (and using pencil/paper) to make it go by quicker and I realized I wasn't really enjoying myself anymore so I stopped playing. I get that it's rewarding to solve some of the more difficult puzzles and it can be fun to come to the realization that you understand how something works in the game, but the novelty wore off and I was no longer having fun at a certain point so I just turned it off.
Probably a weird rule to have but I try to avoid games where the best logo the developer could come up with is just the name of the game typed out in a very normal serif font. It's usually not a good sign.
I feel the same. I finished the witness, but it hardly felt satisfying. Knowing the fundamental rules of the puzzle but not having enough information to solve it due to... not positioning your character in the environment right? Or forgetting the 'invisible' cursor's position? Or some other design contrivance? More frustrating than it was rewarding for me.
This was such a fun video that kept me hooked all throughout. I never have delved into the Blow-verse so The Witness always came off to me as one of those games Joseph Anderson would cover and that’d be enough for me to understand about it (both if which became true lol). Plus, how good can The Witness really be without a Companion Cube? I mean, c’mon.
I dont remember whose video-analysis it was, but it pretty much described the game as very elaborate troll, with forming cult circlejerk following of people liking their own farts too much.
How did you do a video about the game being tedious and not respecting time without mentioning that stupid environmental puzzle in the room that plays videos? (But I 100% agree with your take. You did a much better job articulating it than I ever had been able to before.)
He mentioned having seen only 4 environmentals, and he didn't mention the audio and video content even in passing. There's a possibility he didn't even find the video room.
Yeah I didn’t like it either. The world felt empty it was pretty but it felt empty. Given the only puzzle games that I played besides mobile puzzle games was the two portal games. So that world felt way more lived in though it was way more destroyed.
I don't think I can confidently say the witness is "good" or "bad". It's got some great ideas, the concept of trying to understand what the puzzle are even about takes different mental ressources from actually solving them, I think overlooking the obtuseness as a waste of time is not trying to engage with the game concept. The witness is about the scientific method, testing hypothesis to try and figure out the rules of a confusing world. Basically it's the misanthropic version of outer wilds. Cause yeah the game also just feels like it was made by someone who loathed anyone who'd want to play it, it's not a great feeling, and the accessibility issues for me push that from a front the game could have had to clearly what the game feels like. I know I wasn't able to solve any of the sound based puzzles (except the very early ones) even knowing what I had to do. I'm not deaf, though I learned way after playing the witness that I most likely have auditory processing disorder so looking back it's most likely that. But yeah, having to look up the solution cause you're physically unable to solve a puzzle is not a great feeling and it also makes it more likely to get frustrated quicker with the other puzzles. I know once I started looking the solution for sound based puzzles my trust in the game was kinda shattered and I felt less inclined to believe there was a solution I could work out even when there was so I ended up being more lenient with looking things up. The author probably wanted so much that some people experience his vision in the purest form that he basically thought that anyone else can fuck off. But despite all this I still think it's full of good ideas and I honestly don't really mind that it's "wasting my time". I find it kinda helpful actually, I have ADHD so these long waiting moment are kinda torture but they also help me remind my brain to chill the fuck out. While it's inconveniences can be downright hostile at time I'm also someone who struggles to not use conveniences even when they lessen the experience. For exemple the boat rides could have had an optional teleport but environnemental puzzles aside it'd make it more likely that you just give up on a puzzle quickly and zip around all the areas instead of persevering in the one you're currently in. Sometimes inconvenience can be good and too much convenience can make it hard to settle in with some of the game's features. Like how fast travel and mini maps with quest objectives in open world games tend to make it less likely you familiarize yourself with the world. (seriously, try playing skyrim without fast travel, it can be tedious as fuck at times but you also get a very different appreciation for the environnement layout, the small hidden things everywhere, the random events etc. It's a completely different experience). I think the witness pushes that towards hostily and it doesn't need to be such a dick all the time but going all out "it's bad" without trying to engage with what it's trying to do isn't better than going "it's amazing" and overlooking the accessibility issues in my opinion.
I liked the game a lot, but boy was it pretentious. It should know that my only philosophical viewpoint is getting a damn dot through a square maze to open whatever door it is wired to. lol
I had just finished "The Sojourn" and enjoyed it, so I decided to give "The Witness" a try, and it is a slog. I've played for 11 hours, and I'm just exhausted with the line puzzles. The puzzles themselves annoy me. Like all the puzzles that involve getting the absolutely perfect viewing angle, the puzzles that involve memorization etc... My mistake was that I assumed the good reviews of the game were indicative of a game with wide appeal. I like puzzles, but I'm not the type of puzzle lovers who enjoys figuring out the rules of a puzzle.
maybe i am just too old school, but it never occurred to me to use PS. i used pen and paper and had a ton of fun with the puzzles :) much like with the first dark souls, i wish i could be boinked on the head and forget ever having played the game so i could get another blind playthrough. i also liked 'opus magnum' (perhaps the most accessible zachtronics game) a lot, but that game is more about optimising a setup for different parameters and i didn't get the same sense of discovery i did from the witness.
Only 4 environmental puzzles? As far as you got into the game you should have found dozens. The slow sections are there to get you to look around and spot them, they are everywhere.
I can entirely see your point here, and I think this is a good video, but I still had a really great time playing the game. The biggest change from your gameplay was that I used a physical pen and paper which was really a great time. Kinda brought me back to the old days of making my own strategy guides for RPG's and writing down puzzle solutions for Zelda. Whether or not that is the game being designed well or me having nostalgia is not something I'm sure on. Good video tho I see your point. Sidenote Edit: By the time I was finished I had countless pages of completely indecipherable line drawings which was cool to look back through.
@@Plummiee "everyone who doesn't like this mediocre puzzle game isn't as smart as me." lol keep stroking your ego. I beat the game, it's not that hard. mastering redstone circuitry in minecraft requires more intelligence than the puzzles in the witness. it's creator is a pretentious knob who takes himself way too seriously and it shows. No surprise it appeals to the same kind of person.
@@Plummiee lol right, everyone who doesn't like this mediocre puzzle game must not be as intelligent as you. I beat the game, it wasn't that hard. Mastering redstone circuitry in minecraft requires more intelligence than the puzzles in the witness, but if someone doesn't like minecraft I wouldn't assume that means they're less intelligent than me. No surprise Johnathan Blow's pretentious little game appeals to similar people who like to stroke their own ego.
the problem with jblow is he thinks he is smart. smart people don't think they are smart. if you think you are smart thats a pretty reliable sign that you are in fact, not.
First of all, this sentence makes no sense, and also, i believe its very hard to create a game with this depth and im doubting he just lucked out in making it , so he must be a pretty smart guy
I just played through the witness for the first time, and i came to youtube looking to see other peoples opinions on the game. my only response to this video is that it's entirely a skill issue. seriously. i didnt once screenshot a puzzle. never googled anything. if something didnt work, i walked away and came back when i was more prepared. i think your main problem was that you were playing for the sake of finishing. dont focus on getting to the end, focus on taking each puzzle one by one. spend the extra time and play it out.
I gave the witness a try a while back, but never finished it and I feel like this video perfectly articulates why. While the start of the game was pretty straight forward, I eventually found myself constantly confonting puzzles that I had no idea where to start with. I very frequently felt like i'd missed something elsewhere, which I found overwhelming and frustrating, and it very quickly became a game of me hunting for puzzles that I actually knew how to slove, leaving for later when I couldn't figure out a puzzles mechanic.
Here from the Adam Millard video. Yep, agreed with him. You're wrong. :P I mean, you can't really be wrong on an opinion, so there's that. And you do make some good points. Unlike many (most?) video games, The Witness supports a surprisingly large number of readings. It's not clear what the game is about, so there's a number of arguments that can be made and adequately defended on this. And, of course, depending on what you interpret a work to be about, this is going to inform how good you think it its. If Super Mario Kart supported a reading that it's about meritocracy, you could conclude from that reading that it is a bad game. Where I think you're "wrong" (again, not literally) is in that you didn't mention a few key points that, in my opinion, are integral to an informed and complete reading of The Witness. Either you didn't even experienced them, or you did and didn't think they were important to mention - in any case, this represents a flaw in your reading. The Witness is not an easy game to talk about.
in Very video critiques you good had this! (only 1% of people can understand this puzzle sentence) Many of us would prefer to be deaf than to listen to the last few "bird" puzzles But to be unfair to you, the game is downright miserable for people that can't visualize the solutions, mentally moving the shapes and lines around, without saving screenshots and drawing them out first. But I must agree with you, the desert temple is shit. Concentrated, slow-motion, excrement It's like the California of this game and should sink into the ocean. Personally, I love this game, and it's one of my favorite things, but I don't respect myself or my time, so that might explain it. Cheers
Thank you for articulating this. I couldn't put into words for myself what was bothering me about this game. Tedious and obfuscated rather than an actual increase in challenge, or actually fun. It is like therapy to realise that this is why I couldn't get on with it. Playing this game has been like a peek into the mind of a madman.
There are a lot of good things about the witness, but so also a lot of BAD things about it. You mentioned accessibility which genuinely surprised me cause I feel like NO-ONE ever talks about it. It's genuinely horrible. If you're deaf or colourblind, you just. cannot complete entire sections of the game. if you're photosensitive you cannot complete the mountain, the final section of the game (and the only one that is actively required to finish the game, since for the rest you can choose whichever sections you want to complete). You described the game as arrogant, which in my mind is the *perfect* descriptor for it. Jonathon Blow makes you feel frustrated and stupid. He throws random quotes from philosophers and scientists (read by some great voice actors by the way) that sort of just. dont mean anything. yeah they're contemplative but nothing else. I love the puzzles in the witness but MAN it's just. So tedious. Waiting for that one goddamn cloud enviro puzzle makes me want to rip my hair out.
I just finished the game and felt more of a relief that it was over. Glad to hear I'm not the only one who found the puzzles tedious and laborious. I had very few "aha!" moments which is the cornerstone of any good puzzle game in my opinion.
Funny, good points, well presented. I enjoyed the game so I'll give a defense or two. Couterpoints that occurred to me watching this:
1. Lots of people who played this ended up using out-of-game tools to work out various puzzles. But if you watch a few different playthroughs, you'll see that they differ almost completely on _which_ puzzles demanded this. Some people could do the mirroring and rotation tasks in their mind's eye effortlessly, but needed to keep elaborate notes for the chromatic-light rooms. Some people know their RGB/CMY color wheel so intimately that even the busted elevator cable didn't slow them down, but were too tonedeaf to discern pitches for the sound puzzles. I'm a musician and I found those ones trivial. But it took me embarrassingly long to make anything happen in the treehouse complex. Since so many of the puzzles' core challenges are perceptual, and since players are so wildly different from each other in physical ability as well as what their brains are wired to notice right away and what they overlook for hours, I don't think there could have been any way to tune the difficulty so that the challenges are all tractable with only your own faculties... except by making them all really, really easy. Which would suck.
So some of the puzzles were inaccessible to colorblind people, some of them were inaccessible to deaf people or people with poor pitch perception, some were inaccessible to gamers with twitchy-3d-shooter tunnel vision who are unable to see anything that isn't moving, and some to players with weaker spatial reasoning who can't easily rotate or flip shapes in their heads, or who don't sufficiently understand the geometry of light sources, surfaces and reflections, etc. All of these obstacles can be worked around, one way or another, using out-of-game tools as you did. A colorblind person's 'correct' way of solving that area would probably be no different from your way of solving the invisible-reflection problem. In that sense, I think the game was designed to put all of these obstacles on roughly equal footing.
(I also think they intend to take the 'meta' into account: it's assumed that players aren't playing in a vacuum, and that when they get stuck enough, especially if they're a content-seeking completionist type of player, many will end up looking up hints or solutions, and it isn't the end of the world if they do. [Especially if they know that a disability might be making it literally impossible to solve on their own.] And if they aren't completionists, I guess that's why you don't need to get every laser to reach the 'normal' ending.)
2. I understand being frustrated by how slow-moving the game is, but again given that the core challenges are more about _noticing_ things than about figuring things out with cognitive brute force... I think that the too-slow elevator is a hint aimed straight at those who need it most. Asking yourself "why is this dang elevator so slow?" is meant to make you reexamine your surroundings and wonder what they're trying to make you notice.
A high-speed action gamer who never stops moving, is always frantically whipping their mouse around from viewpoint to viewpoint, strafe-running to save time, leaning on the Shift key all day, is likely to miss critical clues in the environment. And insofar as the game is constantly punishing you for being in too much of a hurry, these "forced slowness" moments seem to me, intended to give you a chance to see things that you'd otherwise sprint right over. To my thinking, they are almost charitable.
You know that cliche'd thing from TV and movies where, maybe the 2 protagonists are on the run from a monster or something, and one of them has spotted it, and the other one is too busy talking or focusing on something-or-other, so the one character just grabs the other's head and turns it and makes them hold still and look?
Y'know, this maneuver: ua-cam.com/video/22Ju9XYdT8A/v-deo.html
That's what J.Blow is doing on the excruciatingly slow elevator or moving platform or whatever; he's grabbing your head and holding it still for a minute and saying "look". If you're stuck there for three quarters of a minute and you have nothing to do except pay attention to your surroundings - and maybe even do some random experimental mouse-clicking to while away the time - you might accidentally make a discovery which you'd otherwise have no hope of making.
3. I'm not sure, but did you make it through the whole game without spotting the environmental puzzles and the underground labyrinth and so on? Because you said you were going to spoil the whole thing, and then you didn't mention a whole swathe of the more hidden challenges and content at all. If you didn't encounter any of that, I'm not surprised you were underwhelmed by the game. But if the Witness has one central message, I think it's to humble and chastise our tendency to assume what we see is all there is, and remind us we should never be *too* confident that we're not overlooking something right in front of us.
IMO, the moral of the whole game is kinda "If you didn't see anything there, maybe that's *not* because there was nothing to see."
Great points, agree with you. I also think it’s funny that most (seemingly) neurotypical people struggled with the slow pace of the game, while I, having ADHD, found it incredibly relaxing and soothing and really enjoyed it.
I think most gamers are averse to letting go of previously held beliefs of what any game should have, I went in blind and let go of any assumptions and embraced it as a new experience. I also didn’t use a single guide or walkthrough.
shoutout to The Looker, a free 6 years-late parody of The Witness that inexplicably manages to be genuinely funny and good.
Agree :)
00:52 Funnily enough, actually it's right there at this point where I see how GREAT The Witness is going to be: because it's conveying it's puzzle mechanics and conditions brilliantly without so much as a single textbox. I believe The Witness is masterclass in "conveyance", it's sheer brilliance in teaching, I love when games do that. Not many games are able to achieve that as well as The Witness does.
I'll be honest that was the reason I hated the witness, the "tutorial puzzles" that lay out the rules for whatever new gameplay mechanic is in the area can easily be misunderstood and you end up slamming your head against a puzzle 5 tiles later because of a specific edge case that makes sense if you understood the mechanic the way the game expects you to, but if you don't understanding why you're wrong is extremely annoying because reducing the possible variables to test things one by one is very hard. I almost wish you could create your own boards to try out stuff.
@@Yo-ji4ud The thing about this is you're expecting the tutorials to teach you the entire set of rules and edge cases in an unambiguous way. This is not what they were designed to do. The tutorials are there to help you formulate your own hypothesis about how a particular set of puzzles. They're not there to make sure your first hypothesis is correct. That's something you have to do for yourself. Failing a puzzle with an answer you're "sure" is correct is a prompt for you to reassess your hypothesis. What did you misunderstand? What else could be the answer? How can you test? That's supposed to be one of the most engaging parts of the game.
@@Yo-ji4ud to expand on what Fabio is saying, this is the point and message of the game that the video author seemed to have missed. The game is about the process of scientific discovery. Getting us the player to participate in it in this virtual world and take those skills with us out into the real world.
The audio and video messages along with the end credits part make this clear.
@@Yo-ji4ud that's science, babyyyyyyyyyy
@@tvorryn idk if it's a bias of mine but i don't think the game's message ends with "scientific inquiry". At least as an experience I think it goes beyond and into the "witnessing" in the name. It uses the useful, laboral looking for solutions gameplay to set the mood and drag you into the playful, curious just looking around to find stuff gameplay. More than looking around to figure out how things are it kinda teaches to look around just to see what is.
If you’re the kind of person who enjoys an intellectual challenge, it’s quite fun to play the game without external tools
I love the witness, I actually replay it regularly. It's the only puzzle game I legitimately really enjoy replaying start to finish (except the light-reflecting puzzles and the music puzzles, those can mostly fuck off).
My favorite part is that it feels like a metroidvania, but instead of the in-game character gaining new abilities, *I* the player gained the new abilities. And upon restarting the game, I have all the abilities still! New game+! I've still not found every puzzle in the game, and I don't really intend to. I like stumbling upon new ones every time I replay.
Why would you replay a puzzle game that is entirely about figuring out each gimmick? What?
I just finished my fourth playthrough of it, this time getting just about everything. There's still new stuff I notice each time. @skillo6399 , the puzzles are still challenging enough even if you know all the gimmicks, and it's fun to try and see how fast you can beat the game each time
@@skillo6399I enjoyed it even though on my first playthrough I had to look up what some of the gimmicks were and you can replay it once you forget what they were
@@skillo6399I'm telling you man I'm sure the line maze minigame is fun but does it really make this game good at all??
@@skillo6399 why would you rewatch a movie or TV series or any video game?
It's funny, every point you made here are the reasons I love the witness. How fitting, given the game's emphasis on perspectives lol. Life is tedium and beauty and time and work and differing beliefs, and all I think the game tries to do is reflect on that with it's soup of objectively nothing but subjectively so much. You can choose to emphasize or pursue any one of the aspects of the game that feels most important to you, like the environmental puzzles, or the panel puzzles, or the "true ending," or finding all the audio logs. I lowkey love that it wastes your time, it makes you sit and be patient. Anyways, I'm ranting and no one asked. I love the video :)
I find it rewarding to figure out the puzzles myself. I could be on a puzzle for half hour just looking at it going crazy until something in my brain clicks… probably why I enjoyed it and you didn’t
I think I liked The Witness in the same way I liked Dark Souls: it's not just about solving the puzzle/beating the bosses, it's about learning how to solve/beat them even when they start leaning on the unfair side. The frustration is only there to make your triumph better in the end. I remember being as excited about getting to activate a lazer as I was beating a tough Dark Souls boss, because it had been a hard journey to get there.
so youre a masochist
@@Venched Not at all, why would you think that?
I'm with you. The challenge is in the riddle, knowing the information is there and having to see if you can find a novel approach to understanding what is happening. When this game came out, I put almost 40 hours into it over a 3 day weekend. I was hooked from start to finish. The work of having to twist my thought process was addictive, I couldn't let it go until I finished everything it had to offer.
@@MondayHopscotch exactly, it's a great puzzle design
It's what all great puzzle work on
Show, not tell
It's pretty much a standard
Textboxes are not only ugly, but also bad
@@MondayHopscotch I have a very strong hatred of riddles. I find the 'gotcha' nature of them so deeply unsatisfying. Games like Opus Magnum are IMO so much more fun, since it actually feels like solving a puzzle and not reverse engineering the twisted intentions of the developer.
So, I never used paint or any external programs when I played the game. I’m not sure I would call it intentional that the puzzles are solved easily outside of the game, but I do remember some of the areas being very intense with regards to keeping track of stuff in one’s head
I used paper extensively to solve many problems and it was great! I don't get the criticism. The dude really calls it "cheating", omg, it's the dumbest point I heard so far, but I'm still on minute 2, it can still get worse.
@@bajjanitor I find it really weird this dude forced himself to constantly do an ALT TAB to MS PAINT and use all sorts of screenshotting and image editing to solve these puzzles. This is fucking weirdo zone. Like, I'm sorry, is doodling a thing only the "poors" do now? Is it something not sufficiently "in fashion"? I don't get it.
The thing about The Witness is that it mostly appeals to people who thinks imagistically over people who think conceptually. As someone who thinks and reasons with mental images, this is the type of game that was taylor-made for me, the same way I can understand why it can get tedious to more verbally-minded people. Also, I don't think any point about the game being slow at points is valid considering this isa game that revolves around the idea of mindfulness, of letting yourself get immersed in the tiny things of this gift-to-the-senses hand crafted virtual island.
taylor-made
@@thepurestvessel9249 he slipped in a golf promo smh
I disagree entirely with you about the game not wasting your time. The game *very much* wastes your time. If the second most common complaint is over and over about wasting your time, odds are it is legitimately wasting most people's time. Mindfulness is fine, but this game totally wastes your time.
While I consider it one of my favorite games, I can't really knock anyone for hating it; I do have some points though
1. Is there really a problem with using resources outside the game? (As in paint, photoshop etc.)
2. I'd argue the water in that part with the reflection puzzles goes slowly to give you enough time to check different screens
3. I agree the part of the review you showed IS funny and kind of ridiculous, but it doesn't seem fair to show that's the only reason people like this game
4. I genuinely think the game looks good, especially from a color perspective, it's very vibrant
5. While I agree games should be accessible for everyone (I'd say a game like Celeste nails it on the head), I don't really think there would be a really good solution for the sound one, writing captions would just give a away the answer
6. I really like basically every environmental puzzle, they're just so fun to find
Some parts I agree with
1. The game really is too slow sometimes, that part when you instantly run to get off the boat is very relatable
2. It's definitely a little bit too convoluted at times
3. I do agree that a colorblind option would've been nice
I can't blame you for making this video though, the game has always been divisive
(Year late but who cares) what I find funny about the water level is that it starts painfully slow but then accelerates immensely as soon as you get to the solutions
The hearing section was so hard for me, I did the first ones with the birds, but then when the cellphones and other animals appeared I wasn't able to hear the bird anymore, not even using earphones or turning up the volume, I had to look up a walkthrough
The witness is the best puzzle game I ever played period.
"The Looker is The Witness without its worst part, Jonathan Blow" -steam review
The Obelisk of Knowledge!!
Well, there is a part where they are poking fun of how all the mechanism in The Witness move so tediously slow, so…
But also with more worse bits added on
Like many of the recent comments here, I saw your channel recommended recently, and was curious as to what your take on The Witness actually was.
To add to what your video mentioned: The accessibility issues are in my opinion one of the worst things about a game that I otherwise do love. I've read before that apparently this was a discussion in the game's production, and that Blow thought that it was worth having the game exist with the issues, rather than remove the puzzles that were problematic (and presumably adding accessibility options he considered to be too much of a deviance from the game's "vision"). I keep expecting someone to create a patch for the game that adds options such as Color-blind mode and Captions, and am somewhat amazed that it hasn't happened yet.
Some stuff that I think you overlooked (possibly because you were already turned off from the game):
- The "Solve puzzles from outside the game" is definitely an intended experience. The game has a built-in Screenshot button listed in the options, and you can then open a folder with the images. I do think that the game would have been improved if they had included an in-game method of making notes though.
- The "slowness" that many people complain about, which is usually what is considered a waste of people's time, is almost always telling that someone didn't get far into the Environment / Secret puzzles. This is what many of the biggest fast of the game actually loved about it, and for many people, there's a big "reveal" feeling and excitement as they seek out the hidden puzzles, and discover that every "slow" area feels almost too fast as you are trying to solve the puzzle.
Overall, I think that the game is one of the best "knowledge-vania" games to-date, but I also believe that being one of the first to do what it's doing, it has a lot of flaws that other future games can learn from. If you haven't played it, I highly recommend that you check out Taiji, which was made by a different developer as a "spiritual successor" to The Witness, and focuses in a lot more of the "good" of the game, while also trying to avoid the "bad".
Thank you for the video!
I don't think the lack of an color-blind mode is what drags the game down overall, you're still able to finish the game by activating only half of the lasers, color blind people can spoil themselves the solution of the puzzle they literally can't solve on the internet. The thing is, if there would be an color blind mode, it would've rendered a whole section useless and probably break a couple of other puzzles, blow explained they tried to experiment with ways how to implement it in a way that color-blind people get their own exclusive puzzles, but it was scrapped cause they didn't manage to pull that off.
I don't think in the end anything was lost, cause on color-blind mode the puzzles in question would've ceased to work anyway. So either you ignore it, which is totally possible or you consult the internet. I can pretty much understand that as a designer you have a particular form of aesthetic to your game in mind, of course accessibility is desirable, but if their is some sort of trade of regarding the artistic direction, it shouldn't be mandatory. I don't think that alone justifies abandoning creative ideas just because people with disabilities wouldn't be able to experience them. Either if you see gaming as entertainment or art, it's an luxury problem.
@@Ageleszly Tbh, this seems like a terrible take imo.
I'm not sure how familiar with colorblindness you are? I'm guessing "not very" based on your response, because there are a lot of ways that colorblind-friendly options can exist, and there's can even be varying degrees of options based on different forms of colorblindness (and there are known color pallets that allow even the most extreme versions of colorblindness to see differences).
Also, the take of "Eh, they can just look up solutions, or ignore it" is pretty much a cop-out. If you're going to go that route, then *at the very least* one can implement something in-game to give the solutions (such as a menu option that states something like "unable to solve color-based puzzles" that would then have the game show solutions to them when you go, or some sort of thing. The point is, there's not really a good reason that *nothing* is done about it, and saying that "nothing can be done without losing the vision" is just not true.
@@DwarfWoot Like I said an option to simply tell you the solution might go against the aesthetics of the game to be as less descriptive as possible.
Being available for everyone might already spoil the solution of certain sections just by recognizing the option. Or some activate the option per accident, without knowing what they're doing. Other peoople might be inclined to cheat themselfes if they get stuck, something which Blow really advised people not doing (it's easier when its directly available in the game), so why should he doing it? It's his game, his artistic choices. Options always affect everyone just by being available, any good game designer knows this, that's why people think very hard how they lay out options or communicate it, there is always an effect.
Jonathan Blow made a statement to this on his channel just search for "Jonathan Blow on accessibility"
By denying there can be any good reason for his decisions you aren't interested in having a discourse over all, you just want to be in the right and this is rather counter productive. Ironically this goes even against what the game is trying to communicate.
I think in the the end you inflate how important such an option for the game truly is, as its only affect an optional portion in the game for an extremely miniscule part of the players, who still can easily skip it by not pretending the internet doesn't exist. Should any good idea be scrapped, just because a small subset of players might be not able to play them?
You basically restrict the freedom of expression in game design.
Even with colorblind and tone deaf options, the game might be still not accessible for cognitive-restricted people, so you could basically never stop by adding more options to basically let the game explain itself, but then you're just adding a huge pile of things the developers hopes for you to ignore, as its all serves as an distraction for normal-abled people, while everyone else might fair better, by experiencing a different game more catered to their sensibilities through their inherent design or at least seek some help by lesser disabled people. In the end it doesn't matter that much as it's only one game of many.
So there is a trade off here, but you just don't acknowledge it.
there are a lot of valid points here, but did you know there is a time challenge at the end of the game?
if you are screen-shotting to work out the puzzles, that would force you to try something new. i dont think having memory as an aspect of puzzle solving makes for an inherently bad puzzle, but it could definitely have the fun / challenge removed. i'd say its a similar situation to save-scumming. sure a lot of games even let you quick load / save - its 100% intended by the developer, but doing it too much can ruin your experience.
as someone with a particularly bad memory, i thought i'd do terribly, but managed to surprise myself when i tried.
a large part of the fun for me was seeing how the different puzzle elements interact with each-other after learning their rules individually. this definitely can lead to bad experiences like the ship, where it's not obvious if you played the invisible line or audio section a long time before, but it comes together well in other parts of the game.
"Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game."
That quote is the first thing I thought of while watching this video. I am so glad I didn't think of using paint to solve the puzzles. The game was so much fun without it.
*Totally Agree on...*
- Sun Temple Bad
- Sound Jungle Bad
- Game Frustrating
*Respectfully...*
- Taking Notes Ain't Cheating
- The slow bits conceal the fun puzzles. Just another code to decipher.
- You can see the mazes from above. The answer is right in front of you.
The elevator is a fake/bad ending. The Challenge is how you get 100%.
*Get Good* (I'm subbed you legally cannot be mad at me.)
Seeing the mazes from above is not sufficient to solve the panel. You cannot see the audio cues, for instance. You still need to memorise, screenshot or draw at least some of the individual solutions.
@@BigDBrian That is correct.
While that puzzle was very easy for me to recall from a glance from above, if you have to go back and take notes that's not cheating.
I think we all can agree on that.
@@AJGexe Of course it's not cheating, the point is it's tedious. Personally I saved a few screenshots the other day. I don't think this puzzle detracted much from my experience, but it didn't improve it either. It's at least a bit satisfying for it all to come together.
@@BigDBrian I was very satisfied when it all came together. The thesis of the game is that the solution was staring you in the face all along. This one adds the bonus of you making the solution for yourself unknowingly. Genius!
I've used photoshop on some of the much later puzzles, but most of them I just mentally visualized and solved it that way, which is why I found them super fun. I can see how if you're someone who struggles with that, the Witness will not be very fun.
even if you can visualize the puzzles, they are obtuse to the point of frustration
even when you know exactly what you have to do, it's often very annoying to actually do it
suffice to say, i gave up halfway through
@@patrolin skill issue
the design philosophy behind the witness is genius. you basically have to learn how to learn, and essentially end up learning how to speak a new language by the end of the game, and there are no explicit instructions anywhere. it's a huge feat, imo. i guess you either find the puzzles fun or you don't, and i found them really fun.
also the environmental puzzles are so awesome haha, to say "they're shit" is such a weird take. having them there is definitely better than not having them there. they get so bonkers and creative
These people do not deserve good games. Sometimes people wonder why the gaming landscape is so terrible, and I just point to videos like these to hammer my point: the problem may reside in part in the developers hands, but mostly, it's the "consumers" who suck. Absolutely terrible.
@@LuisManuelLealDiasthis "game" with a slapped on youtube video ending is not worth 40 bucks. This is a playstore game that should be 4.99. Outer Wilds does this so much better, Stardew Valley does it better too, even the shrines in ghost of tsushima are better communicated through poetry. okay okay compare the shitness puzzles to the puzzles of inscryption. You are insecure about people not liking the first linelike game and thats just naive. This is actual consumer slop made by a guy fucking with his fans, how can you lack the ability to see that perspective if you've learned all about it by playing the witness? That game was a numb brain game I played while I watched Jerma streams.
@@StankFrengus you are always allowed to have terrible opinions, of course. Even despicable ones like the one you shared.
I got The Witness for free a while ago on the Epic Games store, so I will be a bit biased towards that.
I think it's not *terrible* but it's not *stellar.* I think the whole perspective thing is mostly a decent twist, yes it's "obtuse difficulty" to throw something between you and the panel, but my thought process is that it's something different compared to a flash puzzle game on Armorgames or something.
The environmental puzzles I feel like are pretty fun since, to my knowledge, you get nothing for completing them. They are there just to be like "Oh hold on, I think I see something." HOWEVER, I hate how things move so slowly *because* of the puzzles needing them to move slowly. Moments like the bridges in the swamp area make me go "Alright, I'm done for now" when I see one taking 50 seconds just to be *halfway* done.
I'm not great at giving scores, but I'd say *maybe* a 3/10. Not a horrid 0/10 or a great 8/10, just an "Eh" rating. It would've been a 4/10 however Jonathan's reaction towards accessibility features bumped it down for me. The one case I'd imagine using a pen and paper would be the greenhouse section, purely because of the elevator which you need to *predict* the next color for. Plus the giant maze in the courtyard.
Basically, it feels like one of those games you'd play if you had no better options, whether because you beat Portal 2 for the 60th time in your life, or because you already learnt all you could in Outer Wilds and want a weird "modernized puzzle flash game" experience. And even then, it'd only be for a few hours until your patience runs thin and you leave.
@@shibainu2528 Jesus fucking Christ
Basically the best video game ever created.
That's subjective isn't it?
As someone who loves The Witness, this video is great. Funny stuff, and you made many good points, especially about the accessibility issues. I think I've heard Blow use the justification that all the puzzles are optional, so if you can't figure a particular section out, you just move to another one. Well, that, and any accessibility features would compromise the design, but I don't think either of these are reasonable justifications.
I had a brief google to see what the experience of playing The Witness is like for deaf people, and found a good reddit post. This person used a spectrogram app on their phone to solve the puzzles after looking up where they were online, but had this good criticism to make:
"I was willing to give Blow the benefit of the doubt on this one. Perhaps he didn't have the time or resources to implement an alternative, but from the interviews I've read, it seems more like he valued creating a specific experience over accessibility. The complaints about audio and color puzzles notwithstanding, he apparently didn't even want to put the option of having a reticule into the game. What is disappointing here is not the lack or inaccessibility of any specific feature or puzzle type, it's that he doesn't seem to even understand what accessibility is. It's not about making things non-essential and leaving them exclusive. It's about providing a way for players to progress in a different way if it can be done by providing a reasonable accommodation."
"The Witness somewhat gets away with it because it is, after all, a game about sensory perception and environmental awareness, so some sections would have had to be redesigned. But these sorts of barriers are not a fun experience for me and only remind me of similar access issues IRL that have consequences far beyond solving a puzzle. To put it another way: The Witness is a game where puzzle solving is a metaphor for our epistemological construction and understanding of reality (as the dictaphone recordings would seem to suggest), and the fact that certain disabled players can't access parts of the game is almost like saying abled people are the most qualified to comment on the nature of reality. The lack of accommodations feels like uninspired thinking at best and insulting at worst, and makes the game seem kind of pretentious and hollow when it waxes philosophical about its own message."
@@bajjanitor The designer can curate a very specific experience for a general audience, and then provide means to help other people with different needs access this experience. Accessibility needn't compromise design.
Not only that, but it feels like John Blow has a very limited knowledge on what accessibility options can be or the limitations of accessibility at the time of development. It rly feels like John is a pretentious individual who thinks the world must operate the same way he sees it.
3:35 but......there is lol what are you talking about? every single area in the game is full of new and interesting ideas that keep evolving in new and interesting ways. just take the desert as an example, you seem to dislike that the puzzles involve finding the right position to see the solution in the glare, but i don't see why that would in any way be poor game design? having to infer where the glare would appear from the angle of the pannel and the light source in each specific room is imo a very engaging gameplay loop and the witness never stops throwing curveballs at the player to test if they are paying attention (like the room where you can change the lights or the one with the raising water, which were both very well designed btw). sure its not the most complex idea out there and this area as a whole is very short compared to the time it takes to complete the other but im pretty sure this was intentional as the desert is one of the easiest areas to acess after you complete the symetry puzzles in the begining of the game (i mean its literally impossible to not see lmao). i get why you would dislike it but you seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding that the puzzle IS finding out the right way to look at them. idk its just overall super strange for someone to solve the pannel and then look at it like "oh see the solution is to just find the right angle to look at it" when its already solved and there is not much more left to do? its very reductive to just point at the solutions instead of the steps you have to take to find it.
oh yeah and you were also right about how the game is not accesible to deaf and colourblind people but to pretend the way to solve that would just be adding options for to diferent colour configurations and closed captions almost makes me think that you werent paying attention at all to what you were playing, like, you realise you cant just fix it right? please tell me you dont
6:04 you had the solution just by looking at the garden labyrinth from where you are standing. But your pov is understood
I played a solid 10hrs of The Witness and was very torn on how I felt. On one hand having to use a notepad with a game is something I really enjoy but with some puzzles the rules just didn't with me at all (especially the bird song ones).
However many of the games that feel like tangentially inspired The Witness have gone on to become some of my favourites: The Pedestrian and The Outer Wilds. They're all similar in that progress comes from learning rules or information about the world and using that to progress as opposed to getting stronger etc
theres a reason the water moves that slow, sorry you didnt find it
6:10 I took the final maze puzzle as an invitation to test my memory, and to my surprise I actually got it right in one or two tries.
I think this is generally true of the game: If you think it's telling you to do something tedious, you can try the thing that ISN'T tedious. This is obvious with the panels that turn off when a mistake is made, but there's several other examples. For instance, you can do the final mirror puzzles by finding a viewpoint where both versions of a puzzle are visible. And in the desert temple, you should be figuring out where light will reflect so that you don't have to move the water repeatedly. And in the treehouse area, the game actually forces you to figure out an efficient path.)
...that said, it arguably wasn't executed very well. I agree the game was often tedious in practice, since it wasn't clear when to use what methods. It's definitely fair to call it a bad game (although it's one of my favorites).
Interesting perspective, I basically don't agree with any of your points, except that the game is inaccessible due to the nature of some puzzles.
It didn't even occur to me to use tools outside of the game at any point. You can just use your head and in most cases taking notes is pointless because all of the information is small and directly in front of you.
Learning the rules of each kind of symbol is just the setup. It's enjoyable too, but the real challenge is in exploring the solution space. To me a good puzzle game is one that is consistently capable of making you feel that you've explored every possible avenue of search but yet are still missing the solution. The witness consistently does this.
Every single puzzle in every game can be mathematically reduced so this point makes no sense.
The witness is also very varied despite everything being just drawing lines. You could say the game trolls you by throwing away a couple of important rules in the very final (and arguably optional) part of the game, but that doesn't really change the quality of the rest.
To me it just sounds like you don't like this puzzle format. Perhaps because unlike baba is you or other puzzle games, these line puzzles are inherently stateless: you don't need to infer what's going to happen after a certain action is taken, you only need to care what line can satisfy each rule.
Personally I'm tempted to say I might prefer the witness over baba is you because the search space is much more focused.
Absolutely right, I know he makes it clear in the end that he's just putting on a character and just dislikes the game a normal amount but this is absolutely a case of going into a game with entirely wrong expectations.
I played the game together with a friend via discord screensharing and found that it removed alot of the tedium you mentioned. We could look at 2 perspectives at the same time. Figured out the semantics together. Could look at high and low water at the same time etc. I found the game to be really fun playing like this.
I think we've already gotten off on the wrong foot, because I straight up did not think to use external programs or screenshot anything other than the theater codes. At the quadruple hedgemaze climax, I had already put so much effort into memorizing the previous mazes that I just kinda put them all in again at the end to finish it off, so the basic point that this video springs forth from is just completely unrelatable to me.
I also find the core system to be engaging without any of the 3d exploration bells and whistles, and while my favorite parts are the pure puzzling swamp and treehouse village, I have grown warm towards the more gimmicky environmentally clued puzzles as well. I like that they act as a bridge into thinking of the shape and color of the world more like a game unto itself. I think it's extremely unfair to call The Witness's puzzles solely based on obfuscation and tedium. You're right that Stephen's Sausage Roll is better, though, you should definitely play it.
The lack of accessibility is indeed a critical flaw that keeps me from recommending it to everyone, i believe some motion sickness accessibility options was added EVENTUALLY at the very least.
it's interesting seeing this video after your case of the golden idol one, since i think that one has given me the tools to express why i somewhat disagree with you. the witness may not be a great puzzle game, but i don't think it is one. i consider it to be more of an active observation game, and that's where it excels.
the environmental puzzles for me were the meat of the game, almost as if the panel puzzles were just... misdirection. you do panel puzzles only so that when you can spot a circle in the surroundings without being told it's there. and this progression doesn't end there. there are interesting things hidden in the environment that aren't line puzzles to be solved, they're just there to be noticed.
i'll spoil a few of these now, and i'm marking them as a spoiler since it's an aspect of the game you omitted in the video. there are some tree roots hanging from a rock arch that, in the reflection in the water underneath, look like a pair of koi fish circling each other. there is a tree that's filled with faces, if you just look at the branches long enough. the monumental statue reaching into the sky has a counterpart that, if observed from the right angle, it's reaching towards. the lake in the middle of the island is a functional map thereof.
that for me is the point of the witness. it's not "the game escaped into the real world because now when i see a circle and a line i think 'hehe, witness puzzle'". it's paying more attention to the world around you and considering links and patterns in it. the puzzles are only there so that you can break out of them. (and the puzzles that are confined to the panel can be pretty good as you noticed. the swamp and the treetops are both pretty good examples of communicating a ruleset without any words)
also john blow is a smart man who thinks he's way smarter than he is, and that his smarts apply to many more subjects than they do, which is the most annoying and obnoxious thing anyone can be. but that's neither here nor there ;)
if you think the game is just about solving the puzzles you missed the whole point of the game.
Facinating how our gameplay differed. I can think of only one puzzle (in the tetris part) where i needed a piece of paper. All the other puzzles i didnt need one.
I rarily used any tools outside of game, I believe I did it only in the color puzzle
I really enjoyed trying to work with just my mind
I loved the witness. I loved the idea that figuring out what the puzzle was is more important than solving it (this is the only criticism I disagree with, I am a fan of this aspect). I loved the fact that the game is like a metroidvania where the abilities you unlock are understanding how the symbols work which you learn elsewhere.
Every criticism in your video (aside from the one I said I disagreed with) is 100% correct. I'm especially upset with Jon Blow about the lack of accessibility where you literally cannot beat the game if you have a common disability like colorblindness. The ship puzzle was INEXCUSABLY terrible. There's an environment puzzle that requires you to watch an hour long GDC presentation to solve it. The game wastes the ever loving SHIT out of your time and that only wasn't a problem for me because for some reason I had an insane amount of patience. But yeah there are a lot of reasons to hate this game, and even as a person who liked it, I think all of yours (including the one I disagreed with because I do feel that's a matter of personal preference) are completely valid.
also want to add that I got so pissed off at "the challenge" (a series of randomized puzzles with a time limit) I fired up visual studio and threw together a program to solve the puzzle type I was having the most trouble with so I could fucking beat it
I don’t know, taking notes and drawing clues used to be normal. It makes me feel a bit like Myst, the first Myst, anyway, which to me also always felt like the puzzles existed for the sake of being puzzles. (It even had inaccessible sound clues!)
To be fair, it’s from 1993.
I personally want to like The Witness but it gives me terrible motion sickness.
The game has DEVASTATING flaws in the accessibility department that kinda cripple it for real, but none of your other points really stuck with me.
I was gonna write a whole lot of stuff and go down point by point but i think i found the main thing i found lacking in your review.
As we all know "The Witness" is about observation. It's in the name, and the game is practically screaming it at you the whole way. The game doesn't give you tools to solve dilemmas with, all the rules come from _things_ in _places_, and the dilemmas are about discovering ways these things can interact to create correct paths, or just... looking at the things carefully.
The big thing that made me enjoy the game a lot that i think didn't work out in your playthrough is I didn't stop at looking around in search of a solution (even though i spend a whole lot of time on that). No, the game isn't just asking me to look for the solution in the environment, it's asking me LOOK AT THE ENVIRONMENT.
The "environmental puzzles" (which how the fuck do you go through the entire game and only find 4 of those) aren't "a thing that you can do while prancing around trying to find the actual gameplay", they are THE ENDGAME. Yeah the game has an "ending" sequence after you do the whole "figuring out" but it's quite obvious even if you didn't watch the movies under the mill that it's telling you to go see what's out there. The game did such a good job at making me want to look around that sometimes when i needed to go somewhere, i'd just click to walk ON NORMAL SPEED to be able to look around while the character gets to where i wanted to go (yes, click to walk is better. we know they didn't make it for "accessibility" and yes it's a better fit).
Saying the witness is a bad game because the puzzles are badly designed and the game is slow is like saying that undertale is a bad game because the rpg mechanics don't lead to decisions and the bullet hell is too easy
this is legit a skill issue
He said your entire game was easy. And it is. I played it while watching jerma play The Thing
@@StankFrengus he talks on and on about the "easy puzzles blah blah unaccesible blah blah i cannot understand a different point of view other than my own biased one blah blah" when the puzzles are not even the point of the game 😂😂
@@StankFrengus He did seem to use the word "easy" a lot while simultaneously proving he has no short-term memory or spacial reasoning skills. He struggled through the most simple of puzzles. If you agree with this video's take, I doubt you came close to finishing the game
The inaccessibility was definitely the biggest thing for me. My spatial reasoning, short term memory, and pitch perception are all very weak, and I'm color blind on top of it all. For me, so many of the puzzles were way harder than they should've been, not because they offered problems with interesting solutions to work through, but because I was mentally or physically not able to engage with them at the level that they demanded. Using outside tools didn't help me, it just made the things I wasn't able to do on my own even more frustrating and tedious.
Even if you don't have to do every area to beat the game, having to skip whole areas because of something like that is still a miserable feeling.
It's not like it had to be this way to offer interesting puzzles either; my favorite first-person puzzle game of all time, The Legend of Grimrock II, is full to the brim with so many different kinds of puzzles and secrets and riddles, and I could count the number of times that my disabilities caused me to struggle on a puzzle in that game on one hand!
I had a moment playing Braid many years back where I thought “these puzzles are really easy but I don’t have the energy / attention to input the solution”. It was no longer a puzzle game, it was a tedious data entry task.
It sounds like the witness doesn’t respect your time either.
The thing is - the parts that you call needless tedium and time-wasting is the part that I consider the actual puzzles.
In other words, yes, I found going down, figuring out how to drain the water, where to look, and then trying to remember the solution interesting.
I didn’t copy the invisible line to photoshop, and when I finally managed to solve it I felt really proud of myself.
I went up and down the elevator a dozen times, writing down the color changes trying to figure out how they lined up.
And while I can understand the complaints being made, it also feels a bit like someone saying “this book of brainteasers is really easy if you look at the answers in the back.” I don’t think you or the people who agree with you are wrong, per se. I certainly don’t think using Photoshop is “cheating” I just think you either enjoy different kinds of puzzles or look at what the actual puzzle is differently. To me, the game felt a lot like when I was learning to program - I thought I understood how something worked, started making stuff on that assumption, then it turned out I was way off base and had to rethink my initial assumptions. And when I finally got everything perfect, I was super proud of myself.
The one point that stuck with me in the lead-up to The Witness was Blow saying that he wanted the puzzles to require the player to interact with the island - yes, you COULD solve them 1 by 1 in a book, but they were supposed to compliment the island and vice versa, and I think he got that part right.
As far as the ridiculous hyperbole of game reviewers, that’s a whole other bundle of stupidity. But I feel like the Witness is one of the few games that made me genuinely look at the world around me a little differently, rather than always taking everything I see at face value, sometimes it’s worth a second look to see what else might be hiding in plain sight.
100% agree 🔥
I came here from another video recommending your channel. They said you were wrong about the witness. *I WAS LIED TO BY THEM!* I stopped playing the game when I had to do my Nth (it was probably approaching double-digits) minuteS-long reset of a puzzle. I knew what to do. I knew how to do it. The game was just fighting me and wasting my damn time. And so I stopped giving it my time.
My only problem with this game is that my brain doesn't working in a way which is efficient to solve puzzles and most importantly understand how they works (my brain can't work until given a proper fully baked explanation, which means ruining my experience with games like that, and i indeed ruined my experience with the Outer Wilds because i had all needed information but just missed it due to how bad my attention is and had to spoil some things for me), year after year i'm coming back to this game and tries again to complete it with resetted memory and more attention/knowledge, but still stucks everywhere and overwhelming my weak brain to the point it's just becomes a mental torture and not something enjoyable
People who can beat The Witness and similar games have lots of experience playing other puzzle games and also probably a deeper background in mathematics. I recommend playing easier puzzle games first before you get to the witness. You're basically a scientist in the witness doing research and finding discoveries, which is probably the most difficult thing in life.
noone told me that using tools is cheating :D
i used a math block like when you draw maps for yourself in other older games
As an obsessive explorer kind of gamer, I’d say that mediocre puzzles or not I loved the way the environment was built with all the little visual tricks and motivations for the player to look at things from all angles, mixing statues with shadows, reflections with objects, and combining lines through perspective despite them being spatially divided via automatic movement. I see additional program only value in the game to the parts that are definitely encouraged to overcome via out of game tools such as screenshots &pen and paper
I think the witness is one of the best games of all time, Is a piece of art and have amazing puzzles. Its structure is briliant
Same here. The game is about looking at the worlds and seeing something that didn't jump at your at the first glance. That's is not obfuscation. Also JB mentioned they had an internal project to build an alternate color blind mode but that project did not succeeded.
The game is so bad... cuz I kind of suck. Yeaaaaa
I respect your opinion and you make some great points, I do however still disagree with most of what you said xD
The fact that drawing lines on boards is so restrictive and the witness still manages to come up with new and fresh ideas every time is amazing to me.
You've talked about how it is especially with the light reflection puzzles and that they repeat all the time. That part of the game is extremely short though and you basically showed every single puzzle that part of the game has to offer, meaning it cant have been repeated that often can it ? ^^
On another note, your bit with the water going down so excruciatingly slowly is one of my favourite parts of the game, since its also part of a meta environment puzzle. I love that this game just makes you think, because everything seems so stupid at first but probably has a purpose for something else. It makes you look at the game world with different eyes, always wondering if there could be something hidden.
I also never had to draw anything outside of the game or go back to look at the 4 puzzles in the garden for example.
And last thing, I actually dont get what your bit about the artstyle and look of the game was supposed to mean, the game does look great lmao
I do agree with the accesibility problem however.
Thanks for watching! The Witness is definitely a nuanced game and not one I would have spent the last non-working-week diving into if I didn't think there was something there. Nothing mean was meant with the artstyle bit, I genuinely think the game looks very nice. I certainly wasn't looking to change any minds with this, but hopefully offer some new perspectives. Looking at both kind of responses to this video in such a short time shows this game is even more divisive than I thought it was, haha.
I'm in the middle of the Witness right now, and I spent the morning looking for comments. I'm finding myself getting increasingly frustrated at the puzzle difficulty, and the fanboys of the game aren't helping matters. When I see complaints like yours on Reddit, the general response is sneering along the lines of, "You CLEARLY don't understand this game. But that's OKAY."
Many thanks for your review for helping me understand why the game is making me so angry. It's been fun as well, but right now I'm just getting pissed off. It's little things like: 1) How am I supposed to know how many lasers it takes before "something happens" on top of that mountain? Am I literally supposed to climb up there every time I activate one? 2) How would I just know about the audio cues for the mazes? 3) How would I "just know" about the environmental puzzles? There were literally no clues on the outsides of the obelisks, so how am I supposed to know about them? 4) How would I "just know" that the puzzle "plates" could change direction in the treehouse? And so on, and so on.
(The sneering is on the way -- "Well, you need to pay attention to the environment, and you should learn from the tutorials, and yadda yadda yadda, maybe you shouldn't play this game if you're that stupid", etc. Yes, I've seen plenty of that. I've also seen plenty of people saying that they spent 8 hours on a SINGLE PUZZLE ... and that's just frickin' insane.
Anyway, thanks for your thoughts, much appreciated.
I’m sorry, it sounds like the game was lost on you! It’s a little sad to see you give yourself a confirmation bias so far into the game. Just let it do its thing, man! The game tells you exactly enough to get an amazing epiphany once you do work things out on your own. Remember, you can only play the game once!
It also may just be that the game isn’t for you. If you don’t ‘get’ sitting there for a long time trying to do a puzzle, and if the frustration you feel trying to work out a puzzle exceeds the satisfaction from solving one then this is probs the case.
I should also mention that the feedback you’re getting about paying closer attention is absolutely valid. I’m not quite sure why you’re choosing to ignore it lol. Every point you’ve listed actually is very deliberately indicated somewhere: (the number of latches on the box at the centre of the mountain, and the puzzle close to it, speakers next to the tutorial sound puzzles.) I do find it slightly ironic to discard this feedback and refuse to change perspective in a game all about doing so.
it's ok to be wrong
I'm glad you're coming to terms with that miss insecure
@@StankFrengus So when someone tells you that you're wrong you just insult them personally
I agree with some of your general criticisms. The temple gets repetitive quick, the jungle is a little obtuse. But you didn’t bring up the quote players at all, and if you paid attention, you might find that their content actually addresses several of your criticisms. For instance, have you considered that the game might be taking things slowly on purpose? Not to waste your time, but to teach you the value of patience when you’re working on anything difficult? There’s a quote from Einstein near the Sun Temple where he brings up that very point.
Also, I don’t think it’s cheating to use some help when you’re solving the puzzles. But I don’t agree that the game is implicitly telling you to take notes. You can solve every puzzle in the game inside your own head if you’re focused.
If you want puzzles not in a video game I recommend sudoku and sudoku variants. I kinda scoffed at them for the longest time, but there's a lot of creativity and varied difficulties for everyone. Cracking the cryptic is a good channel to watch to check it out.
I say bc watching this vid made me want to go do more sudoku instead.
Honestly true imo. I was looking for games on the "metroidbrainia" sub (shitty name btw) and was looking for an experience that could only really be had once, in the same vein as Outer Wilds, Obra Dinn, Inscryption, etc. Everyone was recommending the Witness, like always top 3 or 4 recommendations. Heard the game had to be experienced totally blind and that it was "a Myst clone" and I thought "y'know, I like Myst, this seems like a good idea". Then I got into the game, eventually realized it was all just line/grid puzzles, and by the time I was done with the Sun Temple, I realized I just wasn't having fun, and the core gameplay wasn't gonna change. And like, I can't believe this is what so many people consider peak. The puzzles aren't interesting, there's no plot. Everyone's like "GO IN BLIND GO IN BLIND", and I did, because I already made that mistake with Outer Wilds and got copped out of what is supposedly a life-changing gaming experience, but what was I even gonna get spoiled on, fucking line and grid puzzles? I get that the game just isn't for me. I want there to be a bit more substance to the games I play. But I just can't believe that this game is as highly acclaimed as it is. At least the parody game, the Looker, has a sense of humor.
I view The Witness as an interesting experiment, playing with a lot of ideas in game design and theme. Silent tutorialization, iterating on a single puzzle type, player driven exploration. The environmental storytelling, the audio logs, the unlockable video clips and the secret ending all hint at bigger ideas and explanations that somehow never come together into a single thesis. Everything about the game is both enticing, but also unsatisfying. Your reward for solving puzzles is always more puzzles.
The entire game is built to get the player to ask "Why am I doing this?"
I can only imagine Jonathan Blow laughing, because both he and the game are completely uninterested in answering that question. If the game has any thesis at all, it would be "I don't know, why are you doing this?"
Which is deeply frustrating. Frustration is one of the core emotions the game is trying to elicit, on every level, 100% intentionally. This is why everything moves slow and wastes your time. The biggest offender is anytime you need to use the boat to solve puzzles in the environment. The game doesn't require you to do any of this. It certainly doesn't reward you. Everything about the game is driven by player curiosity. The designers can say "You did this to yourself", as if they had nothing to do with the meticulously crafted trap they lead you into.
I completely understand anyone who loves the game. I also completely understand anyone who hates it, doesn't get it or doesn't see what the big deal is. I'm glad a game like this exists and I'm glad I played it. But mostly, I'm glad we have The Witness so no one needs to make a game like this again.
My experience was opposite yours. I really liked Braid, so I was excited about this game, but the trailer looked kind of boring to me. I thought a bunch of puzzle boards didn't look interesting at all, but again...I really liked Braid so I thought I'd have to try it.
I really loved it...and was honestly surprised how into it I got. Sorry you didn't enjoy it, but to call it a bad game or badly designed doesn't seem right.
Nice video though! Watched it to the end, you are entertaining 🙂
exactly the same experience as mine :)
At 6:04 you Don't go back down to take pictures of them all. That is why you are on top of the tower to look from top down and see all of the answers from above and connect them
Spoilers for the game, the reason it takes so long to move things in the game is because there are hidden puzzles that change and grow as they move. Is that engaging? Up to you. Furthermore, surprised you didn't mention the best part of the game: the hidden puzzles throughout the island.
This 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
@6:20 I don't know If I'm just weird but well. I solved these mazes so I didn't have to go back. I just remembered and retraced my steps at the top. I think you did a little bit of disservice to yourself by overusing screenshots and paint
I know I'm commenting on a two year old video, and I am ABSOLUTELY not here to defend The Witness, but I have to say: I have never seen anyone say that "taking notes" is in any way cheating for a puzzle game. I think your points about accessibility and places where it didn't feel like the game was respecting your time were spot on, but I also felt like there were plenty of fine puzzles in The Witness that felt appropriate: puzzles where I had to sit down and rationally, logically determine what segments MUST be part of the solution, what segments CAN'T be part of the solution, why my solution always seemed to have the wrong parity, etc.
In the end, I found the puzzles in The Witness completely fine -- not anywhere nearly the level of Baba is You, Portal, Patrick's Parabox, or even Braid, but completely fine. And for me, hunting for the environmental "puzzles" was a hoot, even if most of them weren't "puzzles" beyond having to go slow and sniff around at anything that looked suspicious.
What got to me was the utter pretentious of making the game's only message, "You have to consider things from different perspectives!" and then making basically every single audiolog and every single video about a white person's perspective, nearly entirely Western perspectives with just a dash of Eastern perspectives for "variety." Want to hear something about Zen? Here's two quotes from the same British white guy. Want to hear something about Buddhism? Here's an entire video about a white woman's take on Buddhism. No, sorry, it's a white woman's take on a white man's take on Buddhism. Want to learn something about an indigenous people's perspectives? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha no.
If you value your time so much, and go out of your way to make every puzzle less enjoyable just look up the answers at this point
And yet... It's one of my favorite puzzle experiences of all time.
Your visual imagination and your analytical logical thinking skills are not that sharp. I never once needed a separate piece of paper.
LITERALLY MY POINT, like just give up if youre braindead, no need for a review thats just negative propaganda
I just got through The Pedestrian like three days ago, it was super fun from beginning to end.
I don’t get it
4:36 the longness of the water draining is for a puzzle where the water is supposed to be half levelled, if it is more faster than that it will probably be very much hard
nevermind its actually long
Fantastic video. You explained my frustrations with the game so clearly.
The gameplay reminds me of really old subversive flash puzzle games or html ARG games around about 2003, which were all about the obfuscation and breaking and rebuilding your assumptions about the rules of the game, rather than a more traditional puzzle. So it's more like another genre entirely, but unlike those old games the Witness plays very smoothly and is very pretty and in every way seems like a normal polished puzzle game. Those old games seemed glitchy and crunchy in their presentation so you immediately knew you were wandering into a chaotic and punishing world.
The Witness is a very niche game. It is a puzzle game with very little in the way of story and your only reward for completing puzzles is understanding. It is slow. It encourages mindfulness and examining alternative perspectives. It doesn't hold your hand. It is the opposite of what most content is these days. We have probably the lowest attention spans in history as a result of being spoon fed shorter and shorter content (tic toc, reels, shorts), making us all addicted to frequent, zero effort dopamine hits. The Witness is the opposite of that. It is specifically and intentionally crafted to avoid some things which are considered engaging game design. It is entirely unsurprising that not everyone enjoys it. But not liking it because you might need to use a pencil and paper is absolutely wild 🤣
Totally liked this game! Also think cheating is optional and not the expectation of the game as pointed out in this video. Sure, it must be dull to go through the game if all u do is cheat, but I think mostly there was an 'in-game' solution to be found if u just pay attention. Sometimes just so obnoxious of a solution, that the hassle wasn't worth it and I'd walkthrough it. But definitely it was there to be found.
All in all, as many have pointed out, I think it is a game with a surprising amount of depth underneath a fairly simpistic surface.
For me, the game was terribly boring. The one with the birds singing was just painful for me. Look around, try different things, realize you've got to match the singing... oh that's clever! Now, I'm quite bad at noticing if the tones go up or down, so I needed several listenings for each note. And there are like half a dozen musical puzzles, all next to each other. So, after figuring out the solution to the puzzle, I got to spent like 20 or 30 mins just matching the notes. That's just tedious.
And the rest of the game is just like that. The desert temple with its water and the musical puzzles are only two of many many possible examples.
Genuine question, how would you suggest making accessibility for the sound puzzles, personally I couldnt solve them due to my inability to remember what each tone sounded like, but also, oh well, a set of puzzles werent designed for me, theres no way to make it accessible without just, telling you the tones, and then there is no puzzle
@8:02 I tried The Witness for a bit, I think I get your point. My question would be "do I want to spend time doing this? Is this fun or just work?"
I got bored with this game. I thought it was really cool and fun at first, then the further I got into it I started doing things like using my phone to take reference pictures of tedious puzzles (and using pencil/paper) to make it go by quicker and I realized I wasn't really enjoying myself anymore so I stopped playing. I get that it's rewarding to solve some of the more difficult puzzles and it can be fun to come to the realization that you understand how something works in the game, but the novelty wore off and I was no longer having fun at a certain point so I just turned it off.
Probably a weird rule to have but I try to avoid games where the best logo the developer could come up with is just the name of the game typed out in a very normal serif font. It's usually not a good sign.
I feel the same. I finished the witness, but it hardly felt satisfying. Knowing the fundamental rules of the puzzle but not having enough information to solve it due to... not positioning your character in the environment right? Or forgetting the 'invisible' cursor's position? Or some other design contrivance? More frustrating than it was rewarding for me.
This was such a fun video that kept me hooked all throughout. I never have delved into the Blow-verse so The Witness always came off to me as one of those games Joseph Anderson would cover and that’d be enough for me to understand about it (both if which became true lol). Plus, how good can The Witness really be without a Companion Cube? I mean, c’mon.
I dont remember whose video-analysis it was, but it pretty much described the game as very elaborate troll, with forming cult circlejerk following of people liking their own farts too much.
How did you do a video about the game being tedious and not respecting time without mentioning that stupid environmental puzzle in the room that plays videos? (But I 100% agree with your take. You did a much better job articulating it than I ever had been able to before.)
He mentioned having seen only 4 environmentals, and he didn't mention the audio and video content even in passing. There's a possibility he didn't even find the video room.
@@FBracht To be fair, he did mention audio puzzles near the end. But yeah.
@@smbsmw1111 with audio content they meant the 49 audio logs hidden on the island, not audio-based puzzles.
Yeah I didn’t like it either. The world felt empty it was pretty but it felt empty. Given the only puzzle games that I played besides mobile puzzle games was the two portal games. So that world felt way more lived in though it was way more destroyed.
I don't think I can confidently say the witness is "good" or "bad". It's got some great ideas, the concept of trying to understand what the puzzle are even about takes different mental ressources from actually solving them, I think overlooking the obtuseness as a waste of time is not trying to engage with the game concept. The witness is about the scientific method, testing hypothesis to try and figure out the rules of a confusing world.
Basically it's the misanthropic version of outer wilds.
Cause yeah the game also just feels like it was made by someone who loathed anyone who'd want to play it, it's not a great feeling, and the accessibility issues for me push that from a front the game could have had to clearly what the game feels like. I know I wasn't able to solve any of the sound based puzzles (except the very early ones) even knowing what I had to do. I'm not deaf, though I learned way after playing the witness that I most likely have auditory processing disorder so looking back it's most likely that.
But yeah, having to look up the solution cause you're physically unable to solve a puzzle is not a great feeling and it also makes it more likely to get frustrated quicker with the other puzzles. I know once I started looking the solution for sound based puzzles my trust in the game was kinda shattered and I felt less inclined to believe there was a solution I could work out even when there was so I ended up being more lenient with looking things up. The author probably wanted so much that some people experience his vision in the purest form that he basically thought that anyone else can fuck off.
But despite all this I still think it's full of good ideas and I honestly don't really mind that it's "wasting my time". I find it kinda helpful actually, I have ADHD so these long waiting moment are kinda torture but they also help me remind my brain to chill the fuck out. While it's inconveniences can be downright hostile at time I'm also someone who struggles to not use conveniences even when they lessen the experience. For exemple the boat rides could have had an optional teleport but environnemental puzzles aside it'd make it more likely that you just give up on a puzzle quickly and zip around all the areas instead of persevering in the one you're currently in.
Sometimes inconvenience can be good and too much convenience can make it hard to settle in with some of the game's features. Like how fast travel and mini maps with quest objectives in open world games tend to make it less likely you familiarize yourself with the world. (seriously, try playing skyrim without fast travel, it can be tedious as fuck at times but you also get a very different appreciation for the environnement layout, the small hidden things everywhere, the random events etc. It's a completely different experience).
I think the witness pushes that towards hostily and it doesn't need to be such a dick all the time but going all out "it's bad" without trying to engage with what it's trying to do isn't better than going "it's amazing" and overlooking the accessibility issues in my opinion.
One of my top games of all time.
I liked the game a lot, but boy was it pretentious. It should know that my only philosophical viewpoint is getting a damn dot through a square maze to open whatever door it is wired to. lol
I had just finished "The Sojourn" and enjoyed it, so I decided to give "The Witness" a try, and it is a slog. I've played for 11 hours, and I'm just exhausted with the line puzzles. The puzzles themselves annoy me. Like all the puzzles that involve getting the absolutely perfect viewing angle, the puzzles that involve memorization etc... My mistake was that I assumed the good reviews of the game were indicative of a game with wide appeal. I like puzzles, but I'm not the type of puzzle lovers who enjoys figuring out the rules of a puzzle.
maybe i am just too old school, but it never occurred to me to use PS. i used pen and paper and had a ton of fun with the puzzles :)
much like with the first dark souls, i wish i could be boinked on the head and forget ever having played the game so i could get another blind playthrough.
i also liked 'opus magnum' (perhaps the most accessible zachtronics game) a lot, but that game is more about optimising a setup for different parameters and i didn't get the same sense of discovery i did from the witness.
I actually kind of liked the Witness - right up until the shipwreck puzzle. That made me go "F this game"
Only 4 environmental puzzles? As far as you got into the game you should have found dozens. The slow sections are there to get you to look around and spot them, they are everywhere.
I can entirely see your point here, and I think this is a good video, but I still had a really great time playing the game. The biggest change from your gameplay was that I used a physical pen and paper which was really a great time. Kinda brought me back to the old days of making my own strategy guides for RPG's and writing down puzzle solutions for Zelda. Whether or not that is the game being designed well or me having nostalgia is not something I'm sure on. Good video tho I see your point.
Sidenote Edit: By the time I was finished I had countless pages of completely indecipherable line drawings which was cool to look back through.
Thank you. Its nice to hear my own frustrations articulated and explained so well. I don't understand why this game was as highly rated as it was.
game isnt for stupid people i guess :/
@@Plummiee "everyone who doesn't like this mediocre puzzle game isn't as smart as me."
lol keep stroking your ego. I beat the game, it's not that hard.
mastering redstone circuitry in minecraft requires more intelligence than the puzzles in the witness. it's creator is a pretentious knob who takes himself way too seriously and it shows. No surprise it appeals to the same kind of person.
@@Plummiee lol right, everyone who doesn't like this mediocre puzzle game must not be as intelligent as you. I beat the game, it wasn't that hard. Mastering redstone circuitry in minecraft requires more intelligence than the puzzles in the witness, but if someone doesn't like minecraft I wouldn't assume that means they're less intelligent than me. No surprise Johnathan Blow's pretentious little game appeals to similar people who like to stroke their own ego.
the problem with jblow is he thinks he is smart. smart people don't think they are smart. if you think you are smart thats a pretty reliable sign that you are in fact, not.
First of all, this sentence makes no sense, and also, i believe its very hard to create a game with this depth and im doubting he just lucked out in making it , so he must be a pretty smart guy
I just played through the witness for the first time, and i came to youtube looking to see other peoples opinions on the game. my only response to this video is that it's entirely a skill issue.
seriously. i didnt once screenshot a puzzle. never googled anything. if something didnt work, i walked away and came back when i was more prepared. i think your main problem was that you were playing for the sake of finishing. dont focus on getting to the end, focus on taking each puzzle one by one. spend the extra time and play it out.
the story of that game.... brilliant, and the end... i think myst, quern, obduction and the witness are the best puzzle games of all time (with story)
I gave the witness a try a while back, but never finished it and I feel like this video perfectly articulates why. While the start of the game was pretty straight forward, I eventually found myself constantly confonting puzzles that I had no idea where to start with. I very frequently felt like i'd missed something elsewhere, which I found overwhelming and frustrating, and it very quickly became a game of me hunting for puzzles that I actually knew how to slove, leaving for later when I couldn't figure out a puzzles mechanic.
Here from the Adam Millard video. Yep, agreed with him. You're wrong. :P
I mean, you can't really be wrong on an opinion, so there's that. And you do make some good points.
Unlike many (most?) video games, The Witness supports a surprisingly large number of readings. It's not clear what the game is about, so there's a number of arguments that can be made and adequately defended on this. And, of course, depending on what you interpret a work to be about, this is going to inform how good you think it its. If Super Mario Kart supported a reading that it's about meritocracy, you could conclude from that reading that it is a bad game.
Where I think you're "wrong" (again, not literally) is in that you didn't mention a few key points that, in my opinion, are integral to an informed and complete reading of The Witness. Either you didn't even experienced them, or you did and didn't think they were important to mention - in any case, this represents a flaw in your reading.
The Witness is not an easy game to talk about.
in Very video critiques you good had this! (only 1% of people can understand this puzzle sentence)
Many of us would prefer to be deaf than to listen to the last few "bird" puzzles
But to be unfair to you, the game is downright miserable for people that can't visualize the solutions, mentally moving the shapes and lines around, without saving screenshots and drawing them out first.
But I must agree with you, the desert temple is shit. Concentrated, slow-motion, excrement
It's like the California of this game and should sink into the ocean.
Personally, I love this game, and it's one of my favorite things, but I don't respect myself or my time, so that might explain it.
Cheers
Thiat was a lot of words to just say you have the short-term memory and spacial reasoning skills of a newborn
i dunno i feel like a newborn would do a little bit worse at the game than me
Thank you for articulating this. I couldn't put into words for myself what was bothering me about this game. Tedious and obfuscated rather than an actual increase in challenge, or actually fun. It is like therapy to realise that this is why I couldn't get on with it. Playing this game has been like a peek into the mind of a madman.
It sounds like you're being sarcastic the entire time
A good rule to go by is that any time your argument requires you to assume the death of the author, you're wrong.
There are a lot of good things about the witness, but so also a lot of BAD things about it. You mentioned accessibility which genuinely surprised me cause I feel like NO-ONE ever talks about it. It's genuinely horrible. If you're deaf or colourblind, you just. cannot complete entire sections of the game. if you're photosensitive you cannot complete the mountain, the final section of the game (and the only one that is actively required to finish the game, since for the rest you can choose whichever sections you want to complete). You described the game as arrogant, which in my mind is the *perfect* descriptor for it. Jonathon Blow makes you feel frustrated and stupid. He throws random quotes from philosophers and scientists (read by some great voice actors by the way) that sort of just. dont mean anything. yeah they're contemplative but nothing else. I love the puzzles in the witness but MAN it's just. So tedious. Waiting for that one goddamn cloud enviro puzzle makes me want to rip my hair out.
I just finished the game and felt more of a relief that it was over. Glad to hear I'm not the only one who found the puzzles tedious and laborious. I had very few "aha!" moments which is the cornerstone of any good puzzle game in my opinion.
Maybe the one that is not smart enough is you. The game is great.