The Witness

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This game is a work of art and no doubt took hours and hours of thought and labor to create. It is an achievement in gaming and all involved should be proud. However, for me, in addition to joy and admiration for the game quality, there was a lot of frustration with this game. Unclear rules, sometimes tricky navigation, puzzles that were bordering on... cruel. If you love puzzle games, this is the ultimate test and worth your time. If you want a puzzle game that is fun and doesn't make you work *too hard*, this might not be for you. I'd still recommend it highly for the right person.

The controls are the worst I've ever seen. Tap-to-walk is the dumbest idea ever, it's uncomfortable, unintuitive, just bad. And no option for a virtual joystick, which is the way this game was intended to be played. And this game also depends heavily on micro movements, because you often have to take the right perspective to see the solution. Tap-to-walk makes it painful, you'll have to turn your camera away from the puzzle, then guess the right spot to move your character to, then turn back and check if that worked. Whereas with proper controls it'd simply require you to move the joystick. And A LOT of times the game would't recognize properly where you've tried to put the cursor, setting it somewhere on the background and making your character run completely different way. This makes simple things like getting up the ladder enraging. As of now this is unplayable, no way someone would enjoy the game like this. It feels like you're trying to play it with each one of your fingers broken. Look the Myst remake, that's how controls should be done.

The controls are so annoying to the point where u just want to quit honestly if I had a chance to speak with the creator of this game I would tell him to improve more on the controls. And I also liked the puzzles but at some point I was so confused there was not a helpful guide to tell me how to play the puzzles.there should be a tutorial instead of just throwing the player at the game assuming they know how to play. I know it was created to be challenging but some of them totally didn’t make sense to me. And I literally had to figure it out by trying over and over till I clicked and realized. The graphics were AMAZING 🤩 I would love for u to fix a lot on this game so I could rlly enjoy playing it.

I don’t understand the acclaim for this game. It’s well done, but its main mechanic is the same puzzle over and over again, in endless iterations. There is no variety, no story, and the little bit of Myst-like environmental integration is negligible.

For people who are curious about the port (iPad Pro 10.5”): The controls are tap-to-move with a few details that make the game feel great to control. No issues there. The game looks really good for mobile. It looks low-fi compared to playing on PC, but the art style didn’t really suffer and the resolution is high enough that the game looks good (not native, but close enough). The framerate is rather poor though. I don’t think it ever holds a remotely steady framerate or ever even touches 30fps. From the looks of things, I don’t think there’s much more they could have done to make it run better short of sacrificing a lot more on the resolution and general quality side, so I won’t really complain too much (docked 1 star for it though because I would have at least liked the option for better performance even if it meant tanking the resolution). At least it’s not like the game requires super high responsiveness to play well. TLDR: It’s as good as you could expect a port of a 3D game to mobile could be, and the framerate is sub-30fps. For people who are new to the game: The Witness is a polarizing puzzle game to say the least. I like it a lot, but don’t want to go into much depth because most of what makes the game special for me is in spoiler territory. If you like tougher puzzle games, don’t mind being expected to experiment and explore with no real guide, and like things that are a little pretentious you’ll probably love this. If you prefer easier puzzles, a tutorial for every step of the way, a clear story, and a clear path, this might not be for you. *update Feb. 2024: Some pretty bad graphical artifacting makes this unrecommendable now.

I finished 100% the game on PlayStation last year and am impressed how the experience works on touch platforms. It’s fun to play it all again. For those comparing to Myst, believe me, it will take you a lot of work, let’s say to “completing” the game for you to realize the depth Blow has given us. No pixel is without purpose. But you have to change your POV, literally and mentally. I had some concern about navigation and your fingers obscuring the screen, but I managed to get used to it. However, it could make some of the more challenging parts of the game a bit awkward. Warning, this is a game you cannot look up answers, if stuck - move on, a transcendent experience awaits!

无懈可击，完美的解谜游戏！

Good luck if you’re colorblind or have hearing issues

Definitely a masterpiece