After a long development time of roughly 8 years, Jonathan Blow and his small team finally release something after Braid. The Witness has a pretty and colorful presentation, and it's meat consists of many puzzles on maze boards where you must align the lines correctly in order to power the boards up so that you can progress further.
There are plenty of them to be found on different settings such as a boathouse or a desert, and for the most part the learning curve is shown within the first of a series of puzzles, but sometimes I was stuck for minutes without any explanation given on how a new kind of puzzle would function.
Now of course I know who Jonathan Blow is, who has argued for years that hand holding and tutorials are some of the worst things which have damaged the video game industry, but even he complies when it comes to showing how a different kind of puzzle should be demonstrated before throwing players into the abyss of puzzle solving.
If you look online, Jonathan has plenty of seminars and videos where he talks about design and philosophy surrounding video games, and when speaking of Braid and The Witness, he claims that many games out there for instance lack the sense of discovery and feel forced by various sources to label themselves as necessary "fun". Not everything needs to be fun in gaming.
The modern Japanese industry also feels repetitive in general. What Blow not only advocates aside from creativity and originality, he wants to see video games get categorized properly as genres just like cinema, or at least as an addition towards story driven games in particular.
The feeling of epiphany can then come later as more complex puzzles challenges us. Anyway, The Witness is a pretty good puzzle-thon, but I liked The Talos Principle from recent memory even more, so there ya go.
Rating: 7.3
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