The following review is my opinion of the game after (presumably) 100%ing it. Minor spoilers (by virtue of reviewing) are included.
Pros -
- It's pretty.
- Lack of hand holding - the game trusts that you are intelligent enough to figure out the rules for beating the puzzle panels on your own. Some rules involve pattern recognition while others involve taking a different perception. Figuring out a new rule-set leads to an excellent sense of discovery.
- The secret challenge cave is an optional area that is a thoughtful addition for players who seek brain bustingly difficult puzzles.
- You'll find a new formed appreciation for your mobile camera.
- Several ingenious puzzles. About 60% of the puzzles are a joy to solve.
Cons -
- About 40% of the puzzles are a pain to solve because of lazy gameplay design, elucidated as follows -
- Several puzzles (especially several "hidden obelisk puzzles") require micro-adjusting the camera. There are times you more or less know you have the right camera angle, and yet the game doesn't let you complete the puzzle. It instead forces you to slightly fidget the camera to the left or the right while you ponder "Why on earth couldn't they just auto-snap the camera in the right position if I'm close to the solution?"
- Pointless penalties - upon incorrectly solving certain puzzles, you're forced to re-solve their predecessors as a penalty. Unlike, say, the Professor Layton series, there is no point/score system in this game, making such penalties absolutely meaningless and utterly cumbersome.
- Cheap difficulty rise - Cheap difficulty in a puzzle game usually occurs when developers try to add filler-like puzzles that are merely more complicated than their predecessors. You know HOW to solve them, you just don't know how long it will take for you to go through all the different possibilities for the solution till you get to the right one. And while your brain begins to develop heuristics for the given problem and prune out the branches in the "search tree", the biggest flaw in The Witness comes to light -
- Apart from the joy of discovery, the game is utterly unrewarding. While it is understandable for a game, whose specialty lies in self-discovery, to challenge and re-affirm the player's abilities, challenging the player beyond the point of re-affirmation is only reserved for those games which reward you for doing so, which The Witness does anything but.
- Annoying audio cues. Around 20 hours or so, several of the sound effects employed (such as the pulsating sound at the start of a puzzle) begin to frustrate.
- The story....if there even is one. Scattered throughout the island are recorded tapes of quotes from books and of famous people. You get the sense that the island of The Witness serves to introduce the player to something unprecedented in human history. And as you get closer to 100% completion you come across 2 revelations -
- The game is probably about nothing. Or in other words, it's about the lack of an answer to the question "What is The Witness about?"
- The game does a horrible job of whatever it is trying to convey. To break it down simply, the game is either about something, or about nothing. If it's about something, it suffers from a lack of logical continuity and overestimates the player's artistic abilities. If it's about nothing, the game builds up the notion that there is indeed something, in which case it would be like telling your best friend that you'll buy him a GTX 980 ti and not doing it anyways. No harm no fowl, right? Wrong. The game entices you to invest in the story and throws a big fat nothing in exchange. Shame.
- Wasted potential of novel ideas. With a decent amount of tweaking to the game's formula, we could've easily been looking at a GOTY game, but instead we get a potentially excellent game marred by issues that could've easily been avoided.