---
title: the witness
draft: true
---

i've been on a puzzle game kick recently; antichamber and manifold garden have always visually intrigued me, so i knocked them out in the beginnning of the year and found them pretty enjoyable. i had a crack at filament, which was a creative and interesting idea, but it went a little too hard too fast for my liking and i pretty quickly got demoralised and stopped playing. so what was next on the chopping block?

we're only a quarter of the way in, but the witness is potentially my favourite game of the year. it's been out for about seven years now so i've heard plenty of hot takes on it and frankly expected it to not hold up to the hype, but i was almost instantly swept up in the puzzles and world. i pretty quickly started making comparisons to myst, as you're dropped on a big island with no people but loads of weird mechanisms, cryptic mechanisms and a wide variety of architecture and flora. the location designers clearly had no shortage of inspiration, because you can find all kinds of weird perspective tricks and shapes in shadows and reflections if viewed from just the right angle. the look of the whole game is bright and warm and i spent a lot of time heading over to some exciting looking ruin or cluster of plants i saw out of the corner of my eye.

puzzle-wise, the witness is structured extremely well to make you feel like a genius, regardless of how clever you actually are. different puzzles follow different "rules" that dictate the lines that you should be drawing

- potentially one of my favourite games so far this year
- exploration
   - myst
- puzzles always felt like they were easily explained
- you need the perspective that if something is really difficult, you're probably not meant to be there yet
   - if it's in the middle of a section then just stepping away and doing something else generally helps
   - otherwise, the game really babies you through the beginning of a rule and if you're not being babied then 

# joseph anderson
- i love joseph but this is one of his weaker videos
- gripes were presented as design issues
- 'i didnt get the sound puzzles'
   - brute forcing instead of experimenting to work out what's going on
- complaining about optional puzzles being a waste of time despite them clearly being for completionists
- josephs habit of playing a game to abs0lute completion bites him in the ass here
   - 'they made a game where the ridiculous endgame stuff pushes the line of what's fun to play' like no shit
