Neue Rezensionen von lonelyspacepanda

The Witness is a stunning and stunningly fatiguing puzzle game that captures both the moments of madness and bliss its creator must’ve felt over its seven years of development. And all that madness and bliss? Well, you’ll experience a fair amount too if you play it.

Jonathan Blow, creator of The Witness, in an interview with The Guardian, said he wants to make games for people who read Gravity’s Rainbow. Not everyone who games reads books, and I imagine even fewer read Pynchon. Much like The Witness, Blow’s statement is obtuse and vague but still understandable: He wants to make a game that not everyone will understand, enjoy, or fully comprehend the first time through. In this sense, he achieved what he intended: a frustrating, beautiful and alienating puzzle game. In love with this idea, it seems he never stopped to consider how the player on the other end of the experience will feel about it all.

On a surface level, The Witness resembles the open-world of Myst, puzzle mechanics that gradually build on each other like in Braid (his previous game) and rudimentary grid-based puzzles you’d find in the newspaper. One assumes there must be more to the game than this. In many ways there is, but not always in the ways you want or expect. The ways in which you discover and solve puzzles continues to surprise even after ten hours of play. With over 700 puzzles, it’s entirely possible that Blow is displaying every conceivable puzzle type possible with the rules at play. Discovering and playing with those rules is what makes The Witness so enjoyable and often so painfully tedious.

Unlike Portal and other recent successful puzzle games, The Witness puts a focus on making the player define the rules of the world. Even a tutorial isn’t defined in this game. Instead, you solve a series of simple puzzles, discover nothing changed, and decide “Well, I guess that’s a tutorial!” The Witness is a game about thinking outside the box without ever knowing how big that box might be. Not only is this process deep and ingeniously clever, but it holistically feeds into what the game is trying to convey to the player about life and nature.

If this is all The Witness contained, it’s be a masterpiece. Unfortunately, discovering the rules of the world is only half the experience. You also have to apply them. A puzzle game is only as good as its rule sets. A good rule set can make a puzzle game endlessly fun; I’ve played Picross for years and will continue to do so. But spending even a couple hours with some of the rule sets in The Witness makes me never want to play the game again.

A good puzzle should be about figuring out what rules are needed and how they are applied, but so much of The Witness’ frustration comes from the game obscuring readability for challenge. Imagine playing Tetris with the screen half-black or Uncharted with the screen spinning. It would be unacceptable. The Witness is so far removed from other games that it can almost get away with these tricks at times but they are still cheap tricks: lazy ways of adding challenge to a puzzle that would be easy to solve otherwise.

Additionally, half the puzzles are trial-and-error and not in the sense of “Does this rule apply here or that one?” but rather “I know what rules apply, I just don’t know the exact path through so I need to try again and again until I find it.” Where The Witness’ best moments made me feel satisfied by being observant and thoughtful, these puzzles made me feel like my time was wasted. I never felt clever or happy solving them, as they require an amount of brute force and patience that makes for a miserable puzzle-solving experience.

There are awful things about The Witness. The game becomes so awful at the end that I decided to stop playing it and watch videos of the ending instead. I think Blow is a very intelligent designer but I also think he is a very stubborn one. He insists on making a complicated world that is not meant to be easily understood (or understandable at all, in some aspects); rather than a game world that is designed to accommodate the player. I don’t mean to imply the game needs tutorials or guiding the player -- it’s in these aspects that Blow’s stubbornness pays off -- but the puzzles should have been designed with player experience in mind. If they were tested on players, then Blow must be fully aware that his puzzles force nausea, discomfort, eye strain and just aren’t fun at all at times, especially in the game’s final section.

The Witness is a puzzle game that tests the player’s resolve more often than their intellect. Even though Dark Souls is one of my favorite games, what The Witness asks of me in terms of visual discomfort, fatigue, and repetition is not worth the experience of playing it all. But it is worth playing. It’s a contradiction I’m aware, but the beauty of The Witness’ world, exploration, and message to the player is inspiring. It’s world is one of the greatest things ever achieved in games and when it’s good, it’s incredible. But more often than not, I found myself bored and tired by many of the game’s poor rule sets and combinations of them.

There is a madness and obsession that permeates across The Witness. It manifests itself in the unfathomably beautiful and complex visual design and layout of the game. But, unfortunately, it also manifests itself in the puzzles that have a blatant disregard toward player experience. So in love with this vision, it seems Blow never considered how others may view it. The Witness is a game about the joy of discovery and observation, but so often its puzzles go directly against this theme.

The Witness might aspire to be Gravity’s Rainbow, but it’s not. It can’t be. It’s not a book. It’s a game. And if it were more aware of this aspect, it would be a better one for it.