Recent reviews by Fwuggles the Fried

Good story and narrative presentation, art direction, soundscapes... A pleasure to play at first, but quickly becomes an overall frustrating experience.

The problem with this game is that it's pretty easy for a player to be clueless about everything - the "hands off" lack of concrete guidance could arguably be a pro rather than a con to some, but I'd say there isn't enough content to keep one engaged while they're spending tens of hours trying to find specific research fragments and data pads. All of these items are randomly sprinkled throughout the world, and they're the only real way to progress. Yes, the game does have some series of "quests" which give you vague direction, but you still need to independently develop specific technologies and learn certain mechanics before you can even follow these cues. This means progress is largely dictated by luck, which I don't think is a good way to design linear progression in a video game. From my small experience avoiding looking anything up for around 30 hours of gametime, I'd say that if you don't use a wiki, I think it's entirely possible to spend 100 hours playing this game and get nowhere... Hell, progress is still frustrating and awkwardly paced even if you DO look up what to do next.

I could deal with this problem by just powering through and listening to audio books while grinding... But that just isn't engaging or fun gameplay, and I don't know why the developers thought it would be. That's why I don't play MMORPGs anymore.

All that said, what finally got me to quit for good was having one of my more expensive vehicles glitch and become inaccessible and immovable, with no way of getting it unstuck, even with the help of console commands. It was the latest in a series of janky bugs the game had forced me to deal with, so I spent half an hour trying to fix the issue, then just decided to stop playing the game... I had stopped really enjoying myself by that point, anyway.

Makes me roll my eyes to see the devs release a sequel to this game... This one doesn't seem finished.

The Witness has a problem. Let me illustrate by comparing it to several well-known puzzle franchises:

In the Myst franchise, you explore a long series of strange and alien worlds, each following their own set of unique rules, bound together by books that act as gateways, and attempt to unravel mysteries surrounding the people that inhabit the worlds, and the people who created the books.

In the Witness, you solve a maze puzzle.

In the Portal franchise, you navigate through dynamic, moving environments which include physics, buttons, turrets, lasers, platforms, and more. In most cases, these puzzles would be unsolvable, but they become solvable with the help of a "portal gun", which enables you to move around each test chamber (every one new and unique in its own right) in such a way that you can do the impossible.

In the Witness, you solve a maze puzzle.

In the Monkey Island franchise, you find yourself in peculiar places and situations, and have to utilize the unique aspects of every environment you find yourself in to get to the next section of the game, with increasingly complex, varied, and often hilarious items, props, and talkative NPCs.

In the Witness, you solve a maze puzzle.

So, there you have it. From my estimation, around 80% of this game is composed of 2D maze puzzles on monitors that the player walks up to and solves, that then trigger environmental changes. This is not creative, interesting, or (at least for me) fun. by the 20th one I was getting tired of the mechanic, by the 30th I was exploring to avoid having to solve any more maze puzzles, by the 50th, any hope I previously had of this game not being entirely composed of Maze Puzzles was gone, and by the 70th or so, I decided it was time to uninstall. In all, I played about 2.5 hours, and I could take no more. If there was any real backstory to this game, it was presented in a very hamfisted way - the meandering, psuedo-intellectual, essay-length audio logs that you find scattered throughout the world failed to distract me from the tedium of the maze puzzles.

On a positive note, the graphics/environments are absolutely beautiful in The Witness, and there is a level of polish to this game that I found astounding, especially from a non-AAA developer - even though I did not like this game, I believe that Thekla Inc. has huge potential. Given how pretty, well-made, and lush their 3D world was, I'm just confused by their decision to primarily use it as a delivery medium for 2D maze puzzles. This game represents a lot of wasted potential to me.

Okay, before I begin bashing, I will say: excellent sound and art direction. Before you're exposed to the actual core gameplay, you really are spooked and ready for what's coming up next. The soundscape alone was enough to make me jump a few times, initially. A very cinematic experience just from walking through the snow, and I did like the story exposition that you got through the scattered journals, even if that was a little hamfisted. Now...

The actual threats you deal with in the game really detracts from the atmosphere/subtlety of the game, and feels like a complete afterthought; when you do die, it's always completely unexpected and instant, and then you're spawned in some random place that you don't recognize, lost. I died enough times, and for such ridiculous reasons, that I just stopped caring/being immersed in the game at all. All of the carefully crafted atmospheric events and sound effects just stopped phasing me in any way.

Getting instagibbed by a monster you have no chance of ever outrunning, who can see you through rocks, trees, terrain, and other visual blocks even when crouching, is not fun. Neither is suddenly falling into a random trap and instantly dying. Also, lore-wise, why would there even be traps for you to get caught in? Do the demons in this game just spend all day digging spike pits for me to fall in, when they aren't walking around in circles guarding rocks? It's not like the hikers did it, so what's even the purpose? Very obviously just a tacked on obstacle to stretch the content out. I honestly think this game would've been a lot scarier to me if there weren't any actual, physical monsters, but just the THREAT of one. A few things that can kill a player in a game like this are good, but if it happens too often, or if it's too direct, you just get numb to it, and it annoys you, rather than scares you. I reached that point, and beyond.

I've also never been a big fan of the "realistic" map/compass system. It requires extremely good map design, landmarks, and visual cues to implement such a system so that all players can navigate it well, which almost no dev is willing to put the effort forward to do. It's usually falls flat on its face when used in games, and this one is no exception - you even get the impression that the developers were even aware of this, as there are many points on the map where you'll see glowing sets of coordinates to indicate where you currently are... Almost as if they realized after the fact that they had to implement some blaringly obvious clues like that, because their game world and mapping system is otherwise too confusing and counter-intuitive for normal play. The Russian compass, while "immersive", doesn't help.

Definitely one of the weaker and more frustrating horror games I've played.