For a solo session of island exploration and puzzle solving, The Witness builds its appeal around a focused idea: more than 500 puzzles across dozens of locations. At ≈ $1.45 from Kinguin, the offer is at the lowest price this site tracks for it. The Steam PC rating is 85% from 17,365 reviews, another point to weigh alongside whether extended, independent puzzling suits you.At $39.99 from Kinguin, the island exploration and its 500-plus puzzles come at the offer’s tracked low; the Steam PC rating is 85% from 17,365 reviews.
All-time low ~ $3.99across Steam & third-party storesat the recorded all-time low
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Price History
Past 36 months · Updated daily
Historical Low~ $1.472026-07Current Low Across Stores~ $39.99Kinguinvs. Historical Low+2620%
Prices cover Steam and 39 authorized stores; only legitimate offers are counted. The chart shows weekly market-wide lows and Steam's official price across the past 36 months.
01About The Witness
You wake alone on a strange island and explore its locations, solving puzzles while seeking clues, your memory and a way home.The open world contains dozens of locations and more than 500 puzzles.Player rating: 85% from 17,365 reviews.Release date: January 26, 2016.
$1.472026-07-30 · KKinguinBase game · same records as the chart above; USD history, not a regional Steam low.
Language support
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Simplified Chinese
Yes
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Traditional Chinese
Yes
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English
Yes
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French
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Italian
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German
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Spanish
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Polish
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Portuguese
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Portuguese-Brazil
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Steam PC edition data · 2026-10-20
02Before you buy
Solo exploration
The Steam PC version is single-player, with more than 500 puzzles spread across an open island.
Language support
Interface text is available in English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Spanish, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. English has full audio; the other listed languages have subtitles.
03Frequently asked questions
What do you do in The Witness?
Explore an island, solve over 500 puzzles, and seek clues, your memory and a way home.
Does it have multiplayer?
No. The Steam PC version is listed as single-player.
Which languages have full audio?
English is listed with full audio. The other listed languages have subtitles.
Popular Steam reviews
Native-language selection · 10 reviews
Selected helpful reviews in this language show both recommendations and criticisms. This selection does not represent the overall positive rating; opinions reflect the version reviewed.
RecommendedSteam player
My favorite game in a decade, but it's not for everyone. It's a no-tutorial kind of game. Each puzzle type is introduced gradually so you can get the hang of it before tackling the complex stuff, but you must thrive in self-teaching to get that far. The puzzles, though, are awesome. They're all based on a simple concept but that concept is twisted around and turned on its head in so many ways you won't believe it each time another variation comes up.
Beware of reviews with < 10 hours. You can "beat the game" in probably five hours. The real magic, though, is in a secret that adds 40 hours of gameplay. The trouble is, you have to enjoy the puzzles enough to get to the point where you discover the extra gameplay. Not for everyoneShow moreShow less
74.7 hours at review4,315 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
I cannot begin to describe just how saddened I am by "The Witness." I had been anticipating it for so long, but ultimately it's been an awful let-down.
The short of it:
The Witness delivered on its promise of beautiful visuals and challenging puzzles, but while it contains thoughtful (albeit "borrowed") philosophical content that's beautifully presented, ultimately the promise of a deep mystery to be uncovered was a bold-faced lie. The game had been hyped for years, and ended up so depressingly disappointing to me that In the end I could barely bring myself to finish it. It is a glut of repetitive, meaningless, storyless puzzle-solving in an otherwise visually compelling environment that would’ve had the exact same impact on me had it been on the iPhone with pixellated 8-bit graphics. It wasn’t a game; it was a task. And it wasn’t one I felt any satisfaction from completing.
The description on the store states the following:
"You wake up, alone, on a strange island full of puzzles that will challenge and surprise you. You don't remember who you are, and you don't remember how you got here, but there's one thing you can do: explore the island in hope of discovering clues, regaining your memory, and somehow finding your way home."
Every word of that is a lie, designed to draw you into an ultimately banal and repetitive walking simulator peppered with puzzles.
The long of it:
I was anticipating playing The Witness literally for years, having followed the developer's blog from very early on. A rabid Myst series fan, I was chomping at the bit for another story-based puzzle game to sink my teeth into, especially when it was described as an island setting where you arrive without any understanding of why you're there. When it came out, I bought it instantly, literally purchasing a new gaming PC at the same time so I could experience it on modern hardware. (I was overdue for an upgrade anyway.)
The visuals are very pleasing to the eye in a bright and surrealistic way that walks a fine line between obviously unreal and bizarrely realistic. The lack of close-up shape and surface detail and overpowering color saturation mixed with believable reflections and lighting feel similar to the graphics of Team Fortress 2, oddly enough. Imagine if Aperture Science and a 5-star gardener with a degree in genetic engineering combined to create a manicured environment as an amusement park: Voila, you have the island from The Witness. It’s a wonderful environment to behold, and was clearly an exhaustive effort to create. There’s definitely a great deal of enjoyment to be had discovering the scope of the island and all its nooks and crannies.
The other area that the developers obviously spent a lot of time was the development of the puzzles themselves. Their logic is devious, challenging, and will require you to drag out a pencil and graph paper (or your chosen digital alternative.) There can be a high degree of enjoyment obtained from deciphering their cryptic composition, and the game does a very good job giving you just enough education on the rules to let you figure them out and reach that euphoric "eureka" moment. For a time it was wonderful, and at one point I even said to myself “If this could go on forever, that’d be great.” However, I was working off of the assumption that there would be a gradual revelation of the mystery of why I was there on this island, or at least some hints as to its purpose. As time went on, my heart sank deeper and deeper into despair as I realized that assumption was utterly and painfully wrong. It's clear they spent their efforts on the logic behind the puzzles and graphics engine, with no thought at all into building a reason for the player to actually _care_ about solving any of the hundreds of diabolical mazes strewn all around. I can’t say that I hated playing this game, because I only hated it after I realized that everything I was doing was pointless. Up until that point, I was loving it.
The only content which can possibly pass off as having “story elements" besides the unnerving statues strewn about the island are the live-action movies you can “unlock” by solving certain puzzles, all of which hail from a wide variety of sources and eras. Some are absolutely beautiful philosophical discussions on the nature of reality, human understanding, science, God, and cognition. Others are pure avant-garde art which can be thought-provoking, but ultimately only carry whatever meaning the viewer chooses to ascribe to them. Their most common feature, however, is that the game developers didn’t make a single one of them. They’re all from existing documentaries, interviews, and TED-like talks, and while I respect the developers’ inclusion choices, they took absolutely no effort to incorporate into the game. There is one exception of original content, but it's so banal and drawn-out with no visual component that I nearly threw my controller in anger when I realized after sitting and listening to it drone on for almost a full hour that it's only message was: "people like puzzles." The rest of the island is so devoid of meaningful story content that I found myself desperately trying to find and unlock all of the videos just to hear a human voice break the soul-crushing silence of the soundtrack-free environment. Indeed, the historical quotes and video excerpts are treats to someone who takes pleasure in philosophy and literature. However, if Jonathan Blow thought he could insert the words of great minds into his puzzle game to have them magically imbue it with deeper meaning, he's either deluded or just plain lazy.
This brings me to the thing which depresses me most: The Witness has no story, period. It's a beautiful venue with no party, no music and no people; a concept that actually has literal representation in the game at one point. After anticipating it for so long, the most powerful emotion I felt after completing The Witness was nothing short of betrayal. It felt like Jonathan Blow built it to lure in the kind of people who liked the games it was supposedly "inspired by," only to troll them with a game that itself has no more mystery than a book of sudoku puzzles. I felt like I’d been duped and lied to, and the “secret” ending doesn’t help one bit in changing my mind, nor was it in any way original. In fact, it made me even more angry, because it is one of the single oldest (and worst) cliché endings one can ever possibly use. You've probably guessed what it is just by me saying that...
In the end, The Witness has only one point: People like solving puzzles even when there’s no purpose to doing so. It literally even *says this aloud* during the most disappointing piece of unlocked content. If you’re the kind of person who just wants to use an expensive PC to do maze puzzles, The Witness is for you. Aside from that, it’s nothing more than a walking simulator set on a beautiful island that would serve as a great demo for the Oculus Rift. The remaining "meaningful" content can be much more easily acquired from the original authors, or YouTube.
I'm waiting for Obduction...Show moreShow less
50.2 hours at review829 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
To start with, a word of caution -
If you do not enjoy trying to understand puzzles, you will not enjoy this game.
Note I say "understand" instead of "solve", because the distinction is important.
Solving a puzzle is rewarding to anyone. It's easy enough to appreciate getting the solution after struggling with a puzzle for a while. Games like Portal make great use of this. Portal is about finding the solution that will let you move on.
The Witness is different. The Witness is a game about understanding puzzles. Understanding a puzzle is about more than just finding a solution. It's about knowing how the puzzle works. It's about knowing what makes a solution a solution.
You could be shown the answer to many of the puzzles in the game and be immediately and totally stuck on the next puzzle. Why? Because you didn't understand the puzzle. You don't understand why that solution is a solution. Without that knowledge, you cannot move on to the next puzzle. You may even have to go back to a "solved" puzzle in order to try and understand it better.
Understanding requires questioning. Understanding requires probing. Understanding requires observing. You will be questioning, probing and observing every panel in the game, and indeed, the island itself, all in an attempt to understand.
If you do not enjoy trying to understand puzzles, you will not enjoy this game.
If, however, you have a love for discovery and understanding, this game will entertain that love in a beautiful and fulfilling way.Show moreShow less
31.9 hours at review1,481 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
I begrudgingly choose not to recommend The Witness despite some excellent puzzle design because I feel that the majority of gamers (myself included) will not have the patience, stamina or desire to complete the grueling puzzles in this game with no reward other than a feeling of accomplishment for figuring out the solution. I completed the game only out of pride and curiosity to see if there was any kind of big reveal at the end. I was disappointed.
Ultimately, whether or not you will like this game depends on your philosophy about what a video game should be. If you haven't watched the Youtube video titled Jonathan Blow: How Mainstream Devs Are Getting It Wrong, I suggest you watch it before dropping $40 on this game. Blow is the lead developer for The Witness and Braid, and his philosophy about games is that they shouldn't be designed to be fun. Rather they should be designed to instill a particular emotion in the player. He also detests hand-holding by the developers, opting for an approach where the game lets players discover everything on their own. These principles are on full display in The Witness. Much of the game is not fun. It is often brainwracking and frustrating. The emotion he wants you to experience through this process is that "eureka!" moment from discovering everything all on your own. For some, that experience might justify the price.
However, I disagree with Blow. I understand his desire to use video games as an artistic form of expression, but ultimately when I play a game that has over 600 puzzles and easily over 20 hours of gameplay, I want it to be a fun experience. I contrast his philosophy on game design with Sid Meier's. Meier would take an interesting concept and attempt to develop it into a workable game. He would have testers play the game over and over, making changes each time, based on player feedback, until it was fun. If he could not make it fun for the majority of people, he would scrap the game. Jonathan Blow doesn't do this. Fun wasn't a design consideration in the Witness. Therefore, he decided not to incorporate anything into the game that might distract from his themes of exploration and discovery, despite the possibility of making the game more enjoyable for the majority of people. So what we have in the end is Blow's vision of what he wants the game to be, as uncontaminated by player opinions as possible.
It's too bad because if these well conceived puzzles and pretty open world were incorporated into a suspenseful plot where details were revealed after solving each area, I would have really liked this game. Sadly, there is no plot here, and for the majority of people the puzzles alone probably aren't rewarding enough to motivate you to slog through it without resorting to guides on the internet. Thus, I only recommend The Witness for those who just really enjoy puzzles or who are willing to play a game despite it not being an enjoyable experience much of the time.
If you do decide to get this game, take my advice: savor it slowly. The puzzles are much more enjoyable if you do them a few at a time, rather than binge-puzzling through entire areas. If you get stuck on a puzzle, minimize frustration by taking a break from the game or exploring somewhere else for a while. And the puzzles in the ending area are the worst in the game. They are all either extremely difficult puzzles, or they are easy but unoriginal, tedious, and annoying.
Pros: Experience of discovery and exploration, beautiful scenery, clever puzzle design.
Cons: Hours of frustration, no plot to discover, ending puzzles are terrible, and the ending itself isn't great either.
EDIT 3/10/2016: Many people didn't think I clearly stated my personal opinion, so "(myself included)" was added to the first paragraph to make it clear that my overall experience with the game was negative. I also clarified a bit in the paragraph which contrasts Sid Meier and Jonathan Blow's design process.Show moreShow less
38.3 hours at review648 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
This game is amazing, but not for everyone. As has been noted, it is a fiendishly difficult puzzler. It has garnered many negative reviews, mostly from people expecting it to be a puzzle-adventure game, which it is NOT. It has suffered in it's comparisons to Myst, but it really isn't like that at all.
EVERY SINGLE PUZZLE consists of drawing line-path through a grid or symbol. Every one. Nothing else. Every interaction with the world is triggered by drawing a line-path through a grid or symbol. You cannot interact with the world in any other way. The environment itself often plays a key role in the puzzles, whether it be clues to the puzzle lurking in the environment, or driving the solution of the puzzle itself.
Yet... and here is why the game is great and totally worth the $40 price of admission... something subtle starts to happen to you as you complete puzzle after puzzle. HOW you solve the puzzles -- the thought process required arrive at a solution for each -- starts to take on meaning and become metaphoric. There is a palpable sense of MEANING in the puzzles you solve, and that is reflected and reinforced by ALL the environment details and art and media snippets found on the island. The game begins to speak to you in a language you have learned by playing the game. And the sum total of THAT experience is profound. It's not like anything I've ever experienced in a game.
Except perhaps Dear Esther. In Dear Esther you did nothing but walk around, look at stuff, and listen to an intermitent narrative as meaning started to emerge. In Dear Esther, you were an observer. That game TOLD you a story. In The Witness you walk around, solve puzzles, look at stuff, and begin to understand WHY you're solving puzzles and what it all means. This game SHOWS you a story. It adheres to the old writing adage, SHOW not TELL.
When it all comes together -- and HOW it all comes together -- is both intangible and epic.
If you're the kind of person whom what I've tried to describe makes sense or is appealing, you'll love this game. Otherwise, you'll hate it as many reviewers here apparently have hated it. There's very little in between.Show moreShow less
7.8 hours at review582 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
Extremely disappointed by this game given all the glowing reviews this game has received from various media outlets. It is confusing precisely why these critics had given the game so much praise considering just how repetitious, tedious and deeply unsatisfying these puzzles are to solve. This review is coming from someone who has completed and immensely enjoyed the original Braid, the Portal games, and the Talos Principle + its DLC.
All the puzzles I’ve encountered so far have the same basic structure; you trace a line through a maze governed by certain constraints and rules that you need to discover. The discovery of these rules is an application of the tools of the scientific method; you’ll begin by formulating a working hypothesis about how to traverse the maze, then you’ll test your idea by applying the rule to each of the series of thematically-related mazes that follows. Almost always you will find that you will need to revise your working-rule in favor of some deeper rule, going back to previous puzzles to figure out the commonality between a series of mazes. When nearly every puzzle you encounter is actively trying to defy your expectations, repeat this process puzzle after puzzle (ad nauseum) and you’ll soon begin to see just how frustrating and unfun these puzzles are to complete.
Often you’ll be on the last puzzle of a series just to find out that what you thought was true is in fact incorrect, leaving you dumbfounded at what to do next. Sure, you’re free to walk away from the puzzle, but you’re disincentivized from doing so since – after returning -- you are likely going to forget about what the hell was going on in that problematic puzzle in the first place, forcing you to recapitulate the entire tortuous and stressful process again under the mind-numbing electrical droning of the panel upon which the maze is displayed. These puzzles are also difficult, both logically and cognitively. You’ll be applying deductions in formal logic while storing complex patterns in visual memory, mentally rotating them and retracing them onto the maze panel. Better for puzzle games to be too hard than too easy for sure, but mentally exhausting for the player.
Well, the pay-off to solving these puzzles must surely be worth it, right?! Well, sometimes you’ll be rewarded with something tantalizing – e.g. a staircase descending somewhere mysterious or a stark change in scenery -- only to find that it is locked behind a door with yet another puzzle panel, this time with alien symbols upon them. Other times seemingly nothing happens -- at all. Or, perhaps you will be given a long, boring audio recording of a quote/monologue voiced by some pompous sounding ♥♥♥♥. Yay! Not even your experience of the feeling of insight will be a satisfying reward for you because that too becomes so routine that is becomes boring and banal. The sheer profundity of your epiphanies will begin to wane after your 11th insight.
There’s not much to do in the world other than the puzzles or taking in the visual scenes of the beautiful looking art-style. No discernible story, no ambient soundtrack, limited ability to wander through the world.
I cannot recommend this game at all (unless you are a masochist). Maybe if you are a puzzle fanatic you will enjoy this game. I seriously considered getting a refund but decided to give the game a chance to unfold and prove me wrong. I had not experience any of the “brilliance” this game has been ascribed, so perhaps I am missing something that only shows up later in the game or in areas I have not explored. What I think most critics call brilliance is little more than the fact that some puzzles extend or are transposed into the wider world; something which merely requires one to be more observant of the surroundings the puzzle is situated, not genius.
Update: As a point of reference for how far I got into the game when this review was written, I played ~8hrs and completed 124 puzzles + 11Show moreShow less
8.8 hours at review648 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
I definitely recommend The Witness to anyone who loves solving logical puzzles. And there is an enormous amount of them during the gameplay. And when you think you got them all - then you discover another layer of puzzles... ;)
The best part is that there is no tutorial, no explanation. You learn how to solve puzzles (and what certain symbols mean) by solving progressively-harder riddles. You must work out all rules by yourself. And this is actually very rewarding!
And of course there is the bright, colourful island where the game takes place. Very detailed, engaging, and huge.
Beware that there is no adventure and story, though.Show moreShow less
66.1 hours at review543 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
I wanted to like this game, I really did.
I'm a fan of Jonathan Blow and I LOVED Braid.
The Witness ticks all the right boxes for me: beautiful artistic graphics, open world exploration, puzzles to solve, etc.
However, this game was never "fun" for me. It was repetitive to the point of being monotonous and frustrating. There was never any "ah-ha" feeling of genius, just solving the same puzzle over and over (with some slightly changing rules).
So far, I've "only" played 11 hours and activated 2 lasers (~100 puzzles), but I have to say I'm done. I can't stand to do yet another maze puzzle!
Will others love this game? Absolutely. It's just not for everyone.
EDIT: I wanted to add clarification for what I've done in the game.
I'm more of an explorer type so I wandered around and saw every major area in the game. I also built-up an understanding for most (if not all) of the rules in the game.
I understand the rules for hexagons, squares, "tetris" blocks, "stars", etc.
I did symmetry maze puzzles, tree branching maze puzzles (two major types), sound maze puzzles (which were TERRIBLE), hedge maze puzzles (probably the best ones in the game), color tinted maze puzzles, object tracing maze puzzles, etc. (Basically 11 hours of nothing but maze puzzles.)
I went completely through the "treehouse". I climbed to the top of the mountain. I unlocked pretentious videos. I unlocked pretentious audio recordings (one of which was 8 minutes long!). I took boat rides around the island. I feel that I have a pretty good idea of what this game offers and it's simply not for me.Show moreShow less
11.4 hours at review635 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
One of the best puzzle games I've ever played. Even ignoring the stuff that would count as a spoiler, the panel puzzles have far, far more depth than you'd think at first glance, and uncovering the rules for how they all work is a challenging but very rewarding experience. Plus the game is absolutely beautiful.
I have a notebook full of sketches and drawings I was using to help solve some of the harder puzzles, even went as far as to physically make some props for some of them. That is a sign of a great puzzle game.Show moreShow less
36 hours at review523 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
Seven and a half years after the release of indie darling Braid, Jonathon Blow is back for revenge with another puzzler: The Witness! This newest game is in many ways quite similar to Braid: the puzzles themselves are (for the most part) very well thought-out, the visuals are interesting, and the rest of the game is a complete mess. Braid was a much shorter experience, though, and a lot of the really stupid ♥♥♥♥ didn't show up until after you beat the game and received access to Blow's attempt at a plot (really just an infodump). The Witness, being much much longer, gives the player plenty of time to think about what went wrong during the making of this game.
The majority of the game's puzzles revolve around the use of various symbols that each denote specific rules that must be kept in mind when solving the puzzle in question. Black and white dots must be separated, tetris blocks must be drawn into the grid, and colored balls must be grouped into pairs. I wouldn't really call any of these spoilers, as the way the game introduces these symbols makes it fairly obvious what their specific rules are. As the game progresses, these symbols are combined and used in increasingly more complex ways, and I would say that this is the one part where The Witness isn't a complete failure. The way that the difficulty progresses feels very natural, and I never found myself stuck on any one puzzle for a very long time. It is when the game deviates from these mechanics that things go downhill.
Several areas of the game choose to completely forgo these symbol-based puzzles, with often tedious results. The environment-based puzzles are never difficult: Blow obviously realized that during the development of the game, so the way that these puzzle mechanics evolve just makes them more annoying to solve. For example, one area's gimmick is that you have to listen to bird calls and map out puzzle solutions based on high, medium, and low notes. As you progress through the area, the bird calls begin to get interrupted by other noises, such as wolf howls and jackhammers. Instead of making the puzzles more difficult to solve by increasing their complexity, The Witness chooses in these cases to just make it take longer for the player to get the information they need. Again, these environmental puzzles become extremely tedious: you already know what you have to do, but some silly gimmick has been added that means the puzzle takes five times as long to solve as it should.
The game's final area has its own share of problems, which I'll put in spoiler tags. It seems as though our pal Jonathon ran out of ideas for the last hour or two of the game, because most of the puzzles you encounter are extremely simple, with stupid one-off gimmicks that, like the environmental puzzles, add zero real difficulty. Some of the puzzles are at weird angles, some are overlayed with a checkerboard pattern, and some spin around in circles. Considering how long this game has been in development for, I can't believe that these puzzles were kept around.
Another problem lies with the way that the puzzles are integrated into the game's world. Most of the game involves solving a series of puzzles, each on its own separate panel, which then unlocks a door to the next series of puzzles. Granted, these are very good puzzles, but it rarely feels like I even need to be on an island at all. In only a few instances do these puzzles have any impact on the world other than activating machinery: in the treetops area, for example, the puzzle panels that you solve slowly form bridges that you use to cross from tree to tree. A few puzzles can be solved in more than one way, and depending on how you solve them, the direction of the bridge changes. As it stands, though, there exists very little relation between the game's puzzles and the game's world.
The final major problem, I would say, is the issue of player motivation. The only draw here is the puzzles; if you do not love solving puzzles (in fact, a specific type of puzzle), there is zero reason to buy this game. There is no plot, no lore, nothing exists to motivate those who maybe aren't so keen on the puzzles but want to learn more about this strange island that they're on. In fact, Blow decides to further exacerbate things by dropping audio logs all over the place. No, these aren't recordings made by the people on the island who all apparently turned into statues: they're quotes from famous scientists, artists, and thinkers of the world, telling you about how amazing the world is and how powerful we all are! What's worse, there exists a hidden theater where, by inputting the correct puzzle solution, you can watch unrelated video clips that I guess were meant to "blow your mind". Of the three that I found, there's a clip of James Burke talking about how science is the greatest thing ever, one of Richard Feynman talking about the hierarchy of the universe and why he studied physics, and the ending of Tarkovsky's Nostalghia taken out of context. Really, all of these clips and quotes and whatever other ♥♥♥♥ was thrown into the game seem to have no purpose for being there. Blow just wanted to sound smart by having a clip in his game where an astronaut talks about how cool space is.
I went into this game deliberately avoiding any information I might find (hopefully I don't ruin the magic for anyone reading this ♥♥♥♥). I knew that there were two possibilities: either there was a really interesting backstory, or there wasn't. Not knowing which of these was true meant that, at least for most of the game, there still existed within me a small glimmer of hope that The Witness would end up as something more than a collection of interesting puzzles (not counting the environmental puzzles, ♥♥♥♥ that). It was only during the game's ending, when you fly around the island, disembodied voices say a few unrelated words, and then the game closes itself that I realized that I had been duped. Since I enjoyed the puzzle aspect of the game, it didn't hit me as hard as I would assume that it would hit someone expecting more, but it was still a pretty big disappointment. The Witness just doesn't seem to understand what it wants to be. If you took away the entire island setting and turned The Witness into a traditional puzzle game with a level select system (a la SpaceChem, Mario's Picross, World of Goo, etc), you would certainly lose very little. Sure, I enjoyed exploring the island, but it never felt like a necessary part of the game to me.
So, while The Witness is interesting purely as a collection of puzzles, it makes very little effort to justify the existence of its island setting. Outdated concepts such as "plot" and "lore" are superseded by audio logs talking about how cool our planet is. While 50-60% of the puzzles are very well-designed, the rest involve gimmicks that only serve to bore any competent player. Despite the game's flaws, I did enjoy it. However, I would only recommend it to those interested in solving a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of puzzles.
Taster's score: C-
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14.9 hours at review504 people found this helpful
Source: original Steam user reviews. Helpful votes are an archived snapshot, not live data. Last collected: 08/15/2026.
