Let me preface this review by saying that I did enjoy the game, but I think that it has some serious flaws. I completed the game in about 4 sittings (4 sessions of ~3-4 hours each.) and I have issues with the price point, the philosophy behind the design of many of the puzzles, and the overall world itself. I'm also looking at this from the standpoint of a game developer, because that is what I am, first and foremost (albeit not as successful as Jonathan Blow, of course.) I will be judging this game a little more harshly than some others might. Not in technical aspects, but there are so many things I would have done differently. I'm sorry if this bothers some people, but at the same time, I just want to put an honest opinion out there about a game that stops short of being truly remarkable. Furthermore, this review will be almost entirely spoiler-free. If there is even a minor spoiler, I'll state it beforehand.
Let's get the price point discussion out of the way. This game costs $40. I understand that it took seven years and millions of dollars to complete. That is a very, very large investment of both time and money, and I almost feel bad criticizing Thekla, Inc. for the price point as it may be fair for some people... but it wasn't fair for me. I played the game for about 13-15 hours, completing roughly half of the games total puzzle count. I lost interest at that point, as I was able to complete the game, and I felt I had spent enough time in the charming, but quite small, world that Jonathan and company presented me. It's beautiful, and the space is well utilized, being full of surprises, but at some point the novelty wears off. I wouldn't recommend this game at it's current price point. I think $25-30 would have been a much fairer asking price for what this game presents. If they found a way to keep it more engaging, then maybe I would have completed more of the game, but as it stands, I don't think I want to step foot in the world of The Witness for even another ten minutes.
A lot of the game play utilizes the game world's space well, but there are a small number of puzzles that require pixel perfection of arbitrary precision that really, really put me off. It was very, very frustrating to be put in a position where I had to solve a puzzle to continue, and without actually knowing if I was even doing them correctly, I was expected to find and perfect angles and positions. This basically ended up being an exercise of trial and error... without knowing what errors I was making. This happened only a handful of times, but it was enough to make me paranoid about the problem through a lot of the game, making some easier puzzles simply feel more frustrating than they may have been otherwise. In addition to these complaints, the game doesn't let you fall off cliffs, or walk off ledges, which annoyed me quite a few times while trying to traverse some areas. Again, arbitrary changes to how tall something can be before I can walk up it, or how low something can be for me to step down led to me getting stuck on what was essentially invisible walls while I just wanted to walk over to another area. This only wasted seconds here or there, but the frustration came from the somewhat inconsistent nature of this mechanic. Minor Spoilers: There's a system in place to allow you to skirt the island on a boat. It's not very hidden, and I got this ability pretty early on in the second area I explored. There isn't really a puzzle gating it's discovery which makes it's use an exercise of frustration more than convenience or anything else. Basically, I got the boat, and I couldn't get off at several of the locations it could go to, leading me to standing there for several minutes going from locked door to locked door, only having to eventually circle around almost the entire island to find a place I could get off, which was an area to which I had already been. It's not really fast enough to be fast travel, and the puzzles surrounding the boat are repetitive, require an arbitrary precision, and they take forever to complete. I can't express how annoying this boat became. Spoilers end here.
That leads me to another point, the basis of this game surrounds one particular type of puzzle. They iterate the hell out of this puzzle in a lot of interesting ways, but in all honesty, it gets old by the end of the game. Eventually I found myself frustrated when I encountered a puzzle, instead of intrigued or excited. There are some exceptions that I will not note here for spoiler reasons, but the vast majority of the puzzles are just iterations on the very first thing you do in the game. I actually feel like this game could have just as easily been a game where you walk around an island, stumbling across word-searches. It's like two years worth of newspaper puzzles crammed into a pretty, but small island.
At some point, the developers should have asked themselves if this is a game worth spending seven years and millions to complete. I can tell you that it's not. It's a wonderful achievement, but only in that they actually finished the game and released something playable that a lot of people seem to like. There's nothing about this game that feels like it spent 7 years in development, even if it was a team of just a couple of people. It also doesn't feel like a game that should have cost $5M to produce. It's a good game, but it isn't even as interesting to roam around as Dear Esther, and it's rarely as clever as parts of Antichamber. Exploring the world left me a little annoyed, as there are little bits here and there of philosophy scattered about. This was also something that bothered me about Braid. Jonathan Blow is the master of turning a good puzzle game into a pretentious "work of art." I can appreciate art, but the game feels like it's trying so hard to be art that it comes across off-putting. I don't need your views on the state of the world in a puzzle game. I'm sorry, I just really don't. It's like when you watch a movie that ends up piling on religious allegory out of the blue. It really shouldn't stop you from enjoying the experience, but hearing somebody else's view points, even if it's just a quip here or there or seconds of dialogue in a 2-hour movie, can really break the immersion. It left me wondering if those 7 years were spent scouring the web and BBC archives for footage of things that just sound smart, even if they aren't particularly relevant to the experience at hand. I'm sorry to be so harsh on this particular aspect, but it really got to me. I don't even necessarily disagree with everything put forth, but it has no place in this game. It feels so separate and alien for that to be a part of this game.
Overall, it's genuinely an interesting experience. A lot of clever things happen, it even had a moment or two that nearly floored me with how the game operates, but it's not enough. I don't care what's behind the doors I never unlocked (it's probably just another puzzle.) I don't mind that I'm leaving almost 350 puzzles unsolved. I enjoyed my time, but not enough to offset the superficial annoyances, and not enough to justify the price point. I suppose this game just wasn't for me.