The Witness is an open exploration game with beautiful visuals and fun puzzles and varied landscapes that you just itch to explore. The only issue I find with the gameplay is that it doesn’t explain the rules and requirements for certain gimmicks. Though most are obvious and easy to learn on your own there are a couple gimmicks in the game that do not make logical sense and will frustrate a player uninitiated with the puzzle rules.The other problem I had was the dropped FPS in numerous spots of the game (examples of specific areas include the bamboo jungle, the color swamp, and the Monastery). I have a Mac with a 3.1 Ghz Intel i7 Core Processor and 16 GB of RAM, but as powerful as this desktop computer is I still experience framerate drops in this game. Even when I set the graphics to the lowest possible quality all across the board there are still frequent lag spikes that will freeze the game for a second of two, though still vastly less often then when I set the graphics to HD, it is still a present issue no matter how you set the options. I suggest for the developer to look into this some more and if this can be remedied then work on pushing an update of the game in the future.Overall though The Witness is a great experience, looking past the afformentioned issues. Even if you get stuck on some of the puzzles the vast environment will compell you to explore as much as you can.

This is a beautiful, complex and compelling game. I have found few that could hold my interst like this one. I intend to play it several times.Pro: --complex and diverse puzzles--a wonderful and beautiful landscape to explore and enjoy, even between puzzles.--an at-your-own-pace game play with no direction that encourages exploration, contemplation and thought.--definitely play to get all of the ray guns firing even though you could win with 5.Con:-- on my system (MacBookPro with OS Mojave the cursor disappeared when I solved some of the puzzles. I could log out and it would come back, and I am an extremely patient man, so it didn't matter as much to me, but definitely a glitch.-- some of the puzzles had multiple possible solutions given the rules of the game, but only one worked. That could be frustrating.-- given the pathose of the landscape (and the statues) I expected a more redemptive ending. Instead the ending -- as beautiful as it was -- left me with the feeling that it was all meaningless. That was a disappointment.I gave it 4 stars for its creativity and the fact tha tI am attracted to play it over and over. Still, a little more tought would have made it a 5 star game.

I had high hopes for this game. I like games like Myst. However, this became tedious rather quickly. After some initial exploring, there are various areas of an island where there are sets of puzzles that must be solved. The problem is that as you progress through the game, the way the puzzles are solved becomes much more tedious and you have to battle with technology a bit. For instance, there are puzzles which require your positioing things just right with your virtual body and the viewing angle, which would be ok, but then if you get it wrong, you have to go back and do the previous one to reenable the current one. At a certain point I thought I'd find a walkthrough, and it was tedious even with the walkthrough. So even though the premise might be clever with a certain set of puzzles, doing the same thing over and over is where the tedium sets in.I played this with an AMD Radeon Pro 5500M Pro w/ 8GB, so the motion was very smooth at the highest settings.One thing, though, it's one of those games where if you get motion sick, it might bother you. After an hour I started to get a headache and a nauseated feeling...so it's one where you'd have to take breaks and step away, or have a time limit each day if you're like me.I say it was a waste of money for me because I don't feel like I want to finish the game. Even when it gets boring, using a walkthrough doesn't alleviate the boredom because of the mechanics of having to finish the puzzles.I think I would have liked it more if it had been more about problem solving and thinking, rather than having to do things mechnically over and over again.

I’ve only solved about 60 puzzles so far, but it has been running just fine. As others have mentioned, it is slow to load, but it runs beautifully at full-screen resolution on my MacBook Pro (2015) with max graphics settings.Update: Now I have finished over 400 puzzles and completed the game. This game is beautifully well done, and has an increible amount of content. I wasn’t able to solve every puzzle, but the ones I missed turned out not to be necessary for completing the game. Many of the puzzles are easy, once you get the hang of it, but some are very hard, even (purposely) exasperating. Don’t give up! The feeling of breaking into new areas after solving tough puzzles is very rewarding.I made the mistake of tackling the town area first, but those puzzles are based on puzzles eslwhere on the island, so I had to come back to some of them later, after I had been through the rest of the island and learned how to do those puzzles.