Recent reviews by Shadikka

• Hundreds of 2D puzzles sprinkled around an open world
  
• Visually very pleasing with bold colors
  
• The difficulty is all over the place, partially due to the non-linearity of the game
  
• No plot whatsoever: some real-world quotes and videos that start off interesting, but get on your nerves quickly
  
• Maybe grab it on sale, if you really like puzzle games

The Witness is visually stunning. It uses a lot of bright colors and has a consistent visual style that does not feel like it will age badly - it would not be completely amiss to compare it visually to Super Mario 64 with all the polygons that the intervening 20 years have made possible.

The puzzles have very interesting, sometimes outright brilliant ideas. They are most commonly presented in a series that is roughly ascending in difficulty. In addition, the environment is often used very cleverly in the puzzles.

The island the game takes place on is well-designed, and feels both suitably large and suitably small at the same time: you can always find something new where you didn't expect it, but the travel times are not annoying.


A typical puzzle game has, roughly speaking, a gameplay loop of "discover, learn, understand, apply". The Witness has a gameplay loop of "find, learn, understand, apply, apply, apply ridiculously, apply absurdly, apply, apply, apply some more, apply stupidly" and so on. All too often it feels like the developers have created an interesting puzzle mechanic, and promptly with the enthusiasm of a young child who's learned a new thing proceed to run the mechanic to the ground and keep on beating that dead horse.

There is a lot of needless busywork in the game. Many puzzles require you to broadly speaking find or make the solution in a place a bit away from the actual puzzle grid, forcing you to either memorize it, or more probably take a screenshot of it and use the Steam Overlay judiciously to copy the solution. In addition, numerous puzzles using the environment require you to be in the correct place to solve it... the exactly correct place, down to centimeter accuracy. You only know you're an inch off when you simply cannot draw the correct line on the grid. Rinse and repeat.

Towards the end, the game starts pulling artificial difficulty on you. In the last area of the game, you need to solve puzzles that are easy to solve by themselves, but which have visual glitches or other "features" that do not make it harder to solve the puzzle, but make it harder to enter the solution. Especially in a puzzle game, that is an absolute no-go.


I expected to like the game. I wanted to like this game! Unfortunately many bad aspects of the game's design just cause the player to be frustrated, which ruins the whole experience of journeying from an epiphany to another.

Unless you are a hardcore puzzle game fan, I would recommend you to go play Talos Principle instead. Compared to The Witness, it is pure pleasure to play.

Regardless, I'm still interested to see what the developers do next - there are many good elements in The Witness that when given the proper polish might make for a very good game.

• Challenging, but mostly not frustrating puzzles
  
• Stunning atmosphere, beautiful graphics and an excellent soundtrack
  
• A well-presented, if not the most novel background story
  
• Around 25 hours to complete (see below)
  
• Well worth the full price, absolutely worth it on sale

Talos Principle is a first-person [1] puzzler, which draws a lot of comparisons to Portal. However, whereas the Portal series is full of kinetic puzzles where the motion of your character matters, Talos Principle requires very little platforming skills. For example, if you need to jump on an object such as a cube, the game gives you a prompt for that and essentially makes a guided jump. In essence, you can approach Talos Principle purely as a puzzle game that does not require you to have played any first-person games ever before.

The puzzles in the game are located in open worlds, which can be accessed via three hubs in the main world. Each hub has portals to seven different worlds, for a grand total of 21 worlds with three to seven puzzles each - plus a few outside the worlds, mostly bonus and ending content. Hubs B and C are gated via sigils, which are acquired by completing the puzzles. In addition, all five main gameplay elements need to be unlocked via their own sigils before completing puzzles with them.

If you play through the levels in order, the difficulty with each gameplay element progresses well. You will first encounter a small tutorial-like puzzle, before later on having to think outside the box for trickier uses of the elements. [2] Overall the difficulty is high enough to entertain, but luckily free of frustration. The game does include an in-game hint system, but unlocking even a single hint is fairly laborious and the hints themselves are often obtuse. It is possible to get stuck on a few levels, mostly in the later parts of the game, but most of the time you cannot fail so badly that you need to restart, unless you blow up a mine. (Which is why the mines are the worst part of the game in my opinion.)


The base game includes 36 achievements. Some achievements [3] are technically mutually exclusive with each other on a single playthrough, but with a guide and some planning you can achieve them on a single playthrough by reloading from checkpoints. For the most part, the achievements are not given too easily.

The game has three different endings, but your saved checkpoints are not removed before finishing the game, so you do not need to be afraid of needing to play the game through three times. The hardest ending requires finishing all puzzles in the game, including bonus levels, which have some of the hardest puzzles in the game.

In addition to these, the game has numerous easter eggs, ranging from game references to photos of the development team. The easter eggs are usually easily reachable if you know where they are, but are pretty hard to find.


The game is gorgeous, both visually and aurally. The graphics are detailed and especially the lighting is stunning, even though bloom is overused. Landscapes in the game range from arctic tundra to a lush boreal forest and are always beautiful. Despite the detailed look of the game, the graphics rarely come in the way of the actual gameplay, so you will never need to aim a beam through foliage, for example.

The soundtrack of the game is mostly orchestral and majestic and sets the atmosphere of the game very well. The tracks are short, sadly, and might start to get on your nerves after a while. The pieces vary from typical church-like epics with a pipe organ and a male choir to vaguely Celtic with a harp-like lead in a pentatonic scale, with mostly acoustic or acoustic-like sounds and no really discernable lyrics.

The voice lines in the game are mostly by Elohim, the game's voice in the sky. The voice actor of Elohim, Timothy Watson, does an excellent job. As befitting a divine character, his voice is deep and somehow sounds large and makes you shiver, no matter whether Elohim is currently loving, angry or proud.

The other character with voiced lines is one of the sources of the backstory. Erin Fitzgerald brings out the character really well and manages to convey emotions very strongly via only her voice, as is crucial for a character that the player should feel invested in, but is ever only heard, not seen on-screen.


Small spoilers ahead.

The premise of the game is that you are an artificial intelligence inhabiting a robotic body in what seems like a computer simulation, guided by a divine voice from above who calls himself Elohim. The game does not go out of its way to tell you anything about the storyline, and you could very well finish all the puzzles and the whole game without really knowing anything about the backstory or the actual plot - if you are decidedly not curious about your surroundings.

The story is told via bits and pieces by computer terminals that seem out of place in the environments, shining time capsules that contain audio logs by the only voiced human in the game, and messages on the walls, which are either story-relevant messages by characters that are implied to be related to you, or are from a set of predefined messages painted on the walls by your Steam friends.

Personally I have always liked stories that are revealed slowly, part by part, and Talos Principle was no exception. The fate of the human world is told with very creative ways via very different types of messages, and the world you are in gets painted in a very different light depending on who you want to believe.

A big point of the game is philosophy, and especially te philosophy of existence and cognition are discussed in the game, both actively via dialogue and by the backstory tidbits. While the subject matter is not the rarest one around even in video games, I found it presented very enjoyably. Approach it with an opem mind, and you will hopefully enjoy it.


I really like the game. The gameplay is enjoyable and challenging, and the atmosphere brought by the soundtrack and the backstory is pure escapist bliss for me. Talos Principle is not a very light game to play, but if you are in a suitable mood and approach the philosophical parts of the game with an open mind, it is a more enjoyable experience than most. At least it was for me.

[1] Third-person is an option as well.
[2] And trust me, there will be a trickier use for every single thing in the game. Even the boxes!
[3] Namely, the groups are: The three endings, use / non-use of the in-game hints, and three plot choices that are mostly unrelated to the actual endings. One achievement is dependent on both a plot choice and an ending choice.