Recent reviews by Xaser

While it doesn't quite spark the same hype as the original did when I first played it, and while not technically perfect, this for sure is a fantastic remake that did the original more than justice.

TLDR: If you like puzzle games, play The Witness and Portal 1 & 2 and what not first, then maybe this. Read other negative reviews to underline my points.

Okay. So now the important bits are out of the way, let me quickly go into why I don't like this game. Maybe my experience was worsened by the fact that I actually wanted to play any other game, but felt like I came too far in this game allready to not finish it. But there's a good reason it took me so long to finish and that plainly is: after 3 levels, it's grindy & boring AF and it only gets worse when they shove down their "deep" philosophy down your throat.

The puzzles.
Good 3 puzzle ideas, which are stretched and chewed on over and over again until you just get frustrated with the minor annoyances the mechanics have. Real sensations of accomplishment don't occur anymore after 2 hours of gameplay. It's too repetitive. Then there's these tetris puzzles, which you FOR THE LOVE OF GOD should just look up the solutions to, because there's no real systemic way to solve them, they are just a randomness cluster♥♥♥♥ and feel like they are just there to stretch out the game even longer in playtime.

The graphics & world.
Meh. Nothing special, not that I needed anything beautiful, but also this.. other games get it down much better.

The story.
Full of cliches about machine learning and AI and programming. The programmers should feel awkward themselves to have programmed this. It tries to be all philosophical but pushes you hardly in the one direction it wants you to go. The points there are to make are told in 3 minutes, and again just strechted to boredom. Play Stanley's parabel if you are into that stuff. All the text maybe contains additional nice details, but to me it wasn't presented in any way, that I felt the desire to actually read it. The ending is just the worst.

This game just feels like they ran out of ideas 2 weeks into development and still felt like making a full title out of it. Sure, "The Witness" is just "puzzle boards", but at least, these puzzles are clever and always have you learn something new along the way. This game just teaches you stuff and has you apply all 2^124 permutations of it.