Do you love or hate The Witness?

[HumbleRodent]

This is to ponder whether or not the creator, and the players, of this game despise or cherish The Witness. I could see it being a love letter for some and a piece of ridiculing catharsis for others...thoughts?

[herbstwerk]

Personally I loved The Witness and wish I could play and experience it once again for the first time. I'm also one of those people who think that 'video games can be art' and would consider The Witness being part of that category. Could it be considered pretentious and taking itself too serious at times? Sure. Is that necessarily a bad thing? I don't think so.

I also thoroughly enjoyed my 90 or so minutes with The Looker. It's juvenile, fun, and a guilty pleasure. But what would life be without them? It's serious enough already. :)

[sethsez]

Jonathan Blow is exceedingly clever in some ways and less clever than he thinks he is in others. The Witness is a great game that keeps trying to get in its own way, and this does a wonderful job of parodying both sides of it.

[Simpson]

i hate it. the line puzzles aren't fun. the perspective puzzles have nice Aha! moments, the visuals are beautiful, but it all gets drowned in the pretentious wisdom of the voice logs, movies and Blows contradictory statements, like respecting our time and then putting hour long puzzles in the game where you just stand there and wait for a point to move or a cloud to circle around the island. also he said he wanted to make puzzles that feel rewarding without any jingle or flashy stuff when you do the right thing, i think he failed on that part, the witness rarely felt rewarding.
yes, i got a bit obsessed with Jonathan Blow and The Witness.

Though i only stumbled upon this game just now and haven't played it yet.

[Morsk]

I only liked the puzzles; there are very many good puzzles. I think it's bad art. I'm convinced its intended meaning is "This is beautiful but it's not worth the effort of understanding," but beauty is subjective and after being trolled that way, I don't find the game beautiful anymore.

[Chemical Rascal]

I really really loved The Witness, from start to finish. The Looker is also an absolutely magnificent send-up of it, and it's wonderful. And yeah, it's ridicule, but if you can't ridicule the things you love -- if you love The Witness and can't stand critique of it -- like, what are you even doing?

[MorpheusLunae]

I personally think The Witness is one of the best and most interesting games of the past 20 years. It has its flaws but it does what it wants to do really well. I heard Jonathan Blow going onto a rant about "hate parodies" when people told him on his Twitch stream but I don't think this game qualifies as a "hate parody". It pokes fun at The Witness and it does so quite well while also delivering its own and unique set of puzzles. I'd call that a success.

[aliasup]

the witness is cool puzzle game besides somewhat pretentious voiceovers.

[The Renderer]

The puzzles were great (both kinds of, if you know what I mean), but the world building/"story" could have been a lot better and more interesting. Audio logs in the style of System Shock instead of random quotes that led nowhere, for example.

[Denzel Joshington]

The Witness for me falls into category of "We don't get a lot of these and it's pretty special." A lot of things like that get called pretentious, but the really interesting pieces of creativity have to be certain of themselves in a way that some people will kneejerk as overconfident. I liked the ponderous audio and 70s philosophical videos since it's fun to think about things that come out of left field in a new context. It's not like I couldn't use something that forces my brain to work with some new thoughts every now and then while I'm gaming.

For this game, I thought the audio about "what if there was blue gravity" was the funny jab. I think it could have balanced things by having a clip or two that jabbed at smug critiques of the Witness. I mean, throwing around the word "pretentious" is it's own kind of pretentiousness.

[eri(c)]

never played it haha

[Shrimps]

Loved The Witness. Didn't care about anything that was said on the audio logs or video clips. Not sure why even get hung up on any of that when its primarily a great puzzle game. The puzzles started off slow but then all the "aha" moments that just piled up one after the other made it so addictive to keep going. I loved how interconnected things became as you progressed, and how it all spilled over into the island itself. Just blew my mind in so many different ways.

I didn't do a full completion since for me, just to pass the main game, was a serious love/hate relationship. But always great satisfaction when you realise the next new mechanic in the long list of them. And of course the visuals were beautiful and calming while spending hours in game.

Lots of amazing puzzle games out there but I doubt anything close to The Witness' ingenuity will ever happen again, besides The Looker of course. I definitely paid more attention to the hilarious audio logs in The Looker :D

[Crystaliss]

I saw this is a tongue in cheek love letter/homage, it pokes at several of the target's bigger flaws and oddities in ways that are more humorous than spiteful, I also thought it pulled it's punches, even if only slightly, it could have been much sharper in it's jabs.
It's also made well enough to say that a non-insignificant amount of care and effort went into it's development and design.

[Problematist]

I already don't like puzzle games but there's a great analysis on yt by Joseph Anderson called "A great game you shouldn't play." That sums it up pretty well.

[*Ünhi | .acrophobia. .ldr]

The Witness is way too pretentious and overrated for what it is. That said, I still enjoyed my time with it more than not. It's like a 7/10 for me.

There is definitely some clever puzzle design there which was very enjoyable, especially with the overall world, but the lack of any decent story left it feeling ultimately soulless. The pretentious BS annoyed me all the way through and definitely tainted my experience with the game. (It was completely unnecessary.)

(Back when it came out and people were comparing it to Myst I thought they were idiots... and I still do. The games have nothing in common besides being puzzle games set on islands.)

What I like about The Looker is that it has good (albeit silly) puzzle elements while it also pokes fun at the pretentious BS from The Witness that I hated. That's a win-win for me! I just wish it was longer!

[Jocosity]

As a puzzle game it's at least fine, even if I was always disappointed in how much you have to suffer through boring maze puzzles that have no relation to the 3D world before you actually get to anything interesting. My issue with it is mainly just that it's a lot harder to separate the game from Jonathan Blow's weird pretentiousness than it was with Braid, since it's baked into the game this time. I disagree with a lot of the points he markets the game on in its steam description (there's a reason why this parody has that laser machine that takes like 5 minutes to fully unfurl, and it's not because The Witness respects the player's time) and it's just kind of bizarre that he acts as if he invented the concept of games without explicit tutorials.