![]() There are many puzzles and story elements that I don’t think are actually accessible until after “Endgame”. I still haven’t gotten that second achievement. Steam tells me I got that achievement at the 24 hour mark I have now played for 48, and think I may be closing in on “completely done”. It does commemorate a significant landmark, and you could stop there if you wanted, but there is much left to discover. The first is titled “Endgame”, which is a lie. There are a mere two achievements on Steam. And, indeed, I frequently had the experience of a seemingly-insoluble puzzle cracking instantly when I came back to it. Most of the time it is quite viable, when apparently stuck, to employ the “go do something else and come back later” strategy without even leaving the game. There are only rare situations where a single puzzle is a bottleneck. That said, several of these difficulties can be mitigated by judicious use of Internet spoilers. And a very few puzzles contain timed elements, requiring not just cleverness, but speed. A very few puzzles near the end of the game contain elements of flashing light which might be dangerous for some kinds of epilepsy. Some other puzzles require fine-grained color differentiation which will cause problems for some varieties of colorblindness. There are a few puzzles based on sound even if you have good hearing, as I do, these may prove quite difficult/impossible if you are not good at identifying pitch. I do have to dock a few points for accessibility. Play this game enough, and you will begin to see the world in different ways (and not just through the desire to draw lines on everything!). ![]() Most of them are there, somewhere, or the game will teach you to stop expecting them. Eventually, you will come to expect certain things from the game. It carefully teaches you how to make and test hypotheses – and also how you must sometimes abandon hypotheses in favor of perceiving the actual world in front of you. The game encourages, sometimes in audio or video format, but more significantly in terms of the gameplay itself, a mix of scientific and Zen thought. ![]() What I was not expecting, however, was the way in which the… level upon which the puzzle solving happens changes multiple times over the course of the game. There are the expected variations of size and shape, a variety of symbols which impose constraints on how the line must be drawn, and so on. Every other puzzle is an elaboration upon this. The first door you come to teaches you to draw a line from an open circle to an endpoint. The puzzles, however, are more structured than those in Myst. You find yourself upon an apparently deserted island with some beautiful scenery, some puzzling mechanisms, and a few hints that there is a larger narrative story behind it all. In form, The Witness owes a significant chunk of its DNA to Myst. I have not yet discovered all of its secrets, but I have found enough to want to talk about it, and to highly recommend it. My current gaming obsession is The Witness.
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