[Khellendros]

So after a lengthy hiatus due to moving house, we finally booted up The Witness again. We left off inside the mountain, at the very bottom.

And we almost gave up. We were about 30 seconds from using a walkthrough for the first time. Finally, I cut out some shapes and started playing around witht them...dozens of different combinations. When I hit upon the solution, I fully believed there was going to be something wrong with it right up until those doors opened, that's how frustrated we had become with it.

But we did it! And then we did the final few quite quickly (including those timed ones!) and

Spoiler

got into the Willy Wonka Elevator

.

And then we watched with WTF expressions as the 'ending' happened.

And then we went online, thinking the game had finished, and eager to read about what others thought was going on. And that's when we read about the 'true' ending. And then we went and did that as well and that was a hundred times more weird.

I leave the game both deeply satisfied and unsatisfied at the same time. I LOVED how puzzles built on puzzles, and I loved the setting and the art style. And I especially enjoyed that the girlfirend and I would never have managed all that we did on our own. Some things just clicked for her, and others for me. And for other puzzles still, it was a combination of our thoughts.

The game is about finding your own path to your own truth, I get that. It's about building on knowledge which has come before, learning from other works and places. It's about the mechanics of discovery and innovation in thought processes. Most of all, it's about epiphanies. But becuase of that, I also leave the game feeling a sense of disappointment. Because apparently we never got the most important epiphany of all game-wise, if you wanted to be able to make your way to the 'real ending'. After 454 panels completed, we hadn't got it.

Spoiler

I'm talking about the environmental puzzles, like that 'real ending'

Spoiler

connect the sun to the light beam

puzzle. Yes, we saw them all around. Yes, we saw lines and starting points and end points in shapes and features all around the island, and we saw if we aligned them they would form a 'solution'. But it never even occurred to us to press X and try to do them. We simply thought they were there for 'decoration', as symbolic references to the puzzle panels all around. We never escaped the box of the panels when it came to our puzzle solving

and that makes me feel frustrated. Frustrated with the game or with myself? It's hard to tell.

[Khellendros]

Thinking more on it, only half-jokingly, I blame the Start a New Game screen. If the game had just

Spoiler

taken me back to the beginning and started over again without that screen

I would probably have just continued playing for a bit, suspecting that there was a reason for it. And that final mountain puzzle

Spoiler

the fact that there was no panel for the puzzle and you had to click on the ground to begin, which did take us a while to work out!

had clued us in to the possibility of such puzzles. But because of Start a New Game I immediately plunged into the internet commentaries instead of playing. Now I'll never know if I would have worked it out