(image snatched from gaf)
IGN:
The Witness has a power and pull that carried me throughout the more than 40 hours it took to complete it for the first time, and that, even now, beckons me back to confront the mysteries I left unsolved. Its graceful combination of tangible goals, obscurity, and freedom creates ample opportunity for small victories and grand revelations alike. For the most part, its themes weave themselves beautifully throughout the gorgeous world and wide variety of puzzles, but even when it breaks subtlety in favor of a more heavy-handed approach to exposition, it never detracts from the truly fulfilling moments The Witness offers in terms of solving its physical puzzles and unlocking its deepest mysteries.
http://m.ign.com/articles/2016/01/25/the-witness-review
TIME:
In 2001, The Sims designer Will Wright told an interviewer “…there are certain things we just cannot simulate on a computer, but on the other hand that people are very good at simulating in their heads. So we just take that part of the simulation and offload it from the computer into the player’s head.” Games critic Ian Bogost took that one further by naming what we do when we play games a form of excavation, calling the player “the archaeologist of the lost civilization that is a game’s creator.”
The Witness feels like the fulfillment of that dynamic, a way of ingeniously hiding locks and keys and entire modes of inquiry in plain sight. Blow’s triumph lies in his insight into the thresholds of human perspective, how information travels and agglomerates, and how, given the right frame of mind, any of us might move mountains.
http://time.com/4191490/the-witness-review/
Videogamer
I'm so caught up inside the world of The Witness that it's hard to think about anything else: like Tetris, this is its true power, and it is one of the best games I've ever encountered. Playing The Witness is a real emotional rollercoaster, with flashes of anger, despondency, jubilation, awe, smugness and admiration. Who would have thought you could get all that from a game about drawing lines?
http://www.videogamer.com/reviews/the_witness_review.html
