(spoiler warning just in case)

At first blush, Undertale is a silly little game that honestly looks a little crappy. But the more I played around in its world, the more it came alive. It didn't break fourth wall, but rather it slowly dissolved it and brought me in. Undertale played jokes on me, taunted me, and dared me to delve deeper. At times I thought I had outsmarted the situation, but the game was always one step ahead of me. It may be trite to say, but I've never had a more unique gaming experience in my life.

And of course, everything else about the game is noteworthy. Its graphics are often deceptively amateurish, which only leaves room for more expressive and tender scenes to shine. The branching plot allows characters to react to different scenarios, making them feel alive and genuine. And of course, the music is incredible and full of bangers.

It's been satisfying to reach the end of Undertale as a coda to my recent playthrough of the Mother series. It's amazing to see how the DNA of this series has lived on and inspired dozens of other game devs. While the Halloween Hack was an honest but flawed attempt at capitalizing on the series, Undertale takes the influences and deftly makes its own thing: an amazing game for people that love games.

An amazingly introspective gaming experience.

While I'm sure The Witness can be interpreted in any number of ways, what especially resonated with me is the idea of perspective. "We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want." Is the player lost on this island? Is the goal to solve as many puzzle panels it takes to beat the game? Or is it the ambling and exploration that gives this journey its meaning?

On the surface, The Witness is simply a series of puzzles on panels. These puzzles alone could've easily been a mobile game that you'd finish in an afternoon, but its island setting allows the game to take these puzzles to impressive lengths. I was initially frustrated at the game's lack of explicit direction, and even considered abandoning the game at one point (seriously, I don't think I would've ever figured out what the asterisk symbol meant on my own.) It was the epiphany of finding the way forward that hooked me, making me scour the island for more puzzles to put what I just learned to the test.

For such a simple concept, the complexities grew deeper and deeper. Puzzles often started as tutorials, only to pull the rug out at the last step. Now there's a branch in the way of the puzzle. There's a lone panel out in the desert. You're in a garden maze with seemingly no exit. It wasn't until I changed my perspective in those situations that I could see the solution.

Soon my eyes were tuned to find these puzzles anywhere – and they were everywhere. From the tower, I could see a circle on a dirt road. On the boat was a circle. The sun above me, an omnipresent circle. While finding these puzzles was often happenstance, the real puzzle was finding the right perspective in the situation.

The Witness can be obtuse and aimless at times, but it almost feels meditative in a way. I suppose this is the longest review I've written, but the game warrants this kind of discussion. I highly recommend it.