Jonathan Blow's disdain for accessibility is outmatched only by his burning hatred of completionists and speedrunners. Half of all the puzzles in the game revolve around proving you don't have aphantasia, and there are entire sound- and color-themed sections of the island that aren't particularly well designed to begin with, but are completely unsolvable for a Deaf or colorblind player, in a game with no accessibility options whatsoever. To his credit, you at least don't need to complete all sections to unlock the endgame. However once you get to that endgame, there is no skip button for the moving and flickering screens designed to cause motion sickness and seizures.

Don't get me wrong, The Witness also has many fun and interesting puzzles that don't alienate disabled players, which is why I feel compelled against simply rating the game as low as possible, despite my many grievances about the squandered potential and active antagonism of the player. I think it's really cool whenever a puzzle has multiple valid (and accepted!) solutions that reconfigure the environment in a different way depending on which one you last entered, but then I have to complain again because the integration between the 2D puzzle screens and the 3D environment they affect is trash. Every animation is deliberately crafted to be as slow as a tortoise dipped in molasses for no reason. This includes the player's movement: The default walking speed is a crawl and the "run" button enables a light jog. There are also numerous puzzle screens that waste your time by turning off if you get the answer wrong, demanding you repeat a previous puzzle you already solved before you can try again. Supposedly this is a precaution to penalize guessing, but really it just punishes experimentation.

The meta for criticizing The Witness seems to be that it's a glorified phone game and didn't need this budget-necessitating 3D world to solve 2D line puzzles. Personally I would have been happy just solving line puzzles with pretty backgrounds but it feels like the game is trying to thwart my attempts to enjoy it at every turn.

Commendable for its vignette storytelling style that stands out even among other walking simulators, especially for the time it came out. Playing in current year, you may notice that walking sims need good writing to be interesting, and with this one the method of storytelling is far more compelling than the plot itself, which is kinda just a boring "what if bad things also happened to white people?" story. The one non-white character who married in is an Indian guy whose main interests are hookah and being from India.

Creepy OuterWilds-like that constantly had me feeling like I was both sequence-breakingly clever and completely in the dark about how this world works. Also has a bitchin' soundtrack and a tonally confusing obsession with titties. If Hades is the Gideon the Ninth of video games, Void Stranger is the Harrow the Ninth.

Stopped playing because I stumbled into hard mode, where there's little to do but grind out those sokoban GIMP puzzles while feeling the literal energy drain from the mental crunch of it all. Still a mind-blowing experience for what I got out of it. How dare she choose the fetus