I wish parody in games had bite. Most of them are either too ironic for their own good or end up moving into their own sort of territory abandoning the parody like a third of the way through. I kind of respect Stanley Parable actually, and it lost the coin toss of me playing its 'sequel' over this, but I'm sure it would have had much to tell in its own fashion. Whether played out or not, it would have something to say for itself.

This doesn't. That's the weird part, Jonathan Blow is to me one of the easiest targets ever. You can make some good jokes about him that can turn into many great points. Obviously, The Looker isn't about Blow, but its painful attempts to target what The Witness is going for makes me wish it kind of was because that would've been at least an interesting way of joking about the game. Here you have, puzzle types painfully recreated without any illusion to seem smarmy, and attempts to spin the joke to other genres that never actually quite capture when The Witness actually excels. The jokes have a dual problem of being too reverent of the game to give something really powerful, and too smarmy to land the joke about Witness being up its own ass. From the most charitable lens, it's all cute, but says nothing.

Want to hear another spin? The Witness is a game about someone who is so insecure of their own experience of the world being misunderstood, with walls of libertarian almost incel level thoughts of how they don't quite understand girls, as well as being met with heaps of talk calling their work pretentious already, that they make a work about widening your perspective. Get it, because his own is genuinely really shallow. The irony!

This is a better joke than anything you'll find here, and that fucking sucks.
t. Someone who quite likes the Witness overall