Minecraft is hard to review. It's one of those games that is so ubiquitous, so universal, so generic at this point that it's genuinely difficult to separate the actual game design from the fan culture, steeping so long the design for an Enderman farm or a 12-pixel circle or Hunger Games may as well be hard coded into the game itself, from the endless tapestry of a million billion childhood memories. And there is something special about that - a game which, no matter what form it manifests itself in, can become so deeply ingrained in one's mind. It just makes it hard to pick apart. Past a certain point it becomes like reviewing glass, like reviewing the colour green, like reviewing laughter.

I'm of two minds about Minecraft; part of me, and apparently a significant chunk of its playerbase, have "Minecraft phases"; perhaps once or twice-yearly surges of zealotry for this game, eating up each member of a friend group's Realms trial, like chewing gum and spitting it out. Like clockwork punching a tree, crafting a wooden pickaxe, crafting a stone pickaxe, burrowing underground, engaged in that coy silent arms-race to get diamonds before anyone else.

Building a house, starting farms, the works; it's a lot of fun to do these things, to piddle away at one's little projects while talking to my friends. But do Iike it, is it good game design, or do I, a stranger to Destiny 2 and Dokkan and Apex Legends and Titanfall and battle shonen just love to bridge that gap, to feel what it might be like to like these things I simply cannot?

Because, of course, Minecraft is fun to a point. Inevitably - not yet on the world I'm currently having a lot of fun on, but inevitably, I tell myself - you burn out. Maybe you lose a bunch of your items, maybe inertia just gets to you but you find yourself logging in less, and less, and less. Because on some level, I find Minecraft deeply unsatisfying to play. Your sprint turns off all the time, crouching on half-blocks is awful, I can scant recall a time I've died and it hasn't felt like bullshit. And rarely do these burnouts happen later in the game, for me it's usually before the endgame, before advancement hunting, before raids, before the Ender Dragon, before the Nether even - the meta of Minecraft to me feels like an effort to convince oneself that they are not in Minecraft at all; building automatic farms and grand secure bases in a survival world feels far better to me than engaging in the true survival, than going out in the wilderness and fighting Wardens and whatnot.

But at the same time Minecraft, by its design as a sandbox game, has no expectation of you to lean more rugged or more industrial - arguments could certainly be made that the game prioritizes either - so playing Minecraft is as much an exercise in one's ability to entertain themselves; there are still plenty of blocks and items left in Minecraft I have yet to touch, are the game's downfalls truly so arresting to make it not worth it or have I just failed to have the ambition to acquire them?

idk

The following is my second review of the game, written on May 4th, 2024. My original review was written on the 1st and is available here.

The Witness is a fantastic game; I would really have no qualms about ending the review there. It uses a beautiful mesh of realism and painterly impressionism to make a beautiful world whose sense of exploration and wonder is perfectly in line with the great litany of things to be found, from a great many little secret and clever detail which reward the careful eye, to the hundreds of line puzzles throughout.

Despite the quantity of the puzzles throughout, almost each and every one of them serves some purpose. From teaching you a mechanical consequence to simply opening a door, each puzzle's completion is its own reward, bringing you step by step closer to enlightenment.

I'm being vague on purpose because as a puzzle game - a very, very good puzzle game - The Witness' every moment is that of beautiful, resonant revelation between utterly brain-bending trials. A lesser game would provide hints, background music, anything to latch onto, but The Witness leaves you completely and utterly to your own devices and is such very much susceptible to being spoiled and very much is best experienced as blind as can be. I'm going to intermittently talk about a few significant spoilers, which should not be read the prospective Witness player. If I've sold you on this game, please enjoy!

However, it's not perfect; I have a few gripes, really the tiniest of nitpicks on what was otherwise an amazing game I could happily recommend to any puzzle fan.

1. When you have a puzzle selected, there's often something dinging. Either the beginning circle or the endpoints of the puzzle - which the game elegantly and wordlessly teaches the importance of to the player - are constantly blinking, with a visual and auditory cue. For a game that relishes in giving you the time and mental space to think things out, a tiny mistake like this really feels like a bullet.

2. Some puzzles, upon failure, deactivate. This makes it so you have to go back and re-enter the solution (which is typically pretty easy to remember but does disappear as you re-interact with a given puzzle panel) to the previous panel in a sequence - a feature which is never telegraphed to the player (though even if it was it would be just as unpleasant). The Witness as a game, other than this one quirk, can really pride itself on its terseness of concept so again it is a shame to see something like this bubble up through. Solving a puzzle in this game is a communication of understanding, having to repeat it again mindlessly in some arbitrary rite of passage to retry the current puzzle is, even if a very short inconvenience when it does happen, a baffling blunder from a game like this.

3. There shouldn't be a sprint button. The obvious response is "Well, why don't you just not sprint? but at the end of the day the purpose of a system is what it does; and a sprint, naturally, encourages sprinting; every second spent walking is a moment which could have been spent sprinting, which is a recipe for madness. At least to me, something like that communicates a lack of trust in the game environment to a) be beautiful and b) communicate priorities and paths to the player.

The obvious exception to this is the challenge (which is fantastic by the way; I'm not sure I've ever truly comprehended the heart-stopping terror of In the Hall of the Mountain King until I played this game), to the point that I'm convinced that a sprint was added with the express purpose of being used in the challenge, just kind of being this odd vestigial growth for the rest of the game during which you, very notably, never need to and shouldn't move that fast. Especially for noticing the puzzles hidden in the map; the mix of boredom and wonder of an aimless walk throughout the island is very sufficient fuel to find a very large chunk of these.

Especially given the extra shortcuts and movement options the game grants you pretty early on and only expands on as you progress, having a sprint on top of that just feels overkill to me.

4. Obtaining the secret ending, the one with the hotel and the credits and the real-life video, is a bit odd. I'm going to have to talk a lot more about the game a bit more holistically to describe what I mean.

The Witness, to me, feels like an allegory for the Buddhist concept of enlightenment. As the game approaches its end and you enter the mountain which has been ominously looming over the island and attracting the lights of lasers, you begin to get the sense that this is all a test of sorts. A few nuggets that hint toward this appear throughout the island; recurring symbols, sketches of buildings and puzzles, but here it goes mask-off. Various security monitors show parts of the island, and malfunctioning and rejected puzzles are strewn about the various laboratory-like rooms of the mountain. And yet even these lead you deeper and deeper down the mountain, culminating in an elevator chamber which flies you to the beginning of the game, losing all your control as all your puzzles become undone and culminating in the game itself closing. When you re-open the game you are as you would be if you had never played the game at all, at the start of the very first hallway with no progress in the island to speak of.

This to me feels like a death and rebirth of the player character. Though the puzzles are in the same deactivated state as they were when you first downloaded the game, your knowledge and intuition of the game persists; if you started from scratch you would absolutely finish far quicker than your first attempt. However, the secret ending is not about progressing; rather it is about finding an environmental puzzle using the sun - the most significant circle in the game, one which looms over you for the entire time - thus activating a hotel lounge, which a straight walk forward through brings you to the secret ending. In this secret ending a human wakes up from some kind of virtual simulation and walks around the real studio in which The Witness was developed, utterly transfixed on patterns of lines and circles. This feeling was completely and utterly relatable, that tiny worm that The Witness grows in your brain for seeing circles connected to lines very well might be the game's most profound export.

However, the secret ending does not follow this exact sequence.

What I believe is the intended route to the secret ending revolves around a room, hidden behind activating all 11 lasers (of which only 7 of one's own choice are required to beat the game) and the optional challenge (which, amidst all this negative babble, I feel inclined to mention again is AMAZING). In this room is a puzzle solution which, when put into a certain panel in the starting section, re-seals the door making the sun puzzle, previously blocked off by forward progression, once again possible. I realize this is the tiniest of nitpicks, but the whole beauty of the secret ending, to me, is that voluntary relinquishing of all puzzle progress, is that metaphorical acceptance of one's own death to reach enlightenment! Being able to get this ending while having all your pretty puzzle panels lit up, while still indulging oneself in the samsara of the game world, feels so thematically incoherent to me! Of course, this is the most minute of nitpicks, but finding flaws in a game as pleasant and absorbing in this is like finding needles in a haystack, exclusively by having them prick your fingers.

If you read through all that, thank you! I have not tried to articulate my thoughts about The Witness very much at all, so actually putting the experience of this game that has utterly entranced me is always nice - like a release valve in my brain. I do want to revisit it someday, but for now I think I've earned a break.

If you just scrolled to the bottom and haven't played it, go away!! Play The Witness!!