Blood Brain Barrier said:
Oh. I loved The Witness and think it is the best game of the past decade. It is also the furthest you can get from a walking simulator. Why do you think an artistic or philosophical disposition is needed to appreciate it? I think everyone should be able to get something out of it.
Otherwise, absolutely agreed on everything else you said. The conditioning of modern gamers is hard to undo, and not even necessary to undo. Some won't appreciate games that lack a very specific "mission", and which ask more from you than to follow narrow goals.
Okay. Here's my experience with The Witness in a nutshell.
The first forty minutes or so were awesome. I loved the clear interface, the initially simple mechanic being slowly developed into more complex uses and patterns - I've compared it to Sudoku in describing it to friends of mine. It's a really basic setup for a puzzler, but the game provides enough variants and introduces enough mechanics to keep the challenge fresh.
The problem is that's all there is. Puzzles. Nothing but. No world-building, no theming other than in the presence of statues or weird architectural cues. If you're lucky or patient you'll come across these little recordings that are supposed to offer some insight into the area's overall theme or exposed mechanic in some allegorical fashion. The thing is, I didn't see these as flashes of brilliance or nudges in the right direction; I saw it as self-satisfaction, the game referencing its own claims to be a serious brain-teaser by quoting some of the Greats or the enlightened. Reaching the ending only furthered that impression (so I'm just going back to the beginning? Really?!) and the Easter Egg that's unlockable shortly afterwards made me feel as though Blow were busy tooting his own horn.
I won't spoil anything in case someone else reads this and hasn't finished the game, but the Easter Egg ending feels incredibly pretentious to me. There's something very... self-congratulatory to the entire experience that just raises my proverbial hackles. It's not deep thought or the game being proud of its own innovative streaks; it's pretension. Or at least, that's how it feels to me.
I mean, Portal 1 and 2 provide context and purpose while being as legible and solidly iterated upon as The Witness. The Myst games have terrific world-building going for them and puzzles that actually further the environments' sense of place. There's tons of reasons to be drawn into the experience in both cases, outside of just puzzles and vague promises that recorded quotations will suffice. I'd even recommend Fireproof Games' The Room series on mobile devices, as far as really solid Adventure Game experiences are concerned.
The Witness is just... there. I've played through it, I've tried to find as many of the recordings as I could and I spent time trying to make sense out of the statues in the courtyard or what looks like a half-finished or half-ruined small town. I've even left the game and tried to find online summaries, hoping someone else could shed some light onto it all. I've got nothing so far. It's opaque and it mistakes its profundity for deep thought.
It's all just surprising, really. Braid had a whimsical tone and a bit of an on-the-nose moral to be dug up at the end, but it wasn't this infuriating.
And I do know this is terribly ironic, considering what we've discussed. I'm all for games that don't wear their theming or world design on their sleeves and I don't mind the occasional bit of opaque storytelling, as long as it's well done. See the Souls series, for instance. Despite that, The Witness was my personal limit. I started by loving it, then getting mildly annoyed not so much by the lack of direction as the lack of purpose - and then I flipped my lid once the randomized puzzles kicked in. I couldn't combine enough of the presented mechanics to make it work, the glitchy puzzles got in the way of my ability to work based on the design language the game teaches you - and none of it amounted to much in the grand scheme of things.
See the irony? Guy thinks games could do more than just toss numbers to alter or health bars to nullify, but he still loses it when iterative puzzle design proves to be too much. Same guy also feels the need to cling to the idea of world-building or general versimilitude while tackling a game that clearly doesn't care for either concepts. That's sad, and I know it is.
So yeah. About conditioning? I'm conditioned. I expected something and I didn't get it. Mea Culpa and whatnot.