The Witness isn’t properly new, but now that it arrived to Mobile via the iOS Systems it was the perfect chance for us to try Jonathan Blow’s game.
We heard great things about it, so we jumped to the game, a puzzle game app, with high expectations.
There are some good things and some bad things about the game, its art and its gameplay.
Let’s start by taking the bad stuff out of the way as soon as possible:
The game may give you motion sickness.
After playing for a bit, we got a bit affected by nausea and a feeling of what seems to be motion sickness. We advise people that have epylepsy tendencies so steer clear of this game, it may cause a seizure or two.
Now, as far as the gameplay is concerned, the beggining is the worst part about it because the difficulty takes a lot of time to ramp up, which may be boring for people who are used to play puzzle games.
If you’re a newbie, than we guarantee you’ll feel this game is a good onboarding experience for the puzzle app genre.
The game gives you a lot of freedom to go and explore, even though you have to solve some puzzles to unlock locations, so you can go almost anywhere, but a few key locations are barred until you solve some levels.
The 3D world and 2D Puzzles make a nice mix, as the puzzles blend with the environment in a smart and seamless way.
The controls are a bit wonky at first, but we think that is mainly because we’re talking about a port here anyways, and we know that ports are always a bit wonky as far as controlling your character and cameras are concerned, simply because the game was developed to run in another platform.
We think it works better for the iPhone than for the iPad, but you may have a different oppinion, as we mostly play with our iPhones.
You tap the screen in order to move, but you have no time to lay back and enjoy the scenery because you’ll have to constantly be on the lookout for puzzles you need to solve, as they are hidden sometimes and there are no indicators that the puzzle is even there.
The good things are its puzzles because even though experiencing some sickness we were still hooked and wanted to keep on playing as the puzzles were really that good.
We advise the studio to take a look at the controls and to make the camera a bit more stable as to avoid the uncomfort we experienced.
Other than that, we deem this port a success.
All in all, a rock solid game you may want to try if you’re a fan of the app puzzle games for iOS platforms.
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