In my view, The Witness is the best video game of all times.

On the surface, it's a puzzle game. I bought it (for something ridiculous like €5 on the iPad I believe) expecting to enjoy a few logic puzzles and remembering the games of my childhood like Myst and The 7th Guest (and I was also happy that, unlike many games it wasn't about shooting people). But it ended up a much bigger deal than that. I found The Witness (which doesn't have dialog or a plot) immersive like no other game and I think about it every week, years after completing the game.

If it's not about the puzzles, what is it about? To avoid spoilers, here are just a few hints:

• The Witness is a game about learning and perception. And about meditation. (That's only my interpretation, though; like any work of art, you may have another valid interpretation).

• The author, Jonathan Blow, is a "programmer's programmer", who built his own game engine for The Witness and is in the process of writing his own programming language for his next project. He's also an interesting speaker. Here he talks about depression: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7kh8pNRWOo&ab_channel=Jonat...

• The Witness is as close to a video game equivalent of "film d'auteur" as you can get (at least compared to most of the other games out there, which are commercial Hollywood productions)

(Disclaimer: I'm not a gamer, and haven't played more than 2-3 games in the last decade.)

It's one of the best puzzle games I played period. But people who have concrete expectations of games and features they are used to might not quite get into the flow of the game.

It looks beautiful, but the gameplay is very repetitive. It's basically an exploration of what one can do with one particular puzzle class and taking it to the extreme.

I can appreciate it as an unique game design, but IMO it doesn't make for an interesting gameplay.

Yes, one of my favourite and most unique gaming experiences. I thoroughly enjoyed the process of travelling around the island, and how it encourages you to change your thinking and perspective to progress.

It is essentially a puzzle game though, so if you get frustrated by being stuck on things you may not like it. I found it pretty relaxing personally, and it feels great to figure a puzzle out.

I got it for free on PS4 and played it more or less to completion (100% of trophies, but not 100% of the puzzles), but I'm not sure I'd really recommend it. For a game that has had so much effort put into the environment, it certainly contained a lot of puzzles that were fairly disconnected from it. Even the ones that did have a client connection followed the same "line-puzzle" format which got fairly stale after a while even though different areas added new mechanics to the base rules.

It also felt very self-important to me. There are a bunch of audio-logs scattered about the island that are people reading profound-sounding quotes of famous people. It never felt like the game itself actually had anything interesting to say though

As a puzzle game I think it's one of the best, certainly I became totally obsessed with that aspect of it. It's very atmospheric too and has a great sense of place.

I got it for free at one point and it's a fun game; however, I didn't find much of a reason to come back after finishing. I liked using my imagination to fill in the details of what happened across the game world but didn't have enough detail to it that I found myself truly engaged with the environment

I think part of the game actually ponders the question whether it’s actually enjoyable, so yeah, I recommend it!