This is not a game but a journey. Well, I mean it is a game but really it is a journey, if you can see it. I spent 30 hours learning with little context on how to solve each puzzle. Line after line after line. The gentle progression and 'learning' panels that enabled you to do each area. Often solving puzzles by happenstance only to find out later on how they actually worked. While entertaining, they were just that, line puzzles. The levels are scattered with 'hidden' sound bytes of things I half listened to and statues of stone people that gave me pause to think, but in those 30 hours; it was game.

Then, out of a silly thought, a brief interlude with curiosity there was a discovery that changed everything. I mean it changed everything. How one looked at the puzzles, how one saw the environment, how one heard the messages on the sound bites. I found myself seeking them out, listening intently, playing them over and over to drown myself in their message.

Yes, The Witness is most definitely a puzzle game, through and through. It will entertain as a puzzle game if it is all you want. However, I will tell you, there is so much more to this 'game', something so much deeper than the lines. Something that moves you at the core if look beyond the square boxes into the world around you. A metaphor to life. Something worth immersing yourself in to find.