Wow, The Witness blindsided me with how awful it is. It starts off fine, having the “no dialogue” approach to tutorials by indicating the basic rules of the mazes and how the grids connect to each other via wires so you aren’t just wandering around. However, the boards that are supposed to teach you to outline white squares without outlining black squares was too vague. How many sides need to be filled to for it to count? What’s the exact cutoff point? When I solved the last one in the first set, it felt more random than anything. But okay, maybe I’d figure it out if I kept going. Next, the game introduces dots you have to cross to win, and not long after, two lines you control at once, before finally combining the two and having both lines be different colors and having you intersect each line with its same color dot as well as reach the end. Okay, fine, but then you start to notice cross stitching appear on the second line. At first, I just thought the texture was corrupted, but no, the game soon has the second line disappear and you just have to remember how the duplicate line’s movement would be mirrored from the initial line. Not good, but not the worst I’ve seen. Then, the game has three pretty easy boards, and on the other side of the platform, three duplicate boards, except the dots you need to intersect are invisible; you have to memorize their positions on the three initial boards and cross-check with how the duplicate boards are mirrored. Okay, now it’s getting on my nerves, but what made me give up were the boards right after: no dots, no second line, no mirrored or duplicate boards, but there’s multiple exits. However, I tried going to a couple different exits only to get an incorrect solution. Turns out, you have to look at the nearby tree, see where the apple is, go back to the board, and replicate the path from the base of the tree to the apple on it. Once I figured that out, I realized the game had finally cut the pretense of having real puzzles and gone full Adventure-Game-arbitrary-riddles (in less than an hour!), so I uninstalled it and moved on to my next game.

• Planet Diver
  

  4 hours playtime

  26 of 52 achievements

This is a runner. You’re constantly moving down, but can move left and right at any time. Thing is, your side-to-side movement is in units, like a Game and Watch game. Unfortunately, you can’t just hold left/right to keep moving in that direction; you have to tap the button several times in a row if you want to keep up when the path shifts to the side. You can also push up to do a dodge, which stops your downward movement, lasts around one second, and lets you phase through any hazards (but you become vulnerable as soon as it ends). Lastly, you can push down to do a dash, which temporarily lets you kill enemies you run into and permanently makes your movement faster (unless you dodge or crash).

The concept is just fine, but it seems like the levels weren’t designed around the controls. This may partly be because the levels are randomized, and often the randomness doesn’t have basic quality-of-life checks in place: it isn’t uncommon for rows of coins to lead directly into walls (which would cause you to crash and take damage), or for your target enemy to be placed below a ceiling, where you can’t kill it. Plus, even though your character has multiple speeds, most enemies are programmed to match your speed when they aren’t outright standing still, which kinda defeats the purpose.

Then there are the enemies that go beyond even this. The first boss has an attack where it suddenly charges down at you after a >1 second “telegraph,” so you might think “oh, I have to dodge at the right time” except no, that just causes the boss to stop in its tracks until your dodge finishes its animation, then it hits you anyway. Turns out, the giant legs beside the spider don’t have collision, so you can go over them when it dashes without taking damage. There are green/blue shrimp in world 2 that shoot an electric bolt horizontally quickly, but the distance it travels before it splits into two slowly-traveling vertical bolts is inconsistent. Levels regularly have half-walls, making you think you can go one unit further due to all the space between you and the wall, but when you hit the button, you just crash into it (or worse, if you’re already next to the wall, you can barely see the half-wall coming up and will crash into it that way). World 3 has spike pillars that blend into the wall and jut out an inconsistent distance (once, one of them went all the way to the other wall meaning I couldn’t progress and just died there). Worse, world 3 will frequently shift the camera to put you in the center of the screen, meaning you have less time to react to incoming hazards.

So yeah, I wouldn’t recommend it. The concept is fine, but the execution has numerous flaws. It even gets little things wrong, like how several biomes have background layers scrolling faster than foreground layers.