The Witness by Jonathan Blow. I had really big hopes for this, ever since I saw the first screenshots. A week has passed since I finished it and I can say that it is sadly mostly a forgettable experience.
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| The New Age hipster mystique is all the rage with Blow's new game. |
Most of what gives a skeleton of narrativium to the whole thing is made up by New Age hipster bullshit. If that isn't bad enough, the narrativium is mostly offered via recordings scattered throughout the ludic environment, an abandoned island, many of which are so long, tedious and narrated by such a tiresome obnoxious female voice to make me actually want to stop it at some points. But you can't do that. Literally. There's no stop button, except for unplugging the whole computer. One of the recordings was, I reckon, a quarter of an hour or more. It felt like hell, even more as it was supposed to be a sort of a narrative apex to reaching an environmental and ludic apex.
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| Why couldn't the narrator be this nice stone lady that doesn't talk?! |
The part that I
do remember and will stay with me in a pleasant manner is the beginning as it was simply the single part of the game that didn't suck. You find a new in-universe, a calm, serene and mysterious Arcadian decor, unpopulated but filled with luxuriant flora and strange devices. Soon though the surprise naturally decreases and it isn't replaced by anything. In the end you feel cheated and it's precious little that the video (among others) of a dead-eyed New Age cultist woman imploring you to stop trying to find meaning manages to do.
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| Please. Please stop looking for meaning. You payed forty bucks for this crap. You have to be Zen and let it go. So please, I tell you once more, stahp lookin!! |
