The Witness is a puzzle game by the acclaimed creator of 2008’s masterpiece platformer Braid. It features stunning visuals and quick-to-learn-difficult-to-master puzzles which involve drawing lines with the mouse cursor. There are no block-and-button puzzles here, mystery combination locks, clock puzzles, or overly gimmicky mechanics; just the same essential puzzle with new rules to learn the further you go. At the end of the day you’ll always be drawing a line from the start to the finish on a maze-like grid. How hard could it be?

Jonathan Blow made waves when launching the game for $40 and promising not to offer any substantial sale in at least the near future, as he felt that the frequency of deep discounts on video games devalued the medium. On one hand I agree with him, that I am much more inclined to wait for a sale on a title I’m interested in than pick something up on launch day at full price. On the other, where the actual developers of Triple-A titles earn next to nothing themselves based on sales volume, the (often single) developers at indie studios Blow claim suffer most from that sales model typically reap the most profit from it. Sales are a tricky, often counter-intuitive thing that work the same way with video games as they do in retail.

The unspoken benefit to withholding from deep discounts is perhaps more interesting: buyers who pay higher price points will almost always feel more invested and less critical of the product. The type of customers who can afford to make purchases at full retail price are, in advance, going to be fans of the product or will be able to more easily justify its inadequacies to assure their own satisfaction. There’s a reason The Witness‘ Steam page listed an “Overwhelmingly Positive” score for the first few months the game was out, and it wasn’t because the game was that good.

Now that both a Black Friday and Holiday Sale have passed with more traditional discounts, the negative reviews are starting to make their way in. The one thing everyone unanimously agrees on is that the game is gorgeous. Without even knowing what kind of game it was, the first thing I thought when watching the trailer was how I’d love to live in that world. It’s an island because, well, Myst, but nearly all biomes are equally represented: snowy mountains, arid desert, lush jungles, the classic fantasy village, and even an Asian temple. Lighting changes dynamically to match the tone of each area, and it’s rarely jarring to just explore at your own pace. Unless your pace is fast, because everything about this game is slow and deliberate.

The pacing, which is immediately clear from the first moments of the game, might be the first sign of trouble. Where other puzzle games rely on specific gating mechanisms like skills, items, or guns, The Witness‘ sole gating mechanic is knowledge. The final areas of the game aside, the only thing limiting the player from the start will be their own personal knowledge. The bulk of the game is entirely open, with each area teaching a new mechanic whose later puzzles may require knowledge of learned mechanics from other areas. Practically this might mean running back and forth a lot between puzzle areas, which shouldn’t be a problem because the atmosphere is so generally enjoyable. Except when it isn’t.

Where the game suffers the most is in the pointlessness of playing it. The player is never given a reason for solving puzzles, has no idea why their character is on this island, and except for opening doors or unlocking the next puzzle receives no reward for doing anything. It’s an interesting meditation on video game playing in general, and player motivation as a whole. After one particularly annoying sequence, which I finally got through owed entirely to trial-and-error, a door opened to a little room with some pillows and sketchpads I couldn’t interact with. What I learned from this was that I need something more tangible for my trouble.

Instead, The Witness gives nothing more than the experience of playing it. There is no music, story, or meaningful dialogue. The pieces are there for you to make your own story, or to narrate your own thoughts as you play. The reward for solving puzzles is simply the satisfaction of solving the puzzle. If that’s not enough for you, you shouldn’t be playing it, and likely won’t for $40. It is the ultimate minimalist puzzle game, punctuated extremely rarely with tape recorders of intellectual-sounding quotations that, again, you can use to build an imagined narrative if you choose.

The price for that though is alienating players who will never be able to find the game satisfying. One puzzle mechanic, for example, relied on using the reflection of the sun on a puzzle surface to reveal an intended path: without being able to jump or crouch, the player must find unique vantage points — near or far, high or low — to be able to see the correct solution. While this is an interesting and novel approach the first few times, in practice it ended up being too tedious to bother with after you get it. Instead, as you go, the game just finds further ways to complicate your task. I won’t deny that there are people who love puzzles like this, but why so aggressively put out everyone else who buys your game? That isn’t to say the puzzles can’t be challenging, just that I don’t believe most people enjoy total and utter tedium.

Once you pass the initial “a-ha!” moment in any puzzle game, it’s of course customary to build on it and push the player gently out of their comfort zone. Show them something they think they know and challenge their expectations. That’s fine, but as a player there’s a limit to how much I want to build on something. You do 5 or 6 puzzles and think, “That was a hard one, but I liked it!” You do 30 or 50 and you just can’t be surprised anymore; you’re just bitter and tired and your brain hurts.

So here’s the big spoiler: nothing happens at the end. You don’t win anything, there’s still no music, and you’re not told what was ever going on. You get in a great glass elevator that takes you into the sky and across the island while you watch with horror as all of the puzzles you meticulously solved are slowly reset; you can’t move or open a menu or do anything. Then the game closes on its own.

In truth, the reason the game probably costs $40 is simply to keep people like me from playing it, from spoiling it, and from writing a negative review of it. The people the game was made for will buy it at full price and cherish it. They’ll give it glowing reviews and assure that everyone can solve every puzzle if they are patient, and I’ll say that we each value our time very differently. For me, right now, I don’t have another minute for The Witness.

2/10.