The Witness 12+

Great game - but I wish it supported older Macs

It’s a joy to explore the landscape of this game and the puzzles are rewarding, so it’s great that it’s finally out for Macs.

What’s stopping me from giving it 5 stars is that my wife and I have to play this on her MacBook Air with the lowest graphics settings. We’d prefer to play on my 2009 Mac Pro with a 2.66GHz Xeon CPU and nVidia GTX 960 GPU, but we can't because Apple's Metal API (which this game’s graphics engine relies on) does not support older Macs even though some, like mine, have adequate specs. If you have an older Mac, your solution might be to use Bootcamp to play this game.

Update: Thanks to Thekla/Jonathan Blow for responding to my review. I have updated nVidia drivers for my graphics card, but this does not fix the issue. The entire game displays in shades of red, which makes solving the puzzles impossible. Bootcamp was my answer, as it is likely to be for anyone who owns a significantly upgraded pre-2010 Mac Pro.

Developer Response ,

Thanks for your review. I'm glad you are enjoying the game and I'm happy to say that you may be able to play the game on your Mac Pro by using the latest NVIDIA drivers that you can download here:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/mac-driver-archive.html

Hope that helps!

Good game but heavy on processor/graphics

The game is innovative and features a bunch of ingenious puzzles scattered in a beautiful landscape. It is not like Myst but it’s for people who like Myst.
The pace is relax and it is non-linear. The puzzles are very hard though. You need to learn the puzzle vocabulary piecemeal and be patient. The recordings of philosophical texts by Augustine, Clifford, Calvin etc are very intriguing and food for thought.
The big downside is how processor-hungry this game is. I have a 2015 mac, with 2.9 GHz Intel Core i5, and yet the game is choppy except if I play it on low graphics resolution and my fan becomes very noisy even on the low graphics resolution.

Absolutely enthralling

Quite simply the best puzzle game I’ve played on any platform, ever. Yes, it has crashed a few times, but never lost my progress.
It’s depth is breathtaking - my initial reaction when I “finished” the game was a sense that something was missing. Too right! I’d missed large chunks of deeper gameplay and some insights into the thinking behind the game world construction and (literally) what the makers wanted to say with it.
The challenges are ranged in difficulty, and for such a “simple” mechanic, amazingly varied in nature.
Absolutely beautiful, meditative, frustrating and irritating (in a good “I know the solution exists, so why can’t I see it!” way).
I almost balked at buying it - had I realised how much I’d enjoy it I’d happily have paid more.
Anyone who enjoyed Myst on its release will see the similarities - The Witness may show up its ancestor with the benefit of progress but it now sets the benchmark for the future - I can’t wait.