I feel like I was the target market. I love a lot of the things you mentioned but I still feel like the witness missed the mark in some ways.

He's totally right that the tutorials are not that intuitive and you can solve them without totally grasping a concept or even misinterpret the concept enough to think you know how one works until it stops working.

I totally got upset when the puzzles started using obfuscation to annoy or distract you from being able to interpret the puzzle properly. I could solve this puzzle easily if I could see it, but instead I had to resort to really concentrating or recreating manually on paper and to me that's just poor design. Once I realized that it sort of made me hyperaware of my whole process getting to that point.

The witness was art, but part of it had this pretentiousness that treated the player poorly. I normally appreciate a lack of hand holding but somewhere I felt like the game just wanted to make you feel stupid in order to make you feel smart. A lot of the puzzles were made more difficult by obfuscating the answers, where a proper tutorial would have allowed you to breeze through them because they weren't actually all that challenging. Suddenly I wasn't smart, I was just really stubborn.

All in all, I don't know what my opinion about the witness really is. Exploring the island and the hidden perspective stuff was brilliant. I would have loved just that with less puzzles and more variation in the types of puzzles. I don't want to solve the bigger puzzle on my own... not even sure I can be bothered to cheat and do it all.

People have been asking me about it and I don't know how to recommend it. Will you like it? Did I like it? I just don't know.