The Witness
Fair · Narrative · 2016
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
NO RUSH.
Fair at $39.99. Buy it if you want it.
- Length
- 16.9h
- Value
- $2.37/hr
- Reviews
- 84% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 4 GB of memory, Intel HD 4000 series, 5 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS.
You wake up, alone, on a strange island full of puzzles that will challenge and surprise you.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
The lowest price on record is $7.19, set in January 2026. Its cuts run 75 percent off as a rule. There have been 72 in the 11 years tracked, about 6 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 6 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 6 weeks.
Value puts it in the top 15 percent of the games it competes with. It is pricier than 99 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 80 percent. Among the games that feel like it, INFRA ($29.99, scores 70) beats it on value, while it beats Obduction ($29.99, scores 43).
This site sampled 800 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 11 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written December 2024 to August 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 58 percent of the 1,678 reviews written there were positive, against 84 percent overall, and those are 10 percent of everything written about it.
16.9 hours to finish it, 37 to exhaust it. The completionist tail is 2.2 times the campaign.
Players
103 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
The Witness felt like a really good book that you've spent a lot of time with and after finishing it, you feel a bit sad that it's over because it touched you deeply. I definitely want to play it at least one more time when I get better graphics hardware because the world is just so beautifully crafted. Although the most important part would be not the one that you can see...
Finally done, well worth it. The Challenge is really difficult, but i finally got it after getting stuck on triangles for so long. Enjoyed both endings, and got all environmental puzzles (with help of guide for some). Very pretty visuals throughout the game as well.
Very good game made by horrible person. Jonathan Blow is not a good person. Look up his views before buying the game. The game itself is very good but pretentious. Great art style and puzzles and exploration. The puzzles are not difficult. Be aware that you will spend a lot of time looking at puzzle boards. It's pretentious because the dev thinks the gameplay has some philosophical teachings, it does not. It has...
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: achievement curve (Steam global achievements).
Cite this score
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The Witness scores 54/100 on the BANG Score (fair value). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/210970/the-witnessThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Aug 2, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.