I’m not falling for this again. I spent enough time playing The Witness.
Are you talking about this? https://store.steampowered.com/app/210970/The_Witness/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Witness_(2016_video_game)
Personally I never completed it but I still enjoyed the parts of the game that I did do. So it's not like you have to spend that many hours on a game, you can quit at any time. And on the flip side if you do want to put many hours into it there are a lot of puzzles to be explored.
I can't disagree more. While I can appreciate the visuals and the idea of stretching a single game mechanic until it a single atom thick, I found the game itself to be plain boring after the first hour or so.
It pales in comparison with Machinarium, Love You To Bits and even the Myst series. If The Witness weren't made by Braid's author, I seriously doubt it would've gotten any sizeable traction.
Edit, as far as unusual puzzle games goes, there's also Please Don't Touch Anything, which is absolutely ridiculous in its depth.
[1] https://amanita-design.net/games/machinarium.html
[2] http://loveyoutobitsgame.com/
[3] https://store.steampowered.com/app/354240/Please_Dont_Touch_...
Myst was neat for the time, but I don't think it holds up all that well 30 years later, without the nostalgia factor.
I'll disagree with your disagreement :)
Part of this is having played Myst in the 2010s (rather than in its heyday) and comparing it to its successors, but I enjoyed The Witness much more than Myst.
Myst falls down in the same way as many adventure-style games I've played, in that it has too few puzzles. Each one is self-contained, without much relation to any of the other puzzles in the game, and is dropped in your lap, fully-formed and fully-complex.
As a result, there's a lot of guess-and-check and you can kind of muddle through some of them without any understanding. As a result of that, while each of the puzzles has its own internal consistency, the whole thing feels very arbitrary.
In comparison, because The Witness has so many (over 600) puzzles, it is able to ease you into full understanding of their logic. You acquire a mastery of each individual mechanic over a series of puzzles, and nothing feels arbitrary or forced. Because all of them are the same kind of puzzle, it can combine mechanics with delightfully cohesive results. I really enjoy this kind of game design, it's the "show, don't tell" of progression (while Myst felt more "don't tell, but don't show either").
I will say that Myst is better at world-building than The Witness (despite The Witness feeling much more consistent). But I'd rather play a really good walking-simulator and a separate really good puzzle game than a half-baked adventure game combining the two.
(All of this isn't to say you shouldn't try Myst if you haven't. I'd recommend RealMyst for that.)
The Witness got a lot of initial attention because of the author, but it is also one of the games I enjoyed playing the most (far more than Braid, which was fine). But it's a certain kind of game that won't appeal to everyone's play style and probably depends on your mood.
But I guess what's so cool about modern video games is that there are so many good choices for different people.