10 Ingeniously Clever Video Games That Will Mess With Your Mind

4. The Witness

the witness
Thekla Inc.

Jonathan Blow's long overdue opus has for the most part been received with acclaim for its challenging puzzle design. While at a glance every puzzle looks like little more than a mundane squiggly-line grid, playing the game makes you realise there's much more to it than that.

Each of the distinctly themed zones on The Witness' vibrant island contains some variation of the squiggly-grid puzzle, but even within these zones, the logic required to solve the puzzle may suddenly shift. You'll often need to look outside of the puzzles themselves for solutions, scanning the environment for clues that may come in the form of fruits hanging off nearby trees, shadows, or even just a new visual perspective on a given puzzle.

Despite being probably the most sedentary game of 2016 (you can literally spend half an hour staring at the screen in intense focus as you try to work out how to draw a damn line to the end of the grid), it's an absolute mental marathon.

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Gamer, Researcher of strange things. I'm a writer-editor hybrid whose writings on video games, technology and movies can be found across the internet. I've even ventured into the realm of current affairs on occasion but, unable to face reality, have retreated into expatiating on things on screens instead.