10 Video Games That Judge You For Playing

6. The Witness

Getting to even the "soft" ending of Jonathan Blow's mind-melting puzzle game The Witness is a gargantuan task, but the most dedicated players will push ahead to tackle its ultimate challenge, aptly called The Challenge.

The Challenge requires players to complete 14 line-drawing puzzles in just 6.5 minutes, and to make matters worse, pausing the game resets the puzzle, and its content is procedurally generated, meaning there are no guides available online.

The only way to beat it is to harbour an extremely deep understanding of the game's intricate and expansive puzzle logic.

Though successful players would understandably be expecting something pretty epic at the end, Blow decided to casually mock players for their time investment instead.

The "reward" for completing The Challenge is...a 58-minute lecture from 2002, where video game developer Brian Moriarty explains the history of Easter eggs throughout art (such as in Shakespeare's plays and even the Bible).

Throughout the lecture Moriarty makes not-so-subtle references to the pointless pursuit of hidden goodies in art, and as a player, it's tough not to feel like Blow is laughing at you - over 58 excruciatingly boring minutes, no less.

The recording was so baffling that many players still believe it contains the game's final, definitely final secret...somewhere. To date, however, nobody has uncovered it.

Given the absurd difficulty of The Challenge and being "forced" to listen to a dry-as-sawdust lecture afterwards, believing that there has to be something else is perhaps the sanest option.

Otherwise, the more likely truth is enough to make you wonder why you even bothered.