The Witness begins in a long, dark tunnel. You are moving toward a light along whitewashed walls, concave like a squinted eye. The first puzzle in this puzzle game is one of perspective: Am I going up, or forward?

There is, in this case, an easy path to a solution: Come out the other side and look behind you.

Not that this is one of the game's "true" puzzles, of which developer Jonathan Blow says there are nearly 700. But it shares a key element with everything that comes after. As in all of the The Witness I've experienced so far, the only answer you're likely to get is the one you make yourself.

More than five years in the making, The Witness is the second game from indie developer Blow, whose breakout 2008 hit Braid arguably ushered in the modern indie games movement. To say people have high expectations for The Witness, coming Tuesday on PC and PlayStation 4, is an understatement. I'm not convinced that Braid has aged well—so many of its ideas have folded so neatly into the "indie aesthetic," so far as such a thing exists, that it feels almost unremarkable eight years later. But Braid positioned Blow as a controversial and important studio. Its successor has the dual pressures of being good and reaffirming the legitimacy of Blow's standing in the gaming world.

Given all the pressure, it's hard not to imagine The Witness as an answer to Blows' detractors. In response, the game gives you a tunnel, and then an island. Lush, overgrown with foliage in impossibly bright hues, and quiet. No background music, no voices. A bird, here and there. The pull and push of the tide somewhere in the distance. You are utterly alone.

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If this is a commentary on legacies, so far it feels like a raised eyebrow. Followed by wandering off, shrugging. The island, like the tunnel, is a puzzle, and one for which you should not expect any hints.

Soon enough, you find the first of The Witness's "real" puzzles: A blue panel etched with black pathways, like a circuit. Touch it, and it lights up. Connect the source to the destination, and it lights up, power flowing from a cord coming out the back. Follow the tether, find another puzzle. Push power through the whole facility, a ruined castle courtyard the color of adobe bricks, and a door opens.

You are greeted by more island, and more puzzles. This is The Witness: A set of circuit puzzles on a ruined, abandoned island. The puzzles are stretched across the landscape, with different locations revolving around different sorts of puzzles, each adding a different rule to the basic circuit-completion idea. By traveling to different parts of the island, you come to understand different rules, then return to apply those rules to more complex puzzles you couldn't solve before, eventually opening new paths, activating mysterious machines, and figuring out what in God's name is going on here.

I think that's what you're supposed to do. To tell you the truth, I'm less than confident. I've sunk hours upon hours into The Witness. I feel like I might be halfway through it. But I have no idea what's going on. The circuit puzzles stubbornly refuse to explain themselves; understanding the rules governing them is a matter of trial and error (and error and error), piecing together functional heuristics by inference and work. Likewise, there are no signposts explaining anything about the game's setting or narrative impetus. I don't even know who I am.

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The obvious touchpoint here seems to be Myst, the blockbuster adventure game from the '90s that sent you to a similar island. But Myst had a clear narrative impetus, a hook to draw you into the experience, to give you a reason to care. By using a strange book, you could travel to the game's island, discovering clues that told a concrete, albeit elliptical and strange, story. So far, The Witness has offered me nothing.

I'm on an island, and it's lovely and intricate but I don't know why I should care. This is exacerbated by the impenetrability and complexity of some of the puzzles, which have so far proven to be beyond me. This is a fundamentally subjective complaint, and I can imagine people with a knack for geometric logic sneering here, but I don't think it's entirely my fault. By refusing to offer any guidance at all, The Witness runs the risk of players bouncing off it entirely. I'm not sure it cares.

Frankly, I think I might hate The Witness. Even after hours of playtime, I don't know enough to tell.

There are some bright spots. I found a way to travel to various parts of the island quickly, offering some perspective on the structure of the place. I've made some headway, here and there, on some truly difficult puzzles. In some places, it seems that I'm on the precipice of a real discovery.

The Witness has yet to offer me any reasons to expect that my faith will be rewarded, however. I've found a couple of audio logs, that new standby of videogame narratives. They've all been near ships, which I think might be important.

Upon activation, all they've offered are famous videogame voice actors reading the words of philosophers and poets. Thought experiments. Eulogies. More questions.

In the silence of the island, I can almost hear The Witness laughing at me.