The Witness stands out for many reasons but chief among them, for me at least, was the idea that a meticulously crafted game could still fail at its prime directive: being fun. To be sure I enjoyed my time with it for a good long while, but as time drew on and the mechanics started getting more esoteric and complicated it was clear that the game was built with one person in mind. I still think these kinds of games need to exist however as they serve to push the boundaries of what’s possible, inspiring the next generation of experimental games. That being said however when I saw The Looker I knew I was in for a treat as a game that takes itself as seriously as The Witness is ripe for being parodied relentlessly.
And boy does it ever. The game starts off almost identically to The Witness, revealing it’s core puzzle mechanic, solving mazes, being completely, totally irrelevant as you can simply join the dots directly. This is lampooned even further throughout the game as the puzzles shown to you get more and more complicated but are still able to be completely overwritten by just going outside the bounds of the puzzle page and solving it directly.
Scattered about the place are numerous parody references to The Witness’ sparse bits of dialogue, much of which was quotes from various famous philosophers, scientists and thinkers. Many of them are total garbage misattributed to others, which just adds to their hilarity. Just like The Witness these serve no narrative or mechanical purpose whatsoever, except at least in The Looker they serve as a bit of comedic relief between puzzles.
One thing I will credit the developers for doing is sneakily building up the challenge of the puzzles on you without you realising it. To be sure, the bulk of the main “story” puzzles can be solved with the relative straightforward solution of just straight up joining the dots, but as you progress they start introducing actual, hard rules for some puzzles that you’ll need to overcome to solve them. This is then combined with a variety of weird little mini-games, most of which you can completely fail and still progress.
Which I think is probably the most brilliant part about The Looker. On the surface it’s a dumb as rocks parody of a game that one of the industry’s most celebrated developers spent years crafting. But under that there’s an actual game in there, one that is far more competently crafted than it would have you believe.
The Looker then demonstrates what a good parody should be: something that understands the source material so well that it’s able to ridicule them ruthlessly whilst also being an enjoyable experience in and of itself. The developers are self aware enough to know that not everyone will find every joke funny, or will enjoy the game end to end, but it’s obviously made out of a love for the source material and wanting to lampoon it’s flaws for the enjoyment of the fans.
Rating: 8.0/10
The Looker is available on PC for free right now. Total play time was 1.2 hours with 70% of the achievements unlocked.
