Taiji

You wake up on an island with no context and have to explore and solve puzzles. The island is completely open and divided into several areas, each of them having its own special mechanic.
The puzzles are panels on which you can check or uncheck boxes, and that’s all. What you have to do to find the solutions depends on the mechanic of the area.
It may be purely logical, such as guessing what a sign does. Or it may only be a question of observation of your environment. Or both.

The first few puzzles of each area are easy and slowly ramp up in difficulty in order for you to grasp the basics of the rules. That doesn’t mean the game is easy though… Taiji wants you to fully understand everything, and thus will ask you to understand any subtlety a mechanic has.
These harder puzzles introducing a twist in the logic can be really problematic and sometimes frustrating, but never unfair. When you try a solution, the game even usually tells you where the problem is so you can get why you’re wrong.
Out of the 445 puzzles, only the secret big flower puzzle is nearly impossible to figure out.

So yes, Taiji is basically The Witness in 2D.

The Witness was a special game for many reasons and while some games like Filament or Sensorium were inspired by it, they never tried to copy it. Taiji is the first that doesn’t even try to hide and completely embrace it.
You could argue that it’s bad… but the thing is, Taiji clearly has its own visual identity and different interesting mechanics.

The classic block-pushing puzzle games are all directly descended from Sokoban, a pioneer of this genre that even gave it its name.
Witness could be that, a new genre of open world puzzle games based on observation and hard logical deductions. Everyone wants more The Witness and I hope Taiji will inspire more devs to create their own Witness-like game.

Anyway, a few things could’ve been better but Taiji is nearly perfect.
High priority, play it.

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Developer: Matthew VanDevander
Publisher: Matthew VanDevander
Platform: Steam – Windows
Release Date: September 9, 2022