The Witness was like a bad joke imo. It looked like Myst but it was the antithesis of Myst.

What Cyan were trying to do with Myst and Riven (more successfully with Riven) was make a puzzle game with no "puzzles"; avoid the 7th Guest trope of "a madman has created a labyrinth filled with devious puzzles and you must solve them to escape" and instead just put the player in a weird alien world with culture and tech they are not familiar with, which they explore and eventually understand, and once you understand, there are no puzzles, its trivial. Like if an alien were teleported to new york city and had to figure out what the subway was and how it worked. (btw a great modern example of this, which surpasses the Cyan games and fixes flaws they had, turning them into strengths is "Outer wilds")

The witness on the other hand was just a sequence of grid based puzzles, it was fine, but it wanted to be a mobile game, just puzzle after puzzle. For no reason the puzzles were set in a nice looking 3d world reminiscent of Myst. There's practically zero connection between the two. That's why it seems like a joke to me.

Braid was good tho lol. Perfectly cromulent puzzle platformer, and a fairly early entrant in the genre.