I posted in 2016 an argument that The Witness is a kind of Metroidvania (the TLDR: the keys are knowledge, and Super Metroid’s animals are also knowledge keys). And I see now rereading it that that was also partly an exhausted reaction to conventional, stilted indie progression structures like Axiom Verge’s, and a search for another way of thinking about the genre. And I discovered this other way of thinking was already fully present in Super Metroid itself – I did not need to go to counterfactual genre originators, but only look more deeply into the genre originator itself (instead of the shallow game design cliches that accreted around it).
As Tulpa pointed out at the time, for all that it doesn’t use literal key item powerups, The Witness remains just as stilted and inorganically designed – moreso in fact – as the indie metrovanias we are complaining about. And this is something to hold against it compared to its obvious point of comparison, Myst/Riven.
What’s perhaps truly distinctive – love it or hate it, and I don’t blame anyone for hating it – is that it leans into its inorganicness, wears its formal nature on its sleeve as a proud announcement, instead of having it as a substructure poorly concealed under a game that first presents as providing organic exploration. Blow seems to have decided on his own cliches (he probably called them something like Formal Principles to himself), and consciously and dictatorially molded his team’s game to fit into them, believing that to be a worthwhile (?) self-invented and imposed formal discipline.