To be fair to The Witness, I think it does spread itself out across its traversable space in a similar way. In both games, there's often a locked device or clos

To be fair to The Witness, I think it does spread itself out across its traversable space in a similar way. In both games, there's often a locked device or closed door or puzzle which you try to solve, but cannot. You explore other places on the island to discover the mechanism which allows you go back to that puzzle and complete it. Riven manifests these discoveries as changes to world state stored in computer memory, whereas The Witness manifests them as an acquired skill residing in the player's brain.