A problem with The Witness is that the game’s single biggest excitement comes from a twist that revealing completely spoils

So it’s stuck in the position of letting 80% of its player base walk right past the best part, or preserving the moment of discovery.

I’m personally grateful it has the integrity to let me find it on my own, but it’s also a bummer since at least two of my friends beat it without ever realizing

The Witness has a lot of generative puzzles that I guess technically are replayable, but you can’t go back to before the moments of joy of discovery and that’s the core of what made that game incredible to me

If for any reason you wanted to stick with PHP, Symfony + Doctrine has been a delight to work with. For JS projects I pretty much always go Node for easy startup, but the frontend changes based on project needs and my whims.