“The Witness,’’ a first-person puzzle game for PC and PlayStation 4, was a long time coming. Created by Jonathan Blow, a highly regarded name in the indie game world for his blockbuster, time-rewinding game “Braid,’’ “The Witness’’ was in production for 6½ years before it was released last month.

The game takes place on a big, lush island. Nothing is explained. All you do is wander around and solve puzzles, which come in the form of mazes. You have to draw a line from point A to point B, often satisfying certain conditions indicated in vague ways.

Blow explained this simple-but-not premise in a story on the gaming website Polygon: “One of the basic goals driving the design of ‘The Witness’ was to take this very simple thing — ‘Hey, I’m drawing a line in a little maze’ — and see how much I could actually do with that. I set it as my goal to explore every possibility and take the most interesting ones and give them to people.’’

His obvious inspiration — and Blow is open about this — is “Myst,’’ which haunts the consciousness of anyone who played computer games back in the ’90s. That was also a game about wandering around an island and solving puzzles. It isn’t quite as cryptic as “Myst’’; Blow has updated matters so that you can at least figure out the puzzle’s basic parameters.

“The Witness’’ also reminds me a lot of “The Talos Principle,’’ a brilliant puzzle game from late 2014 that featured much more explicit storytelling, but within a similarly nonlinear, one-puzzle-at-a-time structure.

This is such a beautiful game. The colors leap out at you. The draw distance is insane, even on my underpowered computer, and I just couldn’t get enough of the landscapes, which vary from wintry peaks to lush beaches to autumnal forests. It’s enjoyable just to walk around. Early in the game’s development cycle, it looked rough, but Blow hired a young artist, Orsolya Spanyol, for what Polygon rightly called an “astonishing visual overhaul.’’

As breathtaking as it can be to just explore “The Witness,’’ when it comes to the actual gameplay, it can withhold its affection. Yes, it’s extremely satisfying to be stumped on a puzzle and then “get it.’’ Yet most of the time when you solve a puzzle here, you move on to the next puzzle. Sometimes, after a sequence of them, a door will open, allowing you to proceed into a new area. But for a game with more than 500 puzzles, according to the developers, there’s very little stimulus-reward for going forward other than the chance to do more puzzles. You do puzzles to do puzzles to do puzzles.

I could see some people tiring of this. But the game world of “The Witness’’ is such a vibrant, fascinating place, and the game is so easy to jump back into after taking a break, that I think hordes of people are going to want to unlock this island’s secrets (even though the game takes something like 80 hours to complete). “The Witness’’ is very different from Blow’s “Braid,’’ but it’s special in its own right. Those 6½ years were not wasted.

Jesse Singal can be reached at jesse.r.singal@gmail.com.