The Witness is the latest game designed by indie darling developer Jonathan Blow. The game is his second project in almost eight years after the wildly successful Braid helped launch the massive influx of indie games we have today. You can’t take eight years to release your followup to an incredibly beloved game and not expect the hype train to be rolling at full speed. So does The Witness live up to its pedigree? That might depend more on you than it.
The game is a first person puzzle title that stars you as an unnamed protagonist exploring a long abandoned island and fiddling about with monitors bolted all over the place. These monitors all contain grid-like mazes that can be solved using your mouse or analog stick. Solving mazes can do anything from opening doors to activating elevators and moving platforms. After solving a majority of the puzzles in each of the game’s distinct zones you’ll enable a giant laser beam that will contribute to unlocking the game’s end sequence at the top of the island’s highest peak.
In the opening sections puzzles consist of rudimentary mazes that you simply need to find the end to, but it doesn’t take long before mysterious symbols start appearing on the game boards with no real explanation. What’s interesting about The Witness is that you can solve literally every puzzle right from the get-go. Initially I would encounter a puzzle that looked impossible and walk away from it, assuming that later on I would acquire some kind of upgrade or tool to solve it when in reality the only upgrades you’ll get in game are to your own knowledge. That sounds kind of hokey, but that’s how it feels in action, the symbols the game uses all have different meanings and as you progress you’ll find yourself increasing your proficiency by learning what essentially amounts to the language used in puzzles.
Initially I was disappointed that my only interaction with the immaculately designed island would be through puzzle panels bolted onto walls. For some time I wondered why even have the island at all? Why not just print the puzzles out on paper and sell a book? But as you play, the game slowly begins to integrate the environment into the puzzles. The environment is always used in a passive way, there’s no physics to speak of, you’ll never push a rock or pick up and item or anything of that nature, but there are still some really cool ways that objects in the world will affect how you solve some of the puzzles.
It seems obvious now, but I spent a stupid long time trying to figure out what to do with this puzzle.
The game is incredibly vague when it comes to instructions. There’s not a drop of text to be found anywhere, the only real teaching methods usually appear at the beginning of zones where failing a puzzle will cause the symbols you miss to flash. As you progress the symbols will stop flashing and the difficulty will increase. For the most part things are balanced fairly well but occasionally I found that the ambiguous nature of the rules was too much and I wouldn’t understand why a certain puzzle would fail even though I had a pretty good grasp on the underlying concepts being used. There’s also a couple of puzzles in the game that basically amount to “this is hard to see” or “this is hard to hear”, which I don’t really think of as clever methods of obfuscation.
I’m not ashamed to admit that I cheated multiple times throughout my playthrough of the game. When I did look up solutions to puzzles it was always because the frustration had exceeded the amount of fun I was having. To the game’s credit if you get stuck somewhere it’s a very trivial matter to just wander off and try something else, almost all of The Witness‘ content is available to you right off the bat. In fact the game’s biggest secret can be uncovered within the first five or so minutes of gameplay. Even with the occasional help from the internet it still took me about 30 hours to complete the game, and I imagine it could be almost triple that for a 100% completion playthrough. You can set aside any concerns you might have about puzzle quantity, there’s more than enough here to keep you busy.
Jonathan Blow has been on a press tour since the game’s release and he obviously thinks pretty highly both of himself and his work. It’s hard not to scoff at some of the things that leave his mouth, whether he’s telling Vanity Fair that most games are basically “porn”, or telling The Guardian about how he hopes to make games for people who have read Gravity’s Rainbow. While Blow might enjoy being called the Thomas Pynchon of gaming, interviews like these tend to make him come across more like the Kanye West of gaming instead. Normally I would try to separate a creator’s personality or eccentricities from their games. I can forget about Tim Schafer’s sock puppet nonsense while I play Broken Age, or Phil Fish’s weekly Twitter meltdowns during a session of Fez, but Blow’s pretentiousness seeps into The Witness in a big and damaging way.
The swamp is my least favorite part of the game by a wide margin. I never would have finished it without a guide.
A lot of what the game does right only exacerbates the things it does wrong. The island itself is a sight to behold, with some of the best art direction you’ll likely see this year. There’s just enough ominous imagery scattered about to pique your curiosity, humans frozen in place, an abandoned and crumbling city, etc. I was excited to learn more about the island and its lore, so you can imagine my disappointment when the first audio log I picked up was just a quote from Albert Einstein. That pattern continued, every audio log I encountered would just be a philosophical quote or literary excerpt. In fact the island is only ever mentioned very briefly in some logs that aren’t even accessible without reaching the hidden challenge section I mention below.
Eventually I completed an exceptionally tough puzzle and unlocked my first video log. These too shed no light on the in-game lore and are instead completely unrelated clips, presumably from material that Blow thought would seem deep and mysterious. My first clip was a long tracking shot from the end of Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1984 movie “Nostalghia”. The clip is literally just the last ten minutes of the movie and it’s completely agonizing to watch, especially without the previous 110 minutes of the movie as context. As you progress the video logs become longer and longer, culminating in a couple 30-40 minute clips of increasingly insufferable philosophical nonsense.
What happened here? Hopefully you don’t need to know.
If you complete all of the game’s primary eleven zones you can access a special optional (and very well hidden) challenge section beneath the island. Down here you can complete puzzles to unlock numerous shortcuts through the island’s underground caverns. It’s satisfying opening doors that you’ve been gazing at from the other side the entire game, that is until you realize that you’ve completed all of the game’s core content and the shortcuts are essentially meaningless.
The Witness also features what I can only describe as an enormous metagame, something that rests aside the core gameplay and almost dwarfs it in size and scope. I can’t really delve into the details here without some huge spoilers but I can tell you that upon completing all of the extra puzzles your reward is….nothing. Are you seeing a pattern here?
Speaking of motivation, here’s a curiosity, there are fourteen trophies for the game on PSN but only two achievements on Steam. The PC port is also lacking quite a bit by way of options, you have three quality settings, a full screen and v-sync toggle and….that’s about it.
I’ll concede that there could absolutely be something that I’m missing here. Numerous outlets have claimed that the game features 600 – 650 puzzles, one of which Blow himself estimates less than 1% of players will be able to solve. I’m yet to see anyone online reporting more than 520-530 puzzles completed, so it’s entirely possible that there’s something really cool hidden somewhere in the game that won’t be uncovered until later.
At the end of the day, I did have a lot of fun playing The Witness. The core puzzle gameplay is solid and by end of the game you have a very demonstrable knowledge that you didn’t have at the start. I would compare the entire experience to something like an exceptionally pretty Sudoku book or crossword in the newspaper, things that have no inherent reward beyond your own sense of satisfaction for completing them. If you’re the type of person who’s okay with that, and you go into The Witness with the right expectations I think you’ll have a great time. If you’re more like me and need a little more to keep you engaged then maybe something like The Talos Principle might be the better way to spend your money.
