Why are you on the island? Who set up all the monitors? Why is everything in ruins? Puzzle games don’t need an involved plot, but The Witness’ atmosphere plants the seeds of a story that doesn’t grow. The air of mystery invites speculation, but the world is practically barren on the narrative front. These aren’t addressed during a normal playthrough, which is my only major complaint. The Witness isn’t a story-forward title, though the state of the island poses some implicit questions. If you jump between areas, you don’t need to worry about jumbling the plot. You can move between the zones freely, and you don’t need to clear all of them to reach the end-game puzzles, so you can almost always make progress somewhere. If I encountered a puzzle that was too hard or complicated, I just walked away and returned to it later. I relished the opportunity to work for the solutions, because the effort makes victory that much sweeter. By the end of my playthrough, the array of dots, lines, grids, and other doodles on my desk made me look like a crazed conspiracy theorist. You may need to draw things on paper, play with cut-out shapes, or take some notes. You don’t have a magic hint button to nudge you in the right direction, so if you hit a tough puzzle, you’re on your own. The only hand-holding that happens is the gradual progression from the “teaching puzzles” to the more complex and full-blown applications of the concepts. One of my favorite parts of The Witness is its refusal to treat players like idiots. When you do reach the final puzzles in a sequence, don’t expect an easy win and a pat on the back. This approach is perfect, since it allows players to experience a bunch of smaller victories as they progress toward clearing an entire zone. It doesn’t repeat the same idea over and over most puzzles are organized into groups that feature variations on a theme, but each one in the sequence adds a new layer to constantly push your thinking in different directions. The format is different, but it relies on the same principle of gradually building a vocabulary, and then challenging what players think they know about how the pieces function and interact with each other.
Fans of Blow’s previous game, Braid, might be surprised to find some notable similarities in The Witness.
Each new twist and surprise left me impressed, and I only got more absorbed as I uncovered more. Developer Jonathan Blow and the team at Thekla have created an astonishing variety of elegant and polished problems incorporating elements like colors, shadows, and spatial manipulation. The grid and symbols communicate information clearly, and the satisfaction that comes from identifying the trick and then arriving at the right solution is immense and frequent.īecause figuring out the requirements and their obstacles is part of the fun, I won’t spoil much about the forms the puzzles take – but put aside any concerns that they might feel too similar. Your surroundings might provide necessary clues. Symbols on the grid require you to outline particular shapes. Of course, you can’t just scribble anything your line’s exact path is important, and is the basis for an unbelievable amount of diversity and creativity within this straightforward structure. The gorgeous open world serves primarily as a delivery method for hundreds of monitors displaying grids, and you need to trace paths from the designated starting points to the ending points.
THE WITNESS RUINS FULL
The core mechanic is deviously simple, but it paves the way for brain-bending puzzles and cascading “a-ha” moments that are among the best games can offer.Īs the lone person on an island full of ruins and mysterious devices, your basic goal is drawing lines. Like the genre greats, The Witness has the same ability to infiltrate your perception and draw you in. From imagining blue and orange portals around your office to seeing tetrominoes as you try to sleep, playing around with fun puzzle concepts doesn’t always stop when you put down the controller. The most memorable puzzle games take root in your mind and keep you thinking.