The Witness
The Witness. You wake up, alone, on a strange island full of puzzles that will challenge and surprise you. You don’t remember who you are, and you don’t remember how you got here, but there’s one thing you can do: explore the island in hope of discovering clues, regaining your memory, and somehow finding your way home. The Witness is a single-player game in an open world with dozens of locations to explore and over 500 puzzles. This game respects you as an intelligent player and it treats your time as precious. There’s no filler; each of those puzzles brings its own new idea into the mix. So, this is a game full of ideas. The Witness is a first-person puzzle adventure game. The player, as an unnamed character, explores an island with numerous structures and natural formations. The island is roughly divided into eleven regions, arranged around a mountain that represents the ultimate goal for the player. The regions are differentiated from one another by changes in vegetation, and the puzzles within each region are similar to one another (e.g. their solutions may all involve symmetry). Throughout the island are yellow boxes housing turrets. These can be activated once the puzzles within the box’s region have been solved. When activated, the turrets emerge to shine a light toward the top of the mountain, indicating that a section of the game is complete. Several such turrets need to be activated to unlock access to the inside of the mountain, and ultimately reach the game’s final goal. Additional puzzles can be discovered if all eleven turrets are activated.
The Witness Review
The Witness is a series of maze puzzles (some 600-odd) set on a tropical island—a sumptuous, thickly hewn expanse of cliffs, meadows, orchards, swamps and sand, dotted with buildings such as a church, a logging depot and a windmill, many falling into disrepair. The place is a regular car-crash of eras and traditions, from the vaguely Japanese temple near the centre with its plush red shutters, to the rusting tanker shipwrecked on the northern coast. But there are shared themes, amongst them a motley and unnerving population of stone effigies—priests, kings, guitarists, photographers, rock-climbers and more, all frozen mid-gesture like trolls caught in the sun.
The silent elegance with which The Witness cultivates your understanding in this way, the artfulness with which it feeds you concepts and layers them up into complex problems, is where its greatness lies. Early puzzles are painless—you hold-click to zoom on a screen and activate a cursor, then draw a line through a grid layout from start to finish. But then you start to encounter symbols on squares within each maze that impose additional requirements. These are commonly introduced via banks of five or more screens that walk you through each facet of the new mechanic, beginning with a maze that’s a square or two wide to demonstrate the basic principle. Beyond a couple of text prompts to explain the controls at the outset there isn’t a breath of actual exposition in the game. It simply doesn’t need it. The pedagogy is that accomplished.
What’s remarkable is how The Witness communicates its nuances. Early panels are easy, asking you to guide the line from point A to B on simple grids. After some time, though, new symbols and colors and shapes appear, each conveying their own rules. Some ask you to form silhouettes with your glowing path. Some make you change perspective. Some even require you to break previous rules altogether. And there are never overt instructions as to how these rules work. You learn them through your own intuition and logical reasoning.
It’s also impressive how diverse the puzzles are, and how The Witness manages to keep mazes engaging over the course of 25 plus hours. It’s more impressive when The Witness reveals that its world, and the puzzles therein, aren’t separate; they bleed together. Certain panels seem impossible until environmental clues offer the telltale hint. Other panels contain no clues at all, but affect your character’s surroundings in clever ways. The castle at the center of the island is a shining example–its puzzles spill into the ramparts around them, making you consider the structure in a new light.
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