The Witness

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart, and try to love the questions themselves like locked doors or books written in a very foreign tongue” – Rainer Maria Rilke

About five hours in to Jonathan Blow’s mysterious & cerebral puzzle game The Witness, I had an epiphany. I was picking my way through an abandoned town, full of wild grass and running wires, when I stumbled across a shipping container. It was situated in the centre of a crumbling building, about twenty metres or so from the shoreline of the island upon which the game takes place. On the locked door of this shipping container was a maze, much like all the puzzles that make up The Witness, which was populated by colourful symbols I had never seen before.

I spent a couple of minutes playing around with the puzzle, but eventually decided to leave it and come back later, sure that The Witness would teach me these new pieces of logic when it wanted me to open the door. Sure enough, two or three hours later, I was wandering aimlessly through a swamp when I came across a series of panels which gradually explained (without a single word) how I could trace around yellow blocks to create shapes, and thus find the solution to the maze.

Armed with this new piece of information, I returned to the mysterious shipping container. I solved the tricky puzzle on its door with a fist-pump of triumph, and the door slowly creaked open with a satisfying electrical fizz. But what was inside? Ten pieces of gold? A new shield? A DLC discount?

No. Inside the shipping container was, of course, nothing but another puzzle. But not just another puzzle – another lesson. The panel innocuously thrown on the floor of the container was a simplified form of yet another mysterious set of symbols I’d seen elsewhere, and by solving it I moved one small step closer to understanding the endless mysteries of the island.

It was at this moment that I realized the utter brilliance of The Witness. This is a game which rewards learning with lessons, a game that is about nothing but the pure pursuit of knowledge, and uses that knowledge alone to gate the player’s progress through its twenty-plus hour runtime. There are no powerups or extra abilities in The Witness. Every bit of progress you make is as a direct result of understanding the rules and logic of the island, and your only reward for this task is the pleasure derived in doing so.

A craftily hidden puzzle on one corner of the island might, upon solving, unlock something in your brain which sends you rushing to its complete opposite end, finally understanding what that weird pyramid-shaped symbol means. And having solved that, you might gain a clue as to what that purple hexagon-shaped thing you encountered three hours ago was trying to ask of you.

The Witness’ gently unfurling structure is truly organic, able to be approached from any angle and at any time. It actively encourages you to leave puzzles you don’t understand and go exploring – the entire town, in fact, which you’ll encounter as probably the third or fourth area of the game, cannot be completed until you understand the rules of all ten other areas, but you won’t know that until you’ve spent some time playing around there.

And what a sense of freedom there is in not knowing, especially in the puzzle genre, which has been in thrall to Portal’s linear test chambers for almost a decade now. Too many devs have borrowed these closed-off, pristine white stages as a means of lazily gating the player to the next puzzle, while making no effort to hide the designer’s hand. The Witness’ crowning achievement and prime innovation is the way it makes its whole world into one enormous interconnected puzzle, then simply sets you free to roam.

And it is such a joy to roam. The Witness’ island is a gorgeous microcosm of the Earth, ranging from arid desert to autumnal woodland and marshy swamps in a dense space that can be traversed within minutes. There are bunkers, castles, temples, shipwrecks, and more secrets than I could begin to count crammed into every inch of geography. Everything in The Witness has a purpose, and one of the great joys of playing it is having your brain slowly rewired to see that purpose everywhere.

All of this conditioning and learning comes to a head in The Mountain, the game’s final area, which is so challenging it becomes as much about the desperation of unknowing as it is about the cerebral thrill of discovery and understanding. These last puzzles will force you to confront seeming impossibility in order to overcome it – an idea expressed with consummate elegance by an audiolog near the beginning of the area. For anyone who was tempted to commit the ultimate puzzle game sin at this stage and refer to a walkthrough, Blow imparts these words of wisdom:

“Therefore I thank you, my God – because you make it clear to me that there is no other way of approaching you except that which to all humans, even to the most learned philosophers, seems wholly inaccessible and impossible. For you have shown me that you cannot be seen elsewhere than where impossibility confronts and obstructs me...if, therefore, impossibility is a necessity in your sight, oh Lord, there is nothing your sight does not see” – Nicholas of Cusa, 1453

And sure enough, these brain-melting final puzzles become the most transcendent in the entire game, a gauntlet that push your acquired knowledge and wits to the absolute limit, but feel truly enlightening to solve. The game’s penultimate puzzle had me cutting out and drawing over multiple post-it notes to figure an answer, and when I finally solved it I felt such a flash of elation that I jumped out of my chair.

There are very few games with the power to instil this emotion, but The Witness achieves it. Jonathan Blow has created a game that constantly forces the player to re-evaluate what they are capable of, to undertake sublimely daunting leaps of logic, and to luxuriate in the complete satisfaction of natural human curiosity. Only the most masterful game designers can teach without words, but Blow has complete trust in and respect for the player’s ability to learn, and it is this that sets his game apart.

Cerebral as philosophy, meticulous as science, but so wildly creative it could be nothing but a work of art – The Witness is the greatest puzzle game of them all, and perhaps the most intelligent video game I have ever played. It is the sort of game that seeps deeply into your psyche, and will have you mentally tracing circle mazes in satellite dishes, roundabouts and road signs. A game that you will not be able to stop thinking about, long after having put it down.

And as for that gorgeous, mysterious ending sequence? Well, whatever interpretation you take from it will be the right one. If there is one lesson The Witness teaches above all else, it is this: the pursuit of knowledge is, in the end, not about the answer, but about learning to ask the right questions.

Did you take a look at The Witness - maybe via a few screenshots, maybe a trailer, maybe by reading a pre-release description somewhere - and think it was a game where you explored an island to uncover its mysteries, in the vein of Myst or Dear Esther? So did I. We were both wrong. The island is completely irrelevant.

Well, maybe that's being slightly unfair. The backdrop you play this game against looks fantastic - vivid, imaginative, striking, and diverse. Dense, lush green jungles push up against dusky, autumnal woodland cast in deep reds and bright oranges, and pristine sandy beaches and a stone's throw away from well-kept mansion gardens. You'll spend time in treehouses, in docks, in quarries, in monasteries, and in abandoned towns. The amount of detail and care that went into such a small amount of virtual real estate is incredibly impressive. And yet there's every chance you won't really notice most of it.

That's because The Witness is a puzzle game. And not just any puzzle game - a really, really challenging puzzle game. I don't think I've ever been as mentally taxed by a game as I was with this.

The premise seems simple enough at first - you have a grid with a maze in it, you have a line, and you need to get the line from one end of the grid to the other. If you knew that there were literally hundreds of these grids strewn across the game, you'd probably wonder how they could keep it interesting and challenging throughout the whole game. Boy, if only you knew. Some of them have colored dots in them, where you need to ringfence one color off from the other. Some of them contain Tetromino-style shapes, where you need to draw that shape somewhere with the line. Some of them double the line up, so you're controlling a mirror image of what you're doing as well as the original line. Some of them give you two colours and ask you to make sure that each section of the grid you ringfence off contains only even numbers. Some of them contain 'cancellation' blocks that you need to account for with the colour puzzles. Some of them do all this with shapes instead of colours. And by the end of the game, the puzzles will be doing all of this at once. Additionally, some of them give you simple grids with multiple possible correct answers and you have to identify the correct answer somewhere in the environment - maybe looking through a tree to see what the branches outline for you, maybe listening to a bird tweeting so you can outline a basic soundwave that follows the pitches, maybe standing at just the right angle to see the shadows cast over the grid by the surrounding foliage, maybe by drawing out the path you took walking through a hedge maze just beforehand.

And just to make this even harder than it would be already, the game explains exactly none of this. You're on your own finding out what these shapes and colours mean and how to solve the puzzles that contain them. Each section of the island has its own 'theme' and starts with around six easy, introductory puzzle to get you used to the concept, but doesn't tell you anything about what that concept actually is, so you'll spend a lot of time blindly smashing lines onto the grid, trial-and-error style, until you find the solution and look at it to work exactly why and how that was the right answer. It's extremely frustrating at times. It's also extremely rewarding.

I've seen more than one person on Twitter joke that their house looked like A Beautiful Mind after they were done with the game, pieces of paper strewn across the room with abstract shapes drawn on them. It's that sort of game - if you play it properly (and I won't lie, there were a few times when I had to resort to a walkthrough because I had no idea why my answer wasn't right) then you'll find yourself pausing at each grid, taking stock of the situation, then making notes to remember what you've tried, why it didn't work, and so on - I found on a few occasions that starting in the middle of the line made things easier, which needed me to make notes to visualize it properly. When was the last time you played a game that required you to take notes? I don't think that's ever happened to me before.

The upshot of this, of course, is that each individual grid becomes something to be proud of. Working out the solutions to these puzzles on your own is a minor success, a reward that keeps you pushing onto the next grid, the next reward. I'm reminded of something that Rob Florence said about Tetris in How Videogames Changed the World - about how once you start playing it, you're already winning, that rush of making one line disappear spurring you on to make the next one disappear. The Witness has that same sense of flow sometimes - sometimes you just get it and find yourself bashing out ten grids in two minutes, leaving you not even sure yourself of how you know what to do with them.

If I'm being honest, I think the game does eventually push it a little bit too much; by the endgame, once I'd finished all of the individual zones, pointed all of the lasers I'd activated at the mountain, and entered the secret base inside it, I found myself more frustrated and annoyed than challenged and started rattling off solutions from a YouTube video just so I could see the ending. At this point the game does things like making you draw out paths on the floor to cross pits (when you do this you don't even know which door on the other side you need to get to, by the way), solve puzzles that are wrapped around pillars so you can't see the entire pictures, and solve color puzzles that have psychedelic moving filters on them so you can't see the colours properly, and it was all just a bit too much - my brain was fried and I was genuinely worried that if I left it a few days I'd forget what all the symbols meant. Still, for most of the game up until that point, I felt a lot of things - vexation and pride prime among them - that will mean The Witness stays with me for a very long time. It definitely made me earn my fun like no game ever has before, but it was worth it.

The Witness is a stunning and stunningly fatiguing puzzle game that captures both the moments of madness and bliss its creator must’ve felt over its seven years of development. And all that madness and bliss? Well, you’ll experience a fair amount too if you play it.

Jonathan Blow, creator of The Witness, in an interview with The Guardian, said he wants to make games for people who read Gravity’s Rainbow. Not everyone who games reads books, and I imagine even fewer read Pynchon. Much like The Witness, Blow’s statement is obtuse and vague but still understandable: He wants to make a game that not everyone will understand, enjoy, or fully comprehend the first time through. In this sense, he achieved what he intended: a frustrating, beautiful and alienating puzzle game. In love with this idea, it seems he never stopped to consider how the player on the other end of the experience will feel about it all.

On a surface level, The Witness resembles the open-world of Myst, puzzle mechanics that gradually build on each other like in Braid (his previous game) and rudimentary grid-based puzzles you’d find in the newspaper. One assumes there must be more to the game than this. In many ways there is, but not always in the ways you want or expect. The ways in which you discover and solve puzzles continues to surprise even after ten hours of play. With over 700 puzzles, it’s entirely possible that Blow is displaying every conceivable puzzle type possible with the rules at play. Discovering and playing with those rules is what makes The Witness so enjoyable and often so painfully tedious.

Unlike Portal and other recent successful puzzle games, The Witness puts a focus on making the player define the rules of the world. Even a tutorial isn’t defined in this game. Instead, you solve a series of simple puzzles, discover nothing changed, and decide “Well, I guess that’s a tutorial!” The Witness is a game about thinking outside the box without ever knowing how big that box might be. Not only is this process deep and ingeniously clever, but it holistically feeds into what the game is trying to convey to the player about life and nature.

If this is all The Witness contained, it’s be a masterpiece. Unfortunately, discovering the rules of the world is only half the experience. You also have to apply them. A puzzle game is only as good as its rule sets. A good rule set can make a puzzle game endlessly fun; I’ve played Mario's Picross [マリオのピクロス]for years and will continue to do so. But spending even a couple hours with some of the rule sets in The Witness makes me never want to play the game again.

A good puzzle should be about figuring out what rules are needed and how they are applied, but so much of The Witness’ frustration comes from the game obscuring readability for challenge. Imagine playing Tetris with the screen half-black or Unchartedwith the screen spinning. It would be unacceptable. The Witness is so far removed from other games that it can almost get away with these tricks at times but they are still cheap tricks: lazy ways of adding challenge to a puzzle that would be easy to solve otherwise.

Additionally, half the puzzles are trial-and-error and not in the sense of “Does this rule apply here or that one?” but rather “I know what rules apply, I just don’t know the exact path through so I need to try again and again until I find it.” Where The Witness’ best moments made me feel satisfied by being observant and thoughtful, these puzzles made me feel like my time was wasted. I never felt clever or happy solving them, as they require an amount of brute force and patience that makes for a miserable puzzle-solving experience.

There are awful things about The Witness. The game becomes so awful at the end that I decided to stop playing it and watch videos of the ending instead. I think Blow is a very intelligent designer but I also think he is a very stubborn one. He insists on making a complicated world that is not meant to be easily understood (or understandable at all, in some aspects); rather than a game world that is designed to accommodate the player. I don’t mean to imply the game needs tutorials or guiding the player -- it’s in these aspects that Blow’s stubbornness pays off -- but the puzzles should have been designed with player experience in mind. If they were tested on players, then Blow must be fully aware that his puzzles force nausea, discomfort, eye strain and just aren’t fun at all at times, especially in the game’s final section.

The Witness is a puzzle game that tests the player’s resolve more often than their intellect. Even though Dark Souls is one of my favorite games, what The Witness asks of me in terms of visual discomfort, fatigue, and repetition is not worth the experience of playing it all. But it is worth playing. It’s a contradiction I’m aware, but the beauty of The Witness’ world, exploration, and message to the player is inspiring. It’s world is one of the greatest things ever achieved in games and when it’s good, it’s incredible. But more often than not, I found myself bored and tired by many of the game’s poor rule sets and combinations of them.

There is a madness and obsession that permeates across The Witness. It manifests itself in the unfathomably beautiful and complex visual design and layout of the game. But, unfortunately, it also manifests itself in the puzzles that have a blatant disregard toward player experience. So in love with this vision, it seems Blow never considered how others may view it. The Witness is a game about the joy of discovery and observation, but so often its puzzles go directly against this theme.

The Witness might aspire to be Gravity’s Rainbow, but it’s not. It can’t be. It’s not a book. It’s a game. And if it were more aware of this aspect, it would be a better one for it.

Inconsistent for me. Some of the puzzles are fun others are tedious or boring -- and some just down right frustrating (but perhaps I'm just dumb).

The 3d world is beautiful but not used enough. 90% of the time is spent just looking at boring panels.

Puzzle game perfection

The light-bridge puzzle was amazing to me. Worth the price of admission for that alone. The visuals are beautiful. The game structure is memorable. It's got a coherent message if you can decipher it.

But it is full of a lot of mediocre cereal box puzzles. And I didn't think the game play secret was as mindblowing as other people seemed to.