The Witness

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.

Jonathan Blow strikes again! The Witness is the most meditative gaming experience I’ve had in a long time, and I’m sure it’ll have me dreaming about drawing lines on little grids for weeks.

It feels like a game designed for gamers and non-gamers alike. There’s no friction here – the only challenge comes from the puzzles themselves. At the outset, you awake on an island and almost immediately you’re solving your first puzzle – the first of many. The Witness’s puzzles involve drawing lines on grids to fulfill certain requirements. Some puzzles require you to draw Tetris-like shapes; others make you draw lines that separate white squares from black ones. Certain puzzles even incorporate the elements of the local environment into their solutions – light and shadow, soundwaves and reflections. I wish I could say more but I feel like I’ve already said too much.

The world design is also top notch. The island you’re stuck on is big but not too big. Navigating the environment is relatively straightforward; natural signposts are abundant and if you ever feel lost you can always hike to high ground and reorient yourself. Each section of the island has a different feel. Swamp, desert, jungle, derelict ship – though these environments are all interconnected, each functions as a discrete area, with puzzles that revolve around unique mechanics. Moreover, the openness of the environment meant I rarely got stuck. If one puzzle had me stumped, I could go work on another. This also led to plenty of “eureka!” moments, when I’d come back to a previously indecipherable puzzle with new knowledge and crack it immediately.

When I say this is a game for non-gamers, I really mean it. I suspect if I let my father, who hasn’t played a game seriously since the Atari 2600 days, take a crack at it, he could work his way to the end with minimal guidance. The underlying game design is quite basic and it makes no assumptions about what knowledge and experience the player may or may not have. The only assumption it makes is that the player is capable of recognizing patterns and extrapolating solutions from them.

After I’ve heaped all this praise on the game, why am I not giving it a perfect mark? The primary reason is the limitations inherent in the design. While the puzzles employ many different sets of rules, solving them always comes down to drawing lines on a grid. This isn’t bad – in fact, I enjoy it immensely! But I wouldn’t give a book of Sudoku puzzles 5 stars, and the same goes for The Witness. (And yes, I know there is more going on here than meets the eye. But the scavenger hunt aspect doesn’t particularly excite me.) Additionally, a few of the puzzles felt gimmicky rather than smart. A few unskippable late game puzzles feature intensely flashing lights. I’ll confess that I looked up the solution to one – just one – because my eyes were tired of looking at flickering neon colors. The rest of the 300+ puzzles I encountered in my playthrough I solved without the help of a guide.

No moon logic. No assumptions. No gamerisms. Just a collection of (mostly) no-nonsense puzzles spread across a lovely environment that’s easy to navigate. It’s not the be-all-end-all of video games, nor does it aspire to be. It’s a game that scratches a very particular itch and scratches it thoroughly indeed. While not flawless, The Witness is a very successful marriage of pure vision and clean design. If I had the opportunity to remake it, I would change nothing. (Well, nothing besides the obnoxious disco lights.)

The Witness is one of the most beautiful, detail-oriented, well-thought out experiences you'll find in the medium. It took me 2 failed and 1 successful playthrough to realize this, though, so I don't blame you if that seems unlikely at a first glance. It is a game built as part-playground, part-office, and part-classroom, with each aspect being integrated seamlessly. The basic loop of the game is that you'll encounter a group of line puzzles where you'll first be introduced the basics, then given freedom to play around with them, and finally tested on what you've learned. Doesn't sound to dissimilar to most puzzle games so far, but the best and cruelest aspect of this game is the fact that you will have to teach yourself everything there is to know about the game besides how to move, look around, and activate your cursor.

It's up to you to figure out what every single puzzle mechanic requires of you without a single verbal, written, or visual tutorial, just by playing puzzles of increasing difficulty. It's up to you to accumulate the skillset needed to complete the game based on your successes in simpler "intro" puzzles scattered across the island. It's up to YOU to put together the mechanical implication of the drawing at the top of the mountain, and to learn to apply it to other environments. This is one of the most empowering things I have ever felt in a video game, scratching the same itch that unguided physical exploration does, but amplified 1000 times over (and this happens concurrently with unguided physical exploration as well). And while I can see how people who may struggle to understand certain puzzle mechanics would end up getting frustrated at the game's lack of guidance, it's also an indictment of their own ability (or willingness) to parse the given information.

Not only are you asked to teach yourself the rules of the puzzles before you, but you'll also be asked to figure out things very seldomly touched upon in puzzlers - where to find the puzzles, where to physically view the puzzle environment from to procure information that helps you find an answer, how to access the area that you need by completing other tasks around the immediate area first. Occasionally the solution is not even visible to the player from the zoomed-in panel view that the game automatically puts you into, requiring you to poke around and bring your findings back to the panel and execute from memory. It is not only a puzzler, but a meta-puzzler, and the rules of engagement for both are completely up to you.

On the audio-visual front, The Witness is a gem. What the environment lacks in next-gen hyper-realistic weather effects, it makes up for with a highly impressionist, painterly quality to the palettes and composition of the textures and their environments. Because the game is based on perspective, the environment must be static, to prevent someone from "mistiming" an exploration and missing a puzzle solution. With that constraint in mind, the game is quite nice to look at. I also like that each of the areas thematically match their twist on the puzzles. The jungle, famous in real life for being noisy and dense with life and movement, tests your ability to parse auditory information. The area where you puzzle on transparent panels so you can trace the background is a glass factory, presumably making said panels. The GREENhouse plays with the perspective of color palettes. It's a small touch but it's all very grounded and thoughtful. There's hardly ever any music, but the few times it does arrive it's momentous, because it's striking alongside the extremely detailed and moody sound design. Each environment sounds precisely how they look, and sometimes that materializes in SFX combinations that can feel welcoming, oppressive, or indifferent to your presence.

Here's the annoying part of this written review: the meta-discussion. I wrote this whole thing because I'm disappointed with how awful the discourse surrounding this game is. Instead of focusing on the details of the work itself, the online criticism revolves mostly around Jon Blow's character, financial reasons, and time spent, which are very strange meta-factors to care about for a video game. People think Jon is up his own ass with the game, but this isn't really given a basis besides the fact that it's an artsy fartsy game that actually tries to do something novel. The game also costs much more than the average puzzle game, partly because it is much fucking better than the average puzzle game. Finally, the game is relatively slow-paced when it comes to the mechanical movement of the machinery on the island - the lasers are set up slowly, bridges are move slowly, ramps ascend slowly, elevators move slowly. This is seen as some kind of a taunt for more defensive gamers who view their time as precious. Without getting too much into it, I think it's a relatively stupid position to take that every single work of art in a medium must succumb to constant and never-ending increases in player efficiency, as if making an elevator 2 times faster will unlock your brain like the Limitless pill. This is NOT a game where going fast is the objective, the point is to actually fucking think, and to take actual fucking breaks from thinking to not overwhelm and confuse yourself - you know, like how real life and classical learning take place. Blow's emulation of hundreds of years of real educational theory is suddenly a pretentious annoyance the second it's applied to games, which are supposed to pump a certain amount of testosterone into your bloodstream per second, apparently. The obsession with discrediting this game philosophically is a merely because trying to do so for its actual mechanical or aesthetic design would be an impossible exercise. Ignore any and all people who encourage you for pigeonhole the medium like this.

I don't want to spoil any more of the one million tricks this game has up its sleeves, but I can't say much else than to just play the damn game. Yes, it costs a lot of money, yes it's got controversy surrounding it because of some peoples' distaste for the creator. Fuck the noise, just try it. It's currently peerless in what it aims to do.