The Witness

Editor's Notes

Steam PC version reviewed.

Introduction

'The Witness' was developed by Thekla, a small team led by Jonathan Blow. Blow’s last game was 2008's 'Braid', a heartfelt puzzle platformer that was a resounding hit on Xbox Live. The setting for 'The Witness' is a strange island full of puzzles where the player wakes alone. 'The Witness' is currently available for PC and PS4, with a planned iOS release. The PS4 exclusivity is limited.

The Game Itself: Our Reviewer's Take

'The Witness' is an open world puzzle game, although it defies all attempts at easy categorization. My character is a nameless person who appears to be stranded alone on an island. The island has many small but cultivated biomes, such as a bright pink orchard, a boathouse on a small peninsula, and a castle. Cables snake around and over everything in sight, all connected together into some kind of machine that requires power, achieved by activating panels. There are hundreds of these panels on the island, and each one has a puzzle. Usually the puzzle is solved by tracing a path through a grid of some kind, sometimes passing through certain dots, sometimes with a second line mirroring the first. Once the puzzle is solved, a cable lights up and it can be followed to another panel where the cycle can begin anew.

On the whole, the game has a very simple premise and almost no interface, especially when it comes to visual UI. Traditional video game elements are absent, like a map, journal, or tutorial. The first few puzzles are really simple, but that's all the introduction I would get. I suppose I’m meant to wander around the island, solving line puzzles here and there and ponder the meaning of life. Occasionally I would find an audio log, which would chatter on about the infinite nature of God or quote an ancient Buddhist philosopher. 'The Witness' is a perplexing, enigmatic experience, to be sure.

I don’t necessarily need a lot of direction from games, but I do need some kind of impetus or push to keep going. In the case of open worlds, this can come in the form of some sense of achievement or accomplishment, not by completing objectives, but by learning and exploring. This is one of the main issues I had with 'The Witness'. I never felt like I was going anywhere, even though a lot of the gameplay is walking. I never felt like I was doing anything more compelling than tracing patterns on a matrix. The puzzles are arranged in sets, and even after completing a particularly mind-bending one, all I would receive was an open door, usually to more puzzles. Sometimes a laser beam would rise out of the earth and point towards a mountain in the distance. When I arrived at the mountain, I found dead panels and a collection of human statues in various poses. What does it all mean? Who can say, but I need to trace more lines to figure it out.

As for the puzzles themselves, they are sometimes interesting, often challenging, and ultimately repetitive. A set of them will have some kind of unique design, like having to pass through specific shapes on the board before proceeding to the exit. Throughout the set, this design becomes increasingly difficult to fulfill, and the very last puzzle in a set is mystifying. There is a moment of pride upon completing a particularly difficult set, but it’s fleeting, because my only reward is another lit cable. Some puzzles are solved with clues from the environment, which I won’t discuss further because I would hate to give away any solutions. The more advanced grids combine mechanics from several different sets, and I’m not too proud to say that sometimes I walked away from them in frustration. This was especially true when failing a puzzle would deactivate the cable connecting it to the last one, forcing me to backtrack and solve the previous one again. Brute forcing the solutions is only possible in some of the grids and I tried that too when I could, which I admit sounds cheap but it’s probably better than watching a YouTube video.