I did, however, have the help of another mind sitting on the couch next to me. It’s hard to say myself if I wouldn’t have given in to the temptation of checking a solution online if I hadn’t been playing before the official release. We live in a day when it is far too easy to get mildly frustrated after a couple of minutes trying and failing to solve a puzzle. There’s a sad truth, and it’s that most people who play The Witness will not get a pure experience. Perhaps a few months down the road, I’ll do a follow up piece discussing my deeper take on everything, but for now, I must remain as cryptic and ambiguous as the beautiful, yet mysterious island. I wish I could, and I desperately want to discuss the depth of the ciphers within The Witness, but for the sake of offering you an undiluted experience, I can’t. Outside of each puzzle panel there’s a much larger picture. The island isn’t just home to these puzzles. Sometimes that knowledge wasn’t enough though, and a shift in perspective was required to obtain the solution. By remembering the rules - my past experiences on the island - I was able to push forward. Regardless of how frustratingly impossible some of the puzzles seemed, I was able to make my way through and reach the end on my own. Simple, right? Just wait.įrom black and white squares, to stars, to differently sized dots in the path, the puzzles in The Witness grow in complexity, though the game never fails to effectively teach the rules. Pressing X in the circular starting area will allow you to draw a line through the path to the end. Puzzles mainly consist of panels that appear to have paths or mazes on them. With the entire island available for exploration, gaining an understanding of the rules and how they interact with each other is essential to unlocking the mysteries that the island holds. This is where The Witness walks a perfect balance, slowly doling out and teaching unchanging rules that always apply in future puzzles, but never so obviously telling the player what those rules are. Overtly define your rules, and you’ve given away the solutions before you’ve even begun. Keep your rule set too ambiguous, and puzzles will frustrate the player. What you can and cannot do, what is and is not fair game for any puzzle solution. There needs to be an established set of rules for the world that the game is set in. There are plenty of other themes that present themselves throughout the journey on the painted island - nothing short of God, science, and other things that are sure to make you think about your place in universe - but the ever existent theme that keeps coming back, presented in puzzle after puzzle, is perspective. Imagine cramming that grand idea, that message of individual perception, into a digital experience, and you’ll understand the broad strokes for what Jonathan Blow was trying to do in making The Witness.
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