The Witness (2016) (PC) (Thekla Inc.)
0Jonathan Blow's heavily anticipated second release is in some ways game design at its most pure, but that's not only a good thing. The philosophy at work here is a bit like putting Ockham's razor in the hands of Jack the Ripper; the result being a coldly logical bloodbath in which bloated design and directionless feature creep meet their ugly demise while leaving a bitter metallic taste in your mouth. Killing your darlings might be a necessary evil in the ruthless pursuit of perfection, but it still counts as murder.
Progress in The Witness is solely determined by the player's painstaking accumulation of knowledge about the rules and mechanics of the game world itself. It completely does away with all of the comforting mechanical and mental scaffolding of most modern games; there is no inventory to manage, no heavily scripted tutorials to learn from, no narrative progression in the traditional sense, no XP rewards to feed your inner dopamine troll with - in short, nothing that distracts from the game's many and surprisingly varied cerebral challenges.
While this laser-sharp focus on puzzle solving does give the player some much-needed room to breathe, reflect and take in the sights, I find the experience of exploring the game world to be equal parts relaxation and existential dread. The small but impossibly dense island on which The Witness takes place is overflowing with secrets, and I traverse its deceptively postcard-pretty areas with the sinking, paranoia-inducing feeling that absolutely everything on display is part of the larger puzzle. At first glance, it may seem that Jonathan Blow and his team have crafted an orderly, serene and intelligently designed environment; something akin to the ideal image of a Medieval walled garden. On closer inspection, however, the torturous layout of the place begins to resemble a satanic mill, forever shrouding your mind in a thick black smog of willful obfuscation.
It's clear that Jonathan Blow doesn't suffer fools and degenerated Skinner Box junkies like me lightly, as The Witness makes hard-earned discovery the core feature of its gameplay loop no matter the cost. The risk of less patient players lazily brute-forcing puzzles is minimized by the use of incredibly convoluted puzzle solutions - to the point that figuring out the complex rules is often far easier than grasping how to actually solve it once you already know roughly what to do - and also a time-consuming reset-at-failure mechanic regularly escorting the player back to square one. While I will readily admit that my pathetically slow progress (barely 230 finished panels after more than 20 hours with the game) did not overshadow the pleasure of figuring out how some of the more obscure puzzles worked, in the long run there is just no room in my life for such a relentlessly demanding game.
This is all a bit of a shame, because I've heard some intriguing things about the supposed "message" of The Witness, and would have really appreciated being able to dig deeper into the apparently rather problematic world view it seems designed to convey. As it stands, I'll have to be content with respecting the game from a distance. I hear the new Doom might be more up my alley...