The Witness ๐๏ธโ๐จ๏ธ Part 1: Beginning Gameplay
4The Witness is a 2016 puzzle video game developed and published by Thekla, Inc. Inspired by Myst, the game involves the exploration of an open world island filled with natural and man-made structures. The player progresses by solving puzzles, which are based on interactions with grids presented on panels around the island or paths hidden within the environment. The game provides no direct instructions for how these puzzles are to be solved, requiring the player to identify the meaning of symbols in the puzzles. A central design element to the game was how these puzzles are presented so that the player can achieve a moment of inspiration through trial and error and gain that comprehension themselves. Announced in 2009, The Witness had a lengthy development period. Jonathan Blow, the game's lead designer, started work on the title in 2008, shortly after releasing Braid. The financial success of Braid allowed him to hire a larger production team without ceding control over the final product. To create the game's visual language, the team developed their own game engine and retained artists, architects, and landscape architects to design the structures on the island. This required a protracted development process, and the game's release was delayed from 2013 to 2016. Blow desired to create a game around non-verbal communication, wanting players to learn from observation and to come to epiphanies in finding solutions and leading to a greater sense of involvement and accomplishment with each success. The game includes around 650 puzzles, though the player is not required to solve them all to finish the game. The Witness was released for Microsoft Windows and PlayStation 4 in January 2016, with later versions released for the Xbox One, Nvidia Shield, macOS, and iOS. Original plans for release on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 were abandoned as the game engine became more demanding, and the team ultimately opted for an initial release on Windows and the PlayStation 4, with support for other platforms following. The Witness received generally favorable reviews from critics, who praised the difficult but surmountable puzzles and the game's art and setting. Within a week of release, the game had sold over 100,000 copies, which was about as many copies as Braid had done within a year of its release, nearly recouping all of the development costs for the game.
Gameplay The Witness is a first-person puzzle video game. The player, as an unnamed character, explores an island with numerous structures and natural formations. The island is roughly divided into eleven regions, arranged around a mountain that represents the ultimate goal for the player. The regions are differentiated from one another by changes in vegetation, and the puzzles within each region are similar to one another (e.g. their solutions may all involve symmetry). Throughout the island are yellow boxes housing turrets. These can be activated once the puzzles within the box's region have been solved. When activated, the turrets emerge to shine a light toward the top of the mountain, indicating that a section of the game is complete. Several such turrets need to be activated to unlock access to the inside of the mountain and ultimately reach the game's final goal. Additional puzzles can be discovered if all eleven turrets are activated.There are additional optional puzzles scattered around the island. One such set of puzzles, accessible after entering the mountain and colloquially referred to as "The Challenge", is a time-based test to complete about a dozen algorithmically generated puzzles of various types within seven minutes. The sequence is set to music from Edvard Grieg's "Anitra's Dance" and "In the Hall of the Mountain King". The game has more than 650 puzzles, which Jonathan Blow estimates will take the average player about 80 hours to solve. The puzzles include one that Blow believed that less than 1% of the players would be able to solve.
Mechanically, all puzzles in The Witness are solved in the same way: a path is drawn on a grid. For a path to be a solution to a puzzle, it must satisfy a number of rules. The rules are usually simple. For example, in a grid with white and black squares, a path may be required to separate the different kinds of squares, as illustrated to the left.
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