While finding a solution will very rarely make a small change in the environment that allows the player to proceed, it will far more commonly just activate the next puzzle to be solved, with zero fanfare. In the world of The Witness, solving puzzles is its own reward. But after the revelations, there were still the actual solutions to find - and thus the first hints of tedium started to bog things down. Locking in on a piece of the puzzle vocabulary, especially after plenty of struggle, is more satisfying and impactful than finding the Master Sword in the Lost Woods or most any other game achievement I can recall. That's an astounding achievement in pure game mechanic design and should be applauded. It's all done without a single written word of instruction. The information I held in my head about puzzles in The Witness was literally better expressed via signs and symbols and experience than it was via English. My analogy of a "puzzle vocabulary" was more apt than I initially realized. When I asked co-workers for help with solving a couple of late puzzles (sorry, I was weak), it took just as much time for me to explain the rules of what I was doing as it did for them to solve it. Learning that language is half the fun of the game. That rule, however, is combined with and even subverted by other rules to create something of a rudimentary language. Once a rule like this is established, it is unchanging throughout The Witness. The rule - which you are taught via a sequence of puzzles that unpack this knowledge like a Matryoshka doll - is that whatever line you draw from the entrance to the exit must segment the map off in such a way that black and white dots are never in the same section. To use one of the earliest examples: Some mazes are populated by black and white dots. It's like saying that a book is "just words." What makes The Witness interesting is not solely the solving of puzzles it's the way in which the player must discover what I've come to think of as "the puzzle vocabulary." Every puzzle is a maze, but most mazes have multiple paths, and to find the correct one, you must understand what the symbols scattered throughout the mazes mean. But, mechanically speaking: The Witness is maze puzzles. The Witness is loaded with "plotmosphere," a useful if pat bit of neologism that would probably make Blow cringe. Oh, don't mistake me: There's a beautiful, defiantly colorful world to explore, and plenty of little hints of how it came to be. The assumption is that a simple sequence of hundreds of maze puzzles can't be the next project from the creator of Braid, a game in which narrative was so essential that it was inextricable from the mechanics. The question I've gotten most frequently from co-workers when they find out I'm reviewing The Witness is if I've gotten to "the hook" or "the twist" yet. The problem with The Witness, and where I suspect its spell may be undone for some, is when it feels like Blow had left the room. I don't mind being tormented by a developer if it serves a purpose. I had an emotional reaction to a line puzzle - no small feat. Speaking broadly, I would consider both of these reactions a "success" artistically. He was a vengeful tormenting spirit that I, if granted the opportunity, would have delighted in shoving into a well. He was a proud papa who knew I would find the answer if I only persevered.ĭuring the minutes (OK, sometimes hours) leading up to those breakthroughs, he was a cruel, cackling gremlin keeping me prisoner on an island of impossible puzzles. It's fitting, then, that I've never been more aware of a game's creator than I was while solving my way through Jonathan Blow's island getaway.ĭuring the big breakthroughs - the "how could I not have seen that?" moments, the times when light seemed to emanate from my monitor to bathe the face of Justin, the perfect puzzle-solving genius - Blow was a beloved companion. If The Witness is about anything - aside from, well, doing lots of puzzles - it's about spirituality and science, their parallels, their differences.
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