The Witness

This exceedingly difficult puzzle game, standing on the broad shoulders of Myst, is just as tall. Fans of the genre must play this. So much has been written about this game, but I'll still add my own words and attempt to present it to you with no spoilers.

Imagine a grid-based puzzle game in which certain kinds of squares have certain kinds of rules and the rules can interact with each other in complex ways requiring you to find a clever solution that would satisfy them all. This is already something a lot of us would enjoy.

Now imagine that you're not actually told these rules, but rather have to infer them yourself via a few easier puzzles. Some of the rules are complex enough that you might think you understand them, and indeed you've managed to solve a lot of puzzles, but you find out later that your understanding was incomplete. This learning process adds an additional layer of reasoning, requiring both deduction and induction. The result is a primal satisfaction in the realization that you've learned something new and useful.

Now imagine that all of this is set in a breathtakingly gorgeous, superbly landscaped and architected 3D world in which the environment can invade the puzzle and become part of it, or indeed is the puzzle. You need to explore and look and even listen very, very, very carefully. You often need to literally think outside the box.

And now put lots and lots of this content, and even more optional content (with a twist) for fanatical completionists, and finally wrap it in fragments of narrative that contemplatively contextualize the entirety of the game. You have The Witness.

I do have some criticism. There are some aspects that conflict with the core principles of the game, as it presents itself to you, and are otherwise simply not fun.

Firstly, the environment is an open world, but to succeed you need to go through it in a fairly specific order. You can learn through trial and error what works and what doesn't, but it could easily require a whole lot of trial and error. This, to me, disrespects a certain but common kind of player, who when faced with a challenge tries to work it out before moving on. If that's you, then you're going to have a bad time, at least until you learn (the hard way) to go somewhere else and come back later. But even after you learn this lesson, it's applied and communicated inconsistently. Sometimes you may think you should be ready for a puzzle, but in fact you're missing a crucial lesson. So you'll be moving back and forth and back and forth a great deal and questioning your intelligence. To me, this meta mechanic stands in the way of enjoying the core mechanic instead of enhancing it.

Secondly, though a lot of effort has gone into making the puzzles fair, in that players could figure out solutions without resorting to trickery or brute force, it does not follow that solutions are not tedious. Jonathan Blow stated that he strongly disliked the "pixel hunting" that many such games require, and The Witness is great at making use of the core mechanic of drawing big, thick lines from a clear starting point to a clear end point. Unfortunately, I think The Witness sometimes fails to avoid that kind of tedium. Quite a few puzzles require you to use very specific positions, angles, and timings with no indication of failure. And, ironically, some of the most difficult optional puzzles are exactly about pixel hunting. So much for pretense. Are these puzzles fair? Strictly speaking, pixel hunting is fair: you can patiently hunt for and find the pixels without resorting to tricks. But is it fun? If spending a whole weekend moving back and forth across the landscape looking for a bunch of pixels sounds fun to you, then yes. I, on the other hand, preferred to use a walkthrough for those. And even then, it was often unnecessarily difficult (=frustrating) to achieve the necessary precision.

Still, to his credit, the most frustrating pixel-hunting puzzles are optional. You can (and probably will, at least at first) complete the game without having to tackle them or even being aware of them.

My final criticism is that the tone of the game can be oppressive. It's beautiful while being devoid of a sense of joy, as if there's absolutely no humor allowed. The few bits of spoken narrative speak to a concept that takes itself very, very seriously, and seemingly intends to be overbearing. There are some important Easter-egg-like exceptions to this, and perhaps it's intended that you roll your eyes a bit, too. I get it, but I still think this monument to austerity would have been enhanced with, rather than hurt by, more obviously lighthearted interventions.

Despite my specific frustrations, I count The Witness as a classic of the puzzle genre, of video games, and even of games in general. Blow believes that video games can deliver unto us epiphanies, and here he shows us how it can be done. The Witness doesn't create a new genre, although I'm sure there will be many clones and homages. Instead, the game's innovation is in its total dedication to its principles, which even meant creating an original 3D engine for it. Even if it doesn't always succeed in comprehensive consistency, The Witness is an example of where games could take us.

Final recommendation: Blow has talked extensively about The Witness, but I think the best discussion is in his long interview with Adam Conover, which you can find on YouTube.