LogFAQs > #932384287

<b>#10: The Witness
Released on 1/26/2016
Steam</b>
(written in 2017)

Talk about a linear game...oh ho ho, line jokes!

I hold Braid in great admiration and my laptop wasnt strong enough to play The Witness for more than a few minutes at a time, so I bought a new desktop computer in preparation for Jonathan Blows next game. Was it worth it? Oh yeah, but also I had to accept this game did not intend to hit every note Braid hit.

Blow is a master of a-ha moments. The concept of drawing lines to their proper conclusion is simple enough for a puzzle-game, yet there are just so many different rules hes found to make you do this along the way. They start off simple enough -- theyre basically simple mazes on some flat pads. The game cleverly teaches you without speaking how the rules work, and as you explore this island you see how many different ways these flat pads will demand your understanding of these rules. Knowledge becomes a power-up, where suddenly you can take on previously blocked-off paths because you figured out some rules elsewhere. Its almost a Metroidvania based on intelligence instead of items.

This is a much larger game than I expected -- were talking hundreds and hundreds of puzzles with increasing difficulty -- so know it will get complicated in fair but hard ways. I found myself taking tiny gasps of excitement when I figured out some of its most clever puzzles.

The puzzles slowly creep off the flat pads, from just on-pad puzzles to puzzles affected by what you see elsewhere in the distance to puzzles guided by your worlds shadows, lighting, sounds, filters, personal paths you took to reach the puzzles...and when you finally notice your first line in the environment, you feel like a god with powers you dont fully understand. Its a fantastic feeling when all you did was trace a line with your eyes.

The island is like a love letter to Myst fans. It is gigantic, beautiful, vibrant, interconnected, mysterious, and captivating despite almost no music to be found. I loved the choice of having one dark cloud in an otherwise-gorgeous sky over the island -- it held my imagination for what all that might mean. Your location also contains a lot of tiny secrets along the way. Many of the secrets are just visual -- oh hey, look at those two statues that now look like theyre holding hands -- while other secrets are audio clips of philosophy quotes. Theyre rewarding in the moment since I think many of the quotes are interesting.

However, I looked to these quotes as part of a larger story. As far as the larger picture of The Witness goes, I didnt quite get the same satisfaction I expected after playing Braid. I kept looking for how all these clues and my mastery of the puzzles tied into how this world would become a more interesting place. Blow even left some videos in the game to watch that I expected to further deepen my appreciation of the world, and it did in a way...but then something funny happened.

I started seeing these lines in my own life -- not just in the game, but in random places of my apartment or in drawings. I found that the games secret ending clarified what I was recognizing in myself: this is a mental game of his that Blow is now teaching the world. The Witness was less a game about deeply exploring its world and more a game of better exploring my own world. Its a unique layer to a game I didnt know could be intended; Ive had visions of Meat Boy jumping across picture frames on my wall and dreams of Guitar Hero lines with its incoming notes...but those were accidents. This was the plan Blow had all along.

Its genius, but my expectations for Braid made me want something that had a more satisfying IN-GAME narrative than this. So...I still think Braid is the better game, but The Witness counts as another masterpiece by Blow and I got like seventy more hours of legitimate content out of this than Braid so there is no shame to be had here.

Its the best game Ive played from 2016, even if it has a bottle of pee hidden away.

NOW IN 2020: This is puzzle gaming at its purest. I've dabbled with other recent puzzle games that were supposed to be puzzle game legends of our time -- I'm thinking of Baba is You and Steven's Sausage Rolls -- and they're neat games I wish I could keep playing, but I don't think they get the difficulty curve right for me. The Witness does for the most part...could have used a few more introductory puzzles to the tetris pieces, but otherwise they nailed this.

Also, the game earns its largely-silent ambience, but one day when I replay this I'm having background music.

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O P E R A T I O N O U S T : Nominate SHEIK!
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