The Witness (2016 video game)
The 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. No direct instructions are provided for solving these puzzles, requiring the player to identify the meaning of symbols in the puzzles. A central design element 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 creative 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 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 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 art, setting, and difficult but surmountable puzzles. Over 100,000 copies were sold within a week of release, which was about as many copies as Braid had done within a year of its release, recouping nearly all development costs.
Gameplay
The Witness is a first-person puzzle video game. The player, as an unnamed character, emerges from an underground bunker and 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. 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 is complete. Several such turrets need to be activated to unlock access to the inside of the mountain and ultimately reach the final goal. Additional puzzles can be discovered if all eleven turrets are activated. Once the player finishes the ending puzzle, they are carried through the air by a cage and returned to the bunker where the game began.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. The rules are taught to the player throughout the course of the game by the puzzles themselves, as such, there is no text or dialogue directly explaining a puzzle's rules. While the rules a path must satisfy can differ substantially across the game, at least three rules apply to all puzzles: paths must always begin from a round node, end on a line segment with a rounded end, and avoid self-intersection. As such, many of the puzzles can be classified as mazes.
The game has two modes of interaction. The first, a walking mode, allows the player to move around and explore the island. The second, the path-drawing mode, is the one the player uses to attempt to solve puzzles. This mode is distinguished from the former by a white border around the screen. In path-drawing mode, the player's avatar is prevented from moving and instead allows the player to use their controls to trace the path through the puzzle's grid. The mode ends once the player solves the puzzle or cancels the mode. Normally, this mode is activated in front of a panel, moving the player's view directly to the panel to solve it, but it can also be activated at any other time. Nearly all puzzles provide immediate feedback if they have been solved correctly or not through sound effects or visual indication.
Most puzzles are easy to identify, located on recognizable eye-level panels scattered around the island. Sometimes several panels will be clustered together, as is typically done when the game is teaching a rule to the player. Most panels are daisy-chained to one another with power cables; solving one will light-up the cable, and unlock another panel. When this occurs in one of the game's regions, the complexity of the puzzles increases as the player works towards unlocking the region's yellow box. Though puzzles in a given region usually need to be completed in order, the regions themselves do not. This gives the game an open-world feel and allows players who get stuck in one region to move on to another.
Sometimes the rules of a puzzle depend not on the elements in its grid, but on the environment itself. There are also a number of optional environmental puzzles, where a single path is disguised in the environment. As with the game's grid puzzles, these are solved by entering path-drawing mode and tracing out the path. However, the components of such paths are distributed across different parts of the environment and disconnected. Only when a path is viewed from a certain perspective do the components join together to form a continuous path. The player then needs to find the correct viewpoint to complete the puzzle. Completing one such puzzle early in the game leads to an alternate ending, which culminates in a live-action sequence, apparently from the player's point-of-view, as they finish the game and take off their virtual reality headset, having seemingly been lost in the game for several days. They try to get back to their senses but still look for the game's puzzles in the real-life environment.
Throughout the island are audio recordings that provide insightful quotes for the player, from people such as Buddha, B.F. Skinner, and William Kingdon Clifford. Voice actors for these logs include Ashley Johnson, Phil LaMarr, Matthew Waterson, and Terra Deva. The player can also encounter a theater where short video clips, such as from James Burke's Connections series or the ending of Andrei Tarkovsky's Nostalghia, can be viewed. A number of visual illusions based on depth perception from the player's position can be found in the environment, such as two seemingly disparate human figures at different parts of the island that appear to be holding hands when viewed from the right position and angle.
Development
The Witness was envisioned after Jonathan Blow released Braid. After seeing the title become a success in 2008, Blow took time off from "serious development" to prototype new game concepts, spending a few months on each. The concept that proved to be the basis for The Witness was a prototype that Blow considered to be "very ambitious and challenging". He considered it risky as it would include the development of a 3D gameplay engine, and feared that he would "fall back to square one"—referring to his lifestyle before the success of Braid—should it fail. Despite these challenges, Blow continued to go forward with The Witness as it was also the most compelling prototypes he had crafted. Direct development work on the title began in late 2008.The game concept itself is based on an earlier title that Blow had envisioned but never completed. According to Blow, in this unfinished title, there was a side gameplay aspect with a "magic moment" that would have made the title exciting. The Witnesss gameplay is based on distilling out this "magic moment" and wrapping it within its own game and story. Blow compared this moment to a spoiler for a movie, and thus avoided disclosure of the mechanic or other aspects of the game before release. The maze panel idea came from an earlier idea that Blow had around 2002 for a game involving wizards where the player would cast spells through mouse gestures, a popular element of video games at the time, with the ability to modify the effect of the spells through slight alterations of specific gestures.
One of Blow's goals for The Witness was to explore the types of non-verbal communication that can be achieved through the medium of video games, an exploration he felt to be important to understanding them as an art form. The name The Witness is derived from the core gameplay aspect of making the player attentive to the surroundings to discover meaning and solutions to puzzles without verbal communication, similar to the approach taken by Myst. Blow attributes much of The Witnesss design to Myst, citing Myst as a game that inspired him to become a developer. An aspect of Myst that Blow desired to correct was the nature of "pixel hunting" in some of its puzzles; the player would have to click on various parts of the virtual machinery without knowing what the end result was until sometime later in the puzzle. Within The Witness, Blow created the maze panels as a unifying mechanic for all the puzzles to avoid this confusion. While the basic mode of interaction is the same for every maze in the game, the rules for solving each puzzle differ depending on the set of symbols included on each specific maze. The game map was divided into sections so that the information the player needed to understand the puzzles in that section would be segregated to one general location, " down a lot of ambiguity that used to exist in adventure games". Puzzles were designed to be unique and meaningful within the context of the rest of the puzzles in the game.
Part of the game's concept is a balance between puzzle-solving and perception, giving the player the freedom to explore The Witnesss world and creating a non-linear approach to gameplay. Two of the first puzzles Blow created involved "clues in objects that populate the world", which led him to recognize he needed to create a world to support these puzzles. This would form a dichotomy between exploration and puzzle-solving, which "made a lot of sense" to Blow. Blow felt that a common issue among most adventure games was punishing the player for being stuck, so he created the island as an open world, allowing players to abandon puzzles they were stuck on to explore others. Blow wanted puzzles to be clearly presented in the open and without any red herrings, similar to the approach he had taken with Braid. Exploration is encouraged through the game's narrative, which is told through audio logs the player can find on the unpopulated island; Blow used the audio logs to create a "feeling of loneliness in a beautiful space" for the player. Because these logs can be found in any order, Blow hopes that each player may have a different perception of the narrative depending on how they have approached the game. These audio logs were initially intended to be more story-driven, but Blow opted later to replace these with more obfuscated and obtuse information, similar to the text elements used in Braid, to avoid directly relaying the story to the player and allow them to figure out the narrative for themselves instead. Blow's team designed the narrative so that players will gain a more concrete understanding of the story as they solve more puzzles.
Blow designed the game to allow the player to self-direct and explore and learn about the world through their own curiosity. Blow saw achievements as hollow and false rewards for the player in comparison to puzzle-solving epiphanies and only implemented them because of requirements for certification by the game console platforms. Blow was also concerned about the immersion-breaking pop-up messages that announce achievements, as he considers The Witness a "subtle kind of game" and external cues can be jarring.
For Blow, the ideal player "is inquisitive and likes to be treated as an intelligent person". He was very careful to avoid "over-tutorializing", noting that when a new idea is introduced in a game, the decision to immediately explain it to avoid confusion "kills epiphany and related things like the joy of discovery." He considers The Witness to be "anti-Nintendo", saying that "if you play a Nintendo game, there's a little character telling you every obvious thing over and over again for hours." "This is going the other way. It's more like the original Legend of Zelda, which didn't tell you anything." Blow designed the puzzles to be "as simple as they can be" while still being challenging enough that players would have "miniature epiphanies over and over again." When asked how he felt about the fact that some players may not finish the game due to its difficulty, Blow said he would rather make a game that people who like to be challenged can appreciate than "scale it back so that more people can feel like they got everything."