This means something… Our review of The Witness

It’s here, finally. Jonathan Blow’s hugely anticipated follow up to the surprisingly well-designed time traveling platformer, Braid. After eight years of teasing us through glimpses at conferences or trade shows, we finally get a chance to sit down and see what’s been keeping Mr. Blow up at night for nearly the past decade. The answer, line puzzles. So many damn line puzzles.

The game’s ominous and minimalistic opening has you emerge from a sterile cylindrical tomb underground through your very first line puzzle. There are perhaps two tutorial prompts and that’s it. You’re on your own. No helpful prompts, no minimaps highlighting what’s left to conquer. It’s on you to solve the riddles of this island. After a brief stint rerouting power in a walled garden, the virtual world opens up to you and you can travel anywhere you want. And you’ll want to, immediately. The world is as serene as it is enigmatic. Yes it’s weird to see a statued secret service man standing at that gate but look at reflective lake! Pathways splinter and layer over one another so you’ll no doubt get lost over and over, but for the first few hours this won’t matter to you as the world is so well crafted.

Curious what you’ll find in there? If you said more puzzles, you’re in luck!

But all that glitters is not gold.

You’re here on a mission, we think, and that is to solve an inordinate amount of line puzzles. You’ll have basic mazes, matching puzzles, perspective challenges, auditory tests, etc. all captured in the most rudimentary looking line puzzles. As others have pointed out, the core game mechanic could have been created on an Intellivision. The island portion is just a walking simulator to navigate between these puzzles.

The learning curve for each can be steep too. Typically the game does a good job slowly introducing you to the new rules with basic puzzles before forcefully ripping the training wheels off, but as you’re free to go just about anywhere, it’s not uncommon to stumble upon the more advanced puzzles way too early with absolutely no idea what to do. We spent more time than we care to admit just staring at grids trying to make sense of them. Granted, there is a map that illustrates where symbols are introduced suggesting you go there to learn how to solve those puzzles, but you can only access that map by finding the boat that circles the island’s perimeter.

The game is undoubtedly beautiful

The game is notoriously difficult though and these puzzles will easily consume hours of your time. For a while, finding these puzzles and unlocking parts of the world is a fascinating experience. What is exactly going to be in that bunker when I unlock this door? What is going to be at the top of the castle? But the answer over and over is inevitably more puzzles. That’s especially true in the abrupt and obtuse ending as you literally watch every puzzle reset putting you back to square one. Point is, just don’t expect much variation as you play.

The game doesn’t hold your hand when it comes to telling its story either. There are audio logs scattered around although they offer up coffee shop philosophical thoughts but no real clues to what’s happening. Even more infuriating are the unlockable videos which again speak more towards metaphysical concepts instead of any tangible ideas. The final unlockable video in which the speaker instructs her audience to give up on expectations and hopes to truly be happy resonated with us in ways perhaps Mr. Blow didn’t intend. (We’d love to give up on expecting the game to get better, but it did cost us $40 to set foot on this island on the first place…)

Give up on expectations, especially when playing this game.

The game draws obvious comparisons to other FPS island puzzlers like Myst or The Talos Principle. But for indie gaming, which we consider Mr. Blow’s works to be, we couldn’t help but compare to another recent indie puzzler, Gone Home. That game also contained you in a well designed space and left you to literally figure out the clues as to what’s happening. However, that experience was significantly more rewarding thanks to a intriguing story and interesting ways to unlock the new areas. Even the recent Among the Sleep, despite its trial and error gameplay and erratic platforming, impressed us more with its creative storytelling within the mechanics of a horror game.

It’s disappointing as, like many gamers, we were extremely pleased with Braid. Jonathan Blow managed to squeeze out every possible permutation in time travel puzzles and still delivered a pretty powerful and profound story in the game’s finale. Here, he’s focused all of his impressive intensity at line puzzles and sprinkled them all over a well designed map. Instead of offering rewards, he offers more puzzles. Instead of providing motivation for us to play, he offers shoe gazing platitudes about meditation, living in the moment, etc. It’s hard to feel deep and peaceful when every corner of this island you look is riddled with more goddamned line puzzles.

We started to get why these others gave up

His thoughts aren’t bad, just unearned. We’ll always remember that giraffe moment in The Last of Us. It was our last peaceful moment with Ellie before the heart-wrenching finale. Playing catch with Dog using the gravity gun before the invasion and subsequent plunge into Ravenholm in Half-Life 2. The final confrontation with Boss in the white lily field at the end of Snake Eater. These were moments of meditative zen or levity worked because the games were solid enough to disarm us first. The actual gameplay of The Witness isn’t really that good so to suddenly inject loosely connected philosophy here isn’t profound, it’s pretentious.

The Witness is an interesting game to, well, witness. It was massively hyped thanks to Mr. Blow’s indie appeal and had gamers salivating to try it after the years it spent making random appearances at gaming shows. Many review sites came out of the gate hailing it as an instant classic worthy of a top score yet everyone is now squirming to find out if the game really means anything. Yes, it’s hard and time consuming, but surely I spent my time toward something important, right? This wasn’t just hours of line puzzles Mr. Blow etched out over the past 8 years, right? This game waxes about relationships with God and how to really live so it must be deep, right?  He must have eaten that cracker in the secret ending for a reason, right?

This game must mean something, right?

Our Verdict: WORTH A RENT

It’s hard to do as it’s a digital download but the $40 price tag is too steep for what you get.

The Best Part: The initial mystery or promise of what you’ll find when you emerge from your vault and the potential of what’s on top of the mountain.

The Worst Part: Actually finding out.  There’s not much there so try to enjoy the island for what it is and not feel too bruised about the entry fee.