The Witness

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 (e.g. their solutions may all involve symmetry). 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.

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 Witness's 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 (1993). Blow attributes much of The Witness's 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, "[cutting] 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.

Funding and development

The Witness was announced in 2009 following the release of Jonathan Blow's previous game, Braid. At the time, Blow had no firm plans to release or publicize the game, and had allocated a budget of about US$800,000 for the game.

Blow created the Thekla, Inc. team for the development and publication of The Witness. The company's name is taken from a city in Italo Calvino's novel Invisible Cities. Starting in December 2009, Blow worked remotely with a 3D artist and a technical programmer full-time. Blow stated that by 2015 there were about eight full-time members on his team, though there were ten or eleven people involved around 2011 and as many as fifteen at its peak. The Witness incorporates other artists' and programmers' contributions in smaller roles, such as David Hellman, who had previously worked with Blow on Braid's art design and worked on conceptualizing the design of The Witness. Other contributors include Eric Urquhart, who provided 3D concept artwork for the game, and Ignacio Castaño, who developed a rendering system for the game's illumination and visual effects. Blow gives much credit to Orsolya Spanyol, a freshly graduated graphic artist he hired around 2011, for transforming the original sparse imagery of the island to the more vivid scenery that was included in the final game. By diversifying work on the game, Blow was able to focus more of his time on the core game design, allowing his team to implement his vision, in contrast to the development of Braid, where he also had to program much of the game himself.

The Witness took seven years to complete. Blow attributes this long period to the expansion of the game's scope as he and his team continued to work on it. He opted against time- and cost-saving solutions that would have affected his ambition for the game, such as condensing the game's scope or using an off-the-shelf game engine. Instead, he put revenues from sales of Braid, totaling around $4 million as of April 2014, into development costs. Blow had to seek out additional capital in February 2015 after exhausting the Braid revenues, but believed that regardless of the costs of extra development time, the debt would be justified in the long run. Final development costs were estimated at just under $6 million. While Blow considers The Witness to be an indie game due to the lack of funding or support from a major publisher, he also feels that the scope of the project by time and cost is closer to what a AAA studio would produce, and that it represents a new type of game development in the industry.

Design, art, and sound

The design and layout of the island in The Witness has been nearly consistent since the start of development, with the team working on populating the world with specific puzzles, and detailing the landscape and other art assets. Sam Machkovech, a writer for Ars Technica who played a demo in 2012 and 2015, noted that the island had remained familiar between these two sessions. One aspect of the design is the use of power cables running across the island, connecting puzzle panels to the mechanics they control. Blow found these to help in the initial parts of the game to provide "extreme clarity" of where the player was to go next, but discovered that this also made the game too much of a grind of repeating the same pattern. Over the course of development, the power cable aspects remained, but the designers changed how easy they were to trace across the landscape as a means to guide the player towards potential objectives.

The island has been structured to provide a fair mix of puzzle-solving, exploration, and narrative elements while avoiding a "paradox of choice" by giving the player too much freedom and confusion about where to go next. According to artist Luis Antonio, one of the first things that Blow wanted the player to see was the mountain, to make them aware that this was their ultimate goal. The game initially started the player in an abandoned bunker converted to a living space, but as it was originally arranged, the player would exit the bunker not facing the mountain. Though they attempted to move and rotate the bunker space to meet Blow's goal, it was ultimately scrapped in favor of a simpler space with interior elements that fit with other portions of the game, and which the player would climb out of into the external environment with the mountain in full view.

This introductory area was also meant to serve as the tutorial, helping players to understand the fundamental mechanics of switching between solving puzzles and exploring the environment to find others, and Thekla spent a great deal of time fine-tuning the details to be clear without verbal explanation. The team's artists worked to support Blow's objective of guiding the player by using contrasts of color and of natural and man-made structures to highlight areas that the player would be drawn towards. Blow wanted the game's art to start off with bright colors and high saturation, to present a type of optimism to the player, while later settings would become more dull. He also wanted to make sure all elements stood out to avoid visual noise that may have interfered with puzzle solving. To accomplish this, he and his team often had to review the game as if they were new players to it, and identify what elements they were visually drawn to; this would often identify features of the island they had incorporated early on but were no longer appropriate for the final game.

Marketing and release

The game was quietly revealed to the public by Blow at the 2010 Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) with the help of independent developers Chris Hecker and Andy Schatz, who were sharing booth space for demonstrations of their own games, SpyParty and Monaco: What's Yours Is Mine; the two provided a table for demonstrating The Witness without any signs or other markings. Blow wanted to keep the demonstration subtle and a surprise and to see players' reactions without the pressure of other players waiting in line to try the game. Blow himself was present at the Expo but kept his distance from the demonstration table. The fact that The Witness was playable at the Expo was only fully revealed after the Expo by both Blow and Stephen Totilo of Kotaku, who saw and played the game but did not mention its presence until later. Players who tried the game at PAX or saw footage of it from the Kotaku article afterward became concerned that The Witness would simply be a series of mazes to solve. Blow reiterated that there was more to the game than mazes, and that he encountered similar problems when trying to promote Braid, since seeing videos of portions of the game does not serve to demonstrate "what happens in the player's mind during the puzzle-solving process".

At the time of the 2010 reveal, Blow had anticipated releasing The Witness on Windows and iOS devices, and on an unspecified set of consoles, including possibly the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Later that year, Blow restated his stance, and felt that there would be no console release on initial release, considering the amount of additional programming time and limitations of the console platforms. In November 2011, Blow was able to hire two more programmers, and had rethought the release for consoles; while he could not commit to a console release initially, the additional labor would help make it possible to have one console version ready at the time of launch, with the version for other consoles to be made available at a later time. As development progressed and its engine become more complex, Blow opted to forgo the development of seventh-generation console versions, citing their "relatively low system specs".

Around 2012, development of The Witness for the next generation of consoles with improved hardware capabilities became a possibility, and Blow and his team started looking at this opportunity. They had discounted the Wii U, again citing low specs, and decided to choose between the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One platforms. At the time of this decision, Sony was able to provide hardware information and development kits. Sony also sought out independent developers like Blow to learn about the upcoming PlayStation 4 in preparation for its launch, while Microsoft had not yet released firm specifications for their console. Blow opted to go with the PlayStation platform; this decision was also aided by representatives from Sony who were interested in bringing the game to their system, and Sony's larger trend of bringing more downloadable and independently developed games to their next console, in contrast to Microsoft's tighter controls. Blow affirmed that there was no monetary deal involved with this decision. He also later acknowledged that he had had difficulties working with Microsoft in the past, and had previously explained several of the issues he had to go through with Microsoft to release his earlier game Braid. The Witness had been planned as a launch-window title for the PlayStation 4 in 2013, a limited-time console exclusive. The Windows and iOS versions, at that point, were planned to be released alongside the PlayStation 4 version, barring any development delays that Blow and his team encountered. Other console versions would come later if they opted to develop for them.

Reception

The Witness received "generally favorable reviews" on all platforms, according to the review aggregator website Metacritic.

Chloi Rad of IGN awarded the game a perfect score of 10/10, calling it a masterpiece and stating that it was "[a] beautiful, powerful, and cleverly designed puzzle game with a wealth of mysteries to unravel." Brenna Hillier from VG247 praised the game's use of a first-person perspective to present what otherwise could have been a simple series of puzzle boards, and was impressed by the steep learning curve that the puzzles presented, "impossible, incomprehensible puzzles melt into simple exercises after you’ve visited nearby locations". Aaron Riccio of Slant Magazine found that there was a "jarring shift" once the player reached the puzzles inside the mountain, with puzzles that relied more on obfuscation in a more clinical environment, contrasting with the rest of the island.

Julie Muncy of Wired, though impressed, noted that the lack of any narrative or gameplay guidance could cause "players to bounce off [the game] entirely". Muncy noted that Blow wanted to make games for people who read Gravity's Rainbow, but whereas the novel was difficult yet "enamored with the world and the people in it", the game felt lifeless, concluding "It's hard, but empty. That's not the same thing." Cian Maher of Rock Paper Shotgun disagreed, describing the game as "hardcore postmodern", and concluding that Blow "actually did make a game for people who like to read Gravity's Rainbow." Oli Welsh of Eurogamer praised the game's puzzles for providing numerous "eureka" moments to the player and considered the title as the video game analog of the Goldberg Variations, but felt that the narrative atop the puzzles was "self-involved and wilfully obscure" and believed that it could have been omitted, as Blow and his team "needn't have tried to make a puzzle out of art when he had already, so beautifully and so successfully, made art out of puzzles". Justin McElroy of Polygon gave the game an 8/10 rating, describing it as "uplifting but frustrating"; he criticized the length of time involved in solving certain puzzles while expressing concern that less-patient players would take shortcuts. "That will naturally lead to more cheating. It will snowball." Bob Mackey of USgamer was more critical, giving it 2 of 5 stars. Though he praised its visuals and setting, Mackey found the puzzles to be very difficult, saying that "there's simply too much going on to give me the proper feedback about what I'm getting wrong" and suggesting that "Blow was maybe a little too close to his work".

Legacy

The Witness is widely regarded as one of the best games of the 2010s. The game appeared on 'Best of the decade' features from IGN, Polygon, NME, CNET, and National Post. Edge considered the game the 22nd-best game of all time in 2017, and IGN ranked it the 59th-best in 2022.

The Witness inspired the parody video game The Looker by Subcreation Studio, released in 2022.