The Witness

Release: 2016

Developer/Publisher: Thekla Inc (Jonathan Blow)

Genre: First person, puzzle

Gameplay Stats: 13 hours, 1/2 Steam Achievements  

Jonathan Blow is somewhat of an icon in the indie video game scene. I really enjoyed Braid and I was finally in the mood for experiencing his other game, The Witness. I fully completed Braid with a couple friends back in college (circa 2009) and found it to be devilishly difficult towards the end. Will The Witness live up to the same standard? Minor spoilers to follow!

In short, yes. This game is extremely elegant in the way that it introduces puzzles and new mechanics. I found myself learning throughout the entire game which is relatively unique in puzzlers in my experience. There were a good many puzzles or puzzle types that I found to be too difficult for me, even when I learned the rules through a quick Google search. Your mileage may vary here of course, but the music and additive color puzzles were very hard to me. I understood the basic mechanics present, but a lot of the layers were hard for me to parse. I suppose the point is for it to be difficult, but I didn't expect to need to research things like how to record waveforms or color theory.

I did spoil myself on a few of the puzzles required to complete the game, but I don't regret it at all. The final bird song puzzle was so layered that I had a hard time figuring out which song I was supposed to be listening to. I was very close to the end of that stretch of the game so I decided to look it up instead of trying to teach myself basic audio engineering to record the waveforms and separate out the different bird songs. I abandoned some of the difficult color puzzles in the greenhouse area only to find out that some of that knowledge was necessary to finish the game later. I spoiled those final couple puzzles for myself because the background they were on was strobing in such a way that actually hurt my eyes when I was staring at it.

It's weird to play a game in 2020 with some pretty bad accessibility issues. It's definitely possible to complete the game without needing the audio queues provided by the bird songs, but I don't think it would be possible to complete the game if you were photosensitive or had color blindness issues. That's not necessarily a rule-out in my eyes, but I think it would have been good to have an option to make the game more playable if you did have those particular issues. At least some kind of warning beforehand would have been nice. I was in a series of puzzles when the background began to strobe, that would be a nasty surprise if a player was prone to seizures.

The entire game is SO elegantly presented, these couple of issues really stand out. I super enjoyed the fact that new mechanics were being introduced through the end of the game, the pillar puzzles right before the finish were some of my favorites. Very difficult, but enjoyable. I don't know if I would recommend the game without a couple of strong warnings, but I did enjoy my time with it. I don't think I will return to it to fully complete the game like I did Braid, but this game was largely very enjoyable. [8/10]