What is it?
The Witness is an open-world puzzle game which has been in development since 2008. The game’s creator, Jonathan Blow, is best known for his work on the critically acclaimed 2008 release, Braid.
In The Witness, players explore an island filled with mazes which give clues and rules to solving larger interconnected puzzles. Though the game is navigated in the first person, players solve these mazes on 2D panels, drawing the path between a circular starting point to a rounded end point.
Defined through a clear sense of both challenge and fairness, The Witness’ puzzles are hard. Yet, this difficulty is generated not through cheap tricks, but rather through the player’s need to solve puzzles in a loose sequence that will teach them rules of future challenges. Given this difficulty, players are not expected to complete every puzzle they stumble upon. The game actually encourages players to walk away from puzzles that have stumped them and find other puzzles that may educate them further.
What’s the Story?
Because the game lacks a linear concept, the story in the Witness relies more on unveiling story elements and stitching them together to make sense of it all. The Witness has a story, but it will not be given in the traditional way. Players will experience the narrative as they play the game through contextual story-telling and scattered audio recordings left by former inhabitants of the island.
What drives the game is not some overarching narrative, but rather the mystery revolving around the island and the mountain the player seeks to illuminate. Like many exploration-based games of recent years, the game answers player questions as well as the player is willing to explore and put forth an effort to discover.
In the same way the puzzles are set up to create moments of epiphany for the player, the story also rewards exploration with a sense of narrative discovery.
How Long is it?
Over the course of more than seven years of development, the team at Thekla Inc. has assembled a game which features about 650 puzzles.
The player will attempt to solve puzzles in a 10 different locations on the island which will raise golden turrets to shine light on the mysterious mountain that is central to the game’s intrigue. All-in-all the game will take about 80 hours to complete 100%.
Jonathan Blow has also claimed in a post on the PlayStation blog that “there’s at least one puzzle in the game right now that almost nobody — like 1% of players — will ever be able to figure out.”
The end game does not require players to complete 100% of the puzzles, but finishing mazes found off the beaten path will reveal more about the island than is given to players who simply try to sprint for the finish line.
When and where is it releasing?
The game was originally set to launch in 2011 on mobile platforms with Blow making mention that the game would possibly also launch on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. However, after realizing the limitations of the seventh generation hardware, Blow decided to forego these plans, instead aiming to launch as a timed-exclusive on PlayStation 4.
After yet another delay that kept The Witness from launching in 2013, the game is now set to come to PlayStation 4 and PC on Jan. 26, 2016 and will cost $40.
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