It doesn’t straight up tell you any of these rules, instead trusting you to figure them out through context clues and the gradual building of puzzle difficulty. But then it introduces grammar into the equation, forcing you to figure out how to combine the separate rules you’ve learned into fully functional sentences. The game begins by teaching you the basics of its nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Tetris blocks force you to draw those specific tetromino shapes before exiting the maze - these are just three of the ever expanding rules that are relatively easy to wrap your head around.įirst and foremost, the puzzles of The Witness are a language. ![]() Multicolored squares need to be segmented and separated by the lines that you draw. ![]() Small dots pepper the maze, and you have to make sure your line goes through each one before you hit the exit. But once you branch out into the island proper, rules begin to be added to these scenarios. The puzzles themselves start off fairly simple, asking you to draw a line from the beginning to the end of a maze. Ignite enough turrets, and the light eventually opens up the mountain, revealing the final area of the game. Each area is packed with puzzle panels that lead towards powering up a large turret that fires a beam of light towards the top of the mountain at the center of the island. Once you get through the brief introductory section, you’re free to explore the island at your leisure - from its abandoned village, to winding hedge mazes, to desert ruins, to strange bunkers. The Witness is a first-person puzzle exploration game set on a sprawling and colorful island filled with a dozen different unique and fantastical biomes. And ever since its release, I’ve been searching for another puzzle game to come along and completely take over my life with the same spell that it did. The Witness gripped me tight with its world, puzzles, and mysteries - inside the game as well as out. However, upon finally having the opportunity to immerse myself in the game, it became clear it was so much more than the sum of its parts. On its surface, it had a lot of stuff directed exactly at my tastes - a mysterious island to explore a la Myst, a bright and beautiful color palette, and the same quasi-pretentious philosophical musings of Braid that I actually quite liked. As a massive fan of Braid, I followed the development of The Witness for years leading up to its release. It was the long-awaited follow up to Jonathan Blow’s wonderful Braid, which in itself was one of the early indie hits of the Xbox Live Arcade era. ![]() 26, 2016, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. It’s been five years since Thekla’s The Witness came out on Jan. And when you lay your head down at the end of the day and close your eyes, you see flickers of the game dancing in your mind before you fall asleep. You find yourself bringing it up in conversation, excited when you discover that somebody else has played it. Have you ever played a game that you just can’t stop thinking about? Even when you put down the controller and walk away from the screen, it seems to follow you around.
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