Before I actually review The Witness, I feel I should preface this right from the start to say that I personally did not enjoy this game. The reason I bring this up before I even review it is because I want to get ahead of the potential accusation that if I end up scoring The Witness negatively that it’s just because of my own tainted dislike of it. I try to be as objective as I can when doing something like this, and though I will obviously have my own negative interpretation of it, I don’t want that to affect the way the game is perceived. So I just wanted to open with that.
Puzzle Island
The Witness is a game released in 2016, in which players take control of an unnamed and ultimately unseen character on an island who must solve puzzles in order to reach what is considered the game’s endpoint: a mountain that towers over the island. The puzzles themselves never change in their base nature; the player is presented with a board (usually a grid, but this isn’t always the case) in which there are one or more start points (represented by a circle) and exit points (represented by part of the design of the puzzle “exiting” the layout). All the player needs to do is control a beam of light from the start point to the end point. Simple.
Except of course it isn’t actually that simple. While The Witness does present you with this incredibly easy option of a straight line from one side of the board to the other right at the start, the nature of the puzzles changes across the different environments of the island, and starts to incorporate different challenges in order to actually be solved. This will range from ideas such as little black dots on the grid which must all be picked up in order to complete the puzzle, to blocks of different colours that need to be separated using the beam of light we control, or even by forcing the player to have to include certain shapes in their movement across the puzzle. Some of these puzzles may appear to be able to be solved instantly on a first look as you can trace a direct line, but there may be clues in the environment on a specific order in which the puzzle must be completed; this can be seen with the “tree puzzles” of the pink orchard where the puzzle grid resembles a tree trunk and branches, and nearby trees will have the same design, with a certain branch having an apple (representing the correct choice), or puzzles in the desert requiring the player to move to reflect light off them, revealing shadows in the shape of the true path.
As the player progresses through the game, puzzles may begin to incorporate multiple puzzle types from the different island areas all in the same puzzle, requiring the player to think more and more outside the box. The player may even begin to notice that certain aspects of the island’s environment is actually shaped in a similar way to the puzzles, and interacting with them will reveal that they can also be solved.
As an aside I discovered a puzzle like this right at the start of The Witness as I sat down to review it: the game’s first real obstacle (a laser grid blocking your way) can actually be lined up with the sun, creating it’s own puzzle, the solving of which rewarded me with a new location with audio logs representing the game’s credits. It was a nice little touch that shows your brain adapting to the logic of the puzzles you gain after a few hours with it.
Other than the puzzles combining multiple formats of puzzle (most notably the Mountain section, accessible after fully completing 7 of the island’s 11 areas), there isn’t a tangible difficulty curve to the puzzles: how easy or how hard the puzzles are depends entirely on the player’s own ability to think in the way the game wants you to. In my case, for example, the puzzles where you control two beams of light moving in a symmetrical pattern came quite naturally, but the “Tetris puzzles” as I came to know them, where you have to shape your light beam into specific shapes reminiscent of Tetris pieces before solving the puzzle, was incredibly difficult. It is very much a situation where everybody’s experience is different.
This is not a game you can just rush through, solving the puzzles can take anywhere from seconds to…possibly tens, dozens of minutes. As I neared the end of my playthrough, a viewer in my stream warned me of a room I was coming up to in which he was stuck for hours. I wasn’t as unlucky, but it’s not hard to see how this could happen. I very nearly lost patience with the game in my very first session of it, and I wouldn’t recommend it to people who are easily frustrated as a result.
An Aesthetic of Simplicity
The design of the game, everything from it’s gameplay premise, to it’s narrative, graphic style, and audio boils down to simplicity. And this isn’t a negative. Everything within The Witness is boiled down to it’s absolute necessary essence, and then polished off to the best it can be.
Visually the game uses relatively simple shapes with an almost-but-not-quite cel shaded quality. Colours are bright and saturated, but just on the edge of cartoony, with each of the island’s regions using their own individual colour palettes and models. To the point that each individual region uses it’s own type of tree (both design and colour) which aids the player in knowing where they are. This is important as the game features no on-screen assistance outside of the very first puzzle (an on-screen prompt on which button to press to interact): there is no HUD, no map, no markers; The Witness expects players to learn from environmental context what they need to do.
The game also features no narrative, and this was what personally threw me when I started playing it. This was because I went into The Witness with very little knowledge other than “island of puzzles” and I’d pictured a sort of Portal-like game that used a very focused narrative to take you through it, and this is nothing like that. At all. There are audio logs that can be found throughout, but they don’t tell any story about the world of the game, they are just recordings of quotes from notable historical figures.
The only real clue to the game’s setting comes from it’s visual design: across the vast majority of the island, it seems as though most places we visit (which are in a state of ruin themselves usually) are modern structures (including the puzzles, which usually have power cables running across the natural environment) built upon the remains of some more ancient settlements, though this ultimately doesn’t actually tell us anything about…anything. There are what appear to be statues across the island, though these all represent regular people doing every day actions or interacting in some way (through sometimes players may have to look at things from certain angles to make this apparent). This almost gives a visual idea that these statues could actually be people, suddenly frozen in whatever they were doing, all at once.
The Witness also features no music, the sound work on the game comes entirely from sound effects of the world around the player, with a notable lack of life (human or animal). Oddly enough, this doesn’t make the game boring, as any kind of music would seemingly take away from the simplistic experience intended. Though this did make for probably quite a boring watch on stream when I got absorbed in trying to solve a puzzle, or allow for distracting overly-sensitive microphone noises in my first stream when I hadn’t noticed severe balancing issues.
All of these things however, the lack of story and setting, the bright and colourful simple design, and absence of music, along with these statues of life frozen in time, and occasionally creepy design quirks (like tree branches in the shape of eyes watching you, figures hidden within rock formations, etc…) contribute to an overall serene, yet slightly off-putting environment that I had personally forgotten until I briefly picked the game back up to remind myself of it to review it.
In Conclusion
The Witness is not a game for everyone. It wasn’t for me when I played it; I was expecting a briskly paced entertaining game like Portal, that would be fun to show as my first stream, and what I got was something much slower, at times frustrating and annoying, and mostly quiet game. It is, however, incredibly solidly designed, and everything in it can be seen to mean something, to have some purpose behind it, and after sitting back down with it in my own time to refresh my mind on it to write this review, without viewers, without the pressure of trying to be entertaining to an audience, I was able to appreciate the way the game is meant to come across a little bit more. I definitely recommend it to people who like a mental challenge, who aren’t afraid of feeling like idiots (this happened to me a lot), and who appreciate having to think during a game.
All in all The Witness does have more good points than bad points, but it’s one of those weird cases where the sheer frustrating nature of the bad points can leave you feeling like you had an overall negative experience. In the end, the nature of the game is probably going to be somewhat polarising to those who play it.
| Pros | Cons |
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| Final Score: | 8/10 |
Until next time…buh-bye!
Disclaimer: This review was written using a copy of The Witness bought by TonyKM himself.