The Witness

Developer: Thekla, Inc
Steam Release: Jan 2016
Hours Played: 6
Similar To: Quern / The Talos Principle / The Turing Test
Rating: 3/5 Parsnips





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GAMEPLAY

With a firm nod to mysterious first-person adventure games such as Myst and The Talos Principle, in The Witness you are a lone human let loose on a remote and deserted island. Like those games before it, you examine the remnants of a once civilized land where puzzles seem to have been left specifically to be solved by one such as you. Likewise, in first-person view you wander through various areas such as abandoned castles, courtyards, orchards and small villages while approaching small screens connected by cables.The screens themselves contain deceptively simple line puzzles which, on being solved, light up the cable to activate the next stage of your adventure be it by unlocking a mechanism allowing you to see more of the island or simply leading to another puzzle.

BALANCE & PACE

An eerie stillness and a strange silence fills the air as you continue to work out each problem but it's both the way that the puzzles are solved and the intriguing way that the island unravels and reveals itself that gives The Witness its appeal. For a start there is no text or narrator telling you what to do. Everything has to be worked out from the visual clues given. Sure, it's easy to see where your line starts and where it should end in those maze-like conundrums but working out the rule for determining the exact path it needs to take is the challenge. And what makes you want to travel from one area to the next is down to the interesting ways designer Jonathan Blow varies and mixes up those rules. Similarly simply discovering what mechanism is being initiated, after successfully completing a set of puzzles, will keep you on the hook.       

PRESENTATION & DESIGN 

For an indie game with such a small team behind it, this is a pretty sleek production. Although the menus are plain and unobtrusive, and the puzzles on screen are extremely conventional by design, the island itself may remind some of exotic Mediterranean villages set beside the sea where the sun is always shining. Roaming around, you'll stumble across countless points of interest that will obviously be significant later but are obscure enough to keep you guessing. The lifelike statues, frozen almost as if they had unwittingly caught a glimpse of Medusa herself, along with the ominous windmill and crumbling buildings adds to the mystery and the question of whether people left willingly or not. Movement and speed in first person view is spot-on, while zooming in and out of puzzles is swish and seamless.           

PROGRESS SYSTEM

True to its less-is-more philosophy when it comes to giving guidance on how to solve the line-puzzles, the player is kept very much in the dark when it comes to how they are progressing. There are even only two (yes, two) possible achievements - with one being to get to the endgame! There is no map of the island (which I think is a shame) to show what has been explored and what hasn't and no stats or figures pertaining to how many puzzles have been completed or are yet to be completed. That pretty much leaves area unlocks as a sign for how deep into the game you are - and that can only be checked by actually visiting those areas on foot in the game. Wouldn't it have been a good idea to name areas and have some sort of a checklist so players could set their own goals?     

CONCLUSION

Like Braid, Jonathan Blow's other well-known creation, The Witness will have some players pulling their hair out at the sheer obscurity of it all. Personally, after six hours of play, the game is certainly starting to test my patience. However it has enough to hold my interest and enough to make me think I can crack it with perseverance. In saying that while proceeding further is a very slow process (20 minute sessions being the norm) I can see why it would be a hit with certain players with a certain type of brain. For all type of players though, although movement and roaming is fairly nippy, I'm surprised there isn't a fast-travel feature. At a steep price tag though for a game with 50% of its core gameplay arguably being covered by countless budget games such as Line-Way, Lyne  or Unium, I'd say it'd be worth snapping up in a sale.