The Witness

It is human instinct to survive; to seek safety and answers. The Witness, a 3D puzzle game from the creator of Braid, opens in an under-lit corridor without explanation. It doesn't provide an iota of information as to what led to the current predicament...

The Witness is a challenging and eye-opening puzzle experience that has been designed with such precision that it can alter your thought process for a long...

The Witness is one of the most elegant puzzlers around. It'll make you think, it'll make you laugh, and it'll make you yell. Above all else, though, it'll take you on one memorable journey that will stay with you for a long...

However, the visuals, the audio, the atmosphere and a brilliant structure – not to mention the relentlessly playful, imaginative puzzle design – transform it into something so much more. You’ll have your own opinion of whether The Witness is a masterpiece or not, but this artsy, cerebral puzzler is the kind of game obsessions are made of.

Break it down and The Witness is nothing more than variations of the same simple maze puzzle, spread across a gorgeous island setting. However, the visuals, the audio, the atmosphere and a brilliant structure – not to mention the relentlessly...

The Witness has a power and pull that carried me throughout the more than 40 hours it took to complete it for the first time, and that, even now, beckons me back to confront the mysteries I left unsolved. Its graceful combination of tangible goals,...

That said, I doubt I'll be heading back in for a completionist run. It's a beautiful game and knowing that I finished it with minimal help actually does make me feel smarter. It also contains some subtle messages about human potential that I found surprisingly uplifting (when I wasn't pulling my hair out).

Personally, I don't find that interesting. At any rate, it's nothing like as interesting as The Witness' magnificent puzzles, which in their abstract way seem to have much more to say about the world: about logic, perception and the laws of physics, about light and dark, and about finding a way forward. Blow needn't have tried to make a puzzle out of art when he had already, so beautifully and so successfully, made art out of puzzles.

That's what The Witness is about--gaining knowledge to make sense of the island and its gorgeous but exotic environments. The Witness molds its world, puzzles, and themes into such a layered, cohesive whole that, if we look hard enough, we'll keep finding new ways to perceive it. There are still things about The Witness I can't make sense of--some clues I might never notice, and some puzzles I might never solve. But the hints are there. It might not all be clear at first, but that's okay, because I'm always learning.

Asking The Witness to be a traditional video game is essentially asking the impossible. If the reason Jonathan Blow’s newest game has been in the oven for nearly eight years is that he wanted to avoid compromising on his ambition, then it makes sense that it would stumble a tiny bit along the way. The Witness is a game that can easily cause players to eclipse the one hundred hour mark and the vast majority of that time is going to be spent engaging with hundreds of brilliantly designed puzzles.

A beautiful, powerful, and cleverly designed puzzle game with a wealth of mysteries to unravel.

Quirks aside, The Witness is a remarkable achievement. Its setting is lush and vivid, and its core puzzle-solving gameplay is intuitive without the need for instructions or tutorials. Developing a vocabulary for puzzle-solving in The Witness is very...