And its two endings suggest the places where this may lead: one to disaster (of a sort), a lone, lamentable turn of an endless cycle, and one to release, where you’re forced to integrate your fixation into your existence. Here, at least, there’s no choice: You have to keep going. Devote much of your life-maybe even too much of your life-to a pursuit, and you really do start seeing it and hearing it everywhere. But what Blow and his team have done, in a way I’ve never quite seen anywhere else, is capture the spark of controlled insanity that’s waiting inside all of us to be tapped. Whether the so-called “environmental puzzles” in The Witness could really exist is not the issue (because they can’t). Whether it’s computers, music, movies, sports, or something else entirely, there’s something out there that transfixes us, that drives us against our better judgment (and, in many cases, common sense) to explore and understand to its fullest. I felt a chilling thrill at discovering one that ought to have been impossible (suggestion: look up), but that ultimately made perfect sense. And in places you wouldn’t think they’d even be possible. It’s at this precise moment that The Witness becomes something closer to brilliant, as you’re inspired to backtrack and reconsider everything you’ve looked at across the whole game with this new information. What happens if you take your cursor and treat them as if they’re a puzzle of their own? What indeed. A squiggly line, on a sign planted on the rock next to you, turns out to be exactly the same shape-when seen from hundreds of feet above-as a lake and river you’ve traversed probably dozens of times. The Witness really starts proving itself in earnest once you approach the final area of the game, the mountain, and discover something that shows you that the very world itself isn’t what you’ve always thought it was. Even so, you’ll ponder them as you move from one section of the island to another, either trying to track down the next hint you need or giving yourself a respite from your present frustrations by doing something easier for a few minutes.ĭon’t focus too much on matters like these, though. Who are they? Why are they here? And can you help them-or is your destiny to become one of them? These questions are not easily answered, even if you discover many of the audio and video recordings scattered around that investigate the scientific and spiritual relationships that seem to underlie the land’s logic. During the course of your time on the island, you’ll discover what appears to be a story: a community frozen in time, with people changed into statues while doing ordinary, everyday things. He’s not necessarily an overly obvious one, however. Blow may be a gleefully evil sadist, but he’s a fair gleefully evil sadist. Sooner than you might expect, you’re progressing from basic mazes to challenges involving separation (there must always be a line between all the black and white squares) symmetry (your line is matched, in mirror image, on the other side of the board) color pairing connect the dots my personal ligne noir, shape matching, in which the figures you draw must outline one or more geometrical forms you’re provided (in theory-though the difficulty I had solving these left me seriously wondering) and plenty more.īut even though its riddles rapidly evolve from mild to maddening, The Witness is structured so that you always have the essential tools you need to solve them: Built-in tutorials guide you gracefully through new concepts over half a dozen puzzles, for example, and when ideas are combined, you get a chance to acquaint yourself with the new relationship before things start getting really nutty. They get a lot harder very quickly, of course. Solve that one and before long you’re in the broad, bright, beautiful island, à la Myst, where you’ll encounter literally hundreds of puzzles like these. In this case, a door opens and you move on, before long facing something that’s slightly more advanced (a line with a 90-degree turn). By selecting the circle and then dragging the pointer you fill the complete shape, and then something happens. You begin in a dark tunnel, trudging ever forward toward a glimmer of light that eventually resolves itself as a simple shape: a circle with a short horizontal line connected to it. Looking at it from a distance, The Witness is not hard to unpack on its most elemental level.
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