#3: The Witness

MASSIVE POTENTIAL SPOILERS AWAIT!!!!!!

Now that that's out of the way, its unfortunately been a while since I've done a blog entry (unfortunate for me anyways, wanting to have done one at least once a week), and that is mainly down to two things: school, and my playing two games pretty solely. The Witness, which I talk about here, and Super Smash Bros Brawl, again. Finally almost done, one sticker left and I'll have completed the game! But that's besides the point. I have a bit of a break right now, so I'm going to make up for my lack of keeping with my own promises and goals by doing one of these each day for the next four days (so four more blog entries). Let's hope I can keep a promise to myself this time.

---------- The Witness ----------

Oh wow, The Witness. I was surprised when this came out, as maybe I'm just not savvy when it comes to news, but it had been a year or so since I had last heard anything on Jonathan Blow's next step into the gaming sphere. The time and dedication put into crafting this gem, however, are obvious from the get-go. Less than a minute into the game, you can tell that a lot of work had to go into making a game look this beautiful and stylistic. But I'm getting ahead of myself. I want to talk about the game from the beginning.

So, you start out, appropriate enough, in a long seemingly barren hallway with a light at the end of the tunnel. The first few puzzles of the game show up here, being incredibly simplistic, but by design, as they show you how to interact with the panels you'll be seeing and serve as an introduction to the basics more than anything else. After two to three doors, you finally reach the outside. This is where the talent immediately shines through. So much beauty, the clouds, the sky, the trees, yet most everything is out of your grasp. There are a few more puzzles in your way in order to take down the barrier in your way and progress forward into the landscape. But once you reach it, everything is fair game. Though some puzzles don't become activated until others are completed, the island you are exploring can be visited in most any order, though each area gives a tutorial that can help you in other areas. In addition, the landscape itself consists of puzzles (environmental puzzles), that can be traced for the same screen you use to solve regular puzzles. These complete a set of 6 obelisks that inhabit the island, turning white when all the environmental puzzles on it are completed. Audio logs, which mainly consist of people reading quotes from various famous thinkers and religious texts. These won't really help you with any sort of story, though, as its deliberately vague, so that speculation can run rampant on the "inter-webs".

The puzzles were as difficult as advertised at times, with me actual going through sheets of paper where I would write out various solutions in an attempt to solve them logically. I didn't really know that the separate areas were introductions to different puzzle addition at the start, which led me to much confusion once I had reached the town fairly early in the game. It is a combination of most other areas in the game, so I had no idea what I was doing for quite some time. Not really the games fault in my opinion, more just my own. My real problem came with the discarded panels around the island. I "accidentally" solved quite a few of them before I actually knew what I was doing. Yet again, though, they weren't really a part of any of the main story line-based puzzles, so not too much fault there, and there is a panel in the jungle that some see as an introductory one.

Some of the things to do in the game are, however, down right insane. Not many waiting puzzles, thankfully, but they're outweighed by the duration of one of them, a semi-obscure environmental puzzle found in one of the six movies found throughout the island. The puzzle slowly reveals itself over the course of the film, which is about an hour long. A perfect time to go out for a bite to eat or do some homework while waiting for the game to progress. The talks in the movie are interesting to listen too, but unfortunately for me, the audio on my PC port was bugged with strange delays and audible echoes, making the hour long film more like 3 hours. The audio based puzzles in the game, by the way, were nearly unsolvable due to this, and I had to look a few of them up because of it. Hopefully that can be fixed, because none of the solutions I've found online (such as disabling some audio cards and messing with the Steam launcher) have done anything to help it.

The Witness is a masterpiece, and one of few games I'd say I'll happily go back and play at a later date. The world design is gorgeous, the mystery behind the story (or even just lack thereof) is intriguing, and the puzzles are just infuriating enough to where when you finally get around to solving it, you feel like a genius. I might leave some of these papers scrawled on my desk for people to see when they walk by, because looking at them now, they make me look like I was making some sort of code or solving a mystery. And that's what you feel like you're doing when you play this game. You need to get inside the mountain and see what is going on. I'd love to play a VR version of this game inside one of those giant hamster-balls, just to experience its beauty and relive some awe. But maybe I'll wait a year or so before going back, just so that the puzzles can give me a headache all over again.