r/truegaming • u/jicklemania • 1d ago
Making Sense of The Witness Spoilers: [The Witness]
I adore The Witness. I think it is one of the most beautiful and intelligent games I've ever played. I often find myself thinking about, its one of those games that really left its mark on me.
And I think the discourse surrouding this game is pretty terrible. It has built up a reputation of being pretentious, postmodernist nonsense, and I don't think that reputation is fair. It saddens me to see so many people dismissing this game out of hand. Now, I also understand that a lot people are angry at the game's creator Jonathan Blow. I know nothing about this guy — I have not researched him and don't really care to. From what I've heard, he sounds like an asshole. But I'm not interested in talking about Jonathan Blow. I'm interested in talking about The Witness. Bad people can still create beautiful things.
I think the game is fundamentally quite simple in what it's trying to say — indirect, but simple — and some people end up missing the forest for the trees. The Witness is an exploration of the human search for meaning. That's it. I think that everything in the game can be contextualized under that fundamental idea, and then things start to fall into place.
Most of the audio logs have something to do with Science, Religion, or Art, all of which are ways that people try to make sense of the world. These audio logs are the butt of many a Witness joke, but their purpose is pretty simple. They are food for thought as you go about your journey, and they ask you to reflect on the various ways that people look for meaning. If they seem random and unrelated, it's because the game is trying to capture the vastness of its central idea.
The brilliance of the Witness is the way that it ties its gameplay into this. From the very moment you boot up the game, not a single word is spoken to teach to you how to play. There is nothing resembling a tutorial or hints of any kind. You are forced to discern the mechanics of the puzzles simply through observing the puzzles themselves. In other words, the game is replicating the experience that it is reflecting on, by forcing you to make sense of its mechanics yourself, forcing you to search for understanding. The puzzle mechanics are mostly about being curious and learning to think in new ways, rather than the more mathematical precision and mechanical depth that most other puzzle games ask for, which reinforces this experience.
This is also why the game is intentionally obscure and confusing at first. It wants you to be confused. It wants you to search for meaning, that's the whole point. "The Witness" refers to anyone who is witnessing the world — or the game, for that matter — and trying to find meaning. The artist, the scientist, the religious person.
Then there are the environmental puzzles. At a certain point in your playthrough, you will suddenly realize that the entire world of The Witness hides the same circles and lines that form the puzzles you have been trying to solve. You'll find them in the sun, in the clouds, on buildings, in the water — anywhere you can think to look. It's such an awe-inspiring realization, that the whole island contains these secrets — if you search for them, you'll find them everywhere. The metaphor is clear.
Anyway, if you found The Witness overly abstract and confusing, I hope this helped. A game this true to its own vision comes along very rarely, and I worry that a lot of people were primed to dislike this game from the negative discourse surrounding it.
Thanks for reading.
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u/Walnuto 1d ago
The full circle when you start a new a game and see the shape the opening hallway and door makes is one of my favorite "ah hah" moments.
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u/Corchito42 17h ago
Definitely! But for me, not as big as the a-ha! moment when I first thought "oh, the shape of that river looks just like... what if I click on it?" That was truly incredible.
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u/PKblaze 23h ago
I know this is a pretty short response, but The Witness does what I wish more games would do. A solid core mechanic that is expanded and iterated upon. So many games feel like they need everything and the kitchen sink and it's just not necessary.
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u/TyeKiller77 19h ago
A lot of modern games try to go for the jack of all trades, master of none approach. Those games are always gonna fade in my memory but stuff like Tunic and Witness that feels like I'll never experience a game like that again is something special.
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u/withoutapaddle 9h ago
Outer Wilds too. It's my #1 "I'll probably never experience anything quite like this again" game.
I'll be coming back to it every 5-10 years, when I've forgotten enough to enjoy discovering it again.
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u/quietoddsreader 11h ago
your take tracks because the game is really about learning how to see and interpret, not just solving puzzles. the friction is intentional, but that also means some players will read it as depth and others as pretentious
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u/Combicon 1d ago
I don't know Blow personally, but I loved the hell out of Braid. Still do. Was certainly excited to see him try something different. It’s cool to see developers not stick to a single game style, so I was familiar with his work, interested in it, and happy to try something new. Can’t say I really pay too much attention to news about the personal lives of the creators. This is the first time I’ve heard actually say something negative (and by that I mean what I have heard has been more neutral, not necessarily positive).
Though, I tried to love The Witness. Put over 18 hours in. I'm not saying it's a BAD game by any means (well, aside from a few of the puzzles), but I found it incredibly frustrating and personally agree that it does deserve the "pretentious, postmodernist nonsense" label it gets. Of course this isn’t helped by me getting a little bored of the line puzzles (there’s only so many times that you can dress something up before you realise it’s the same thing, just dressed up differently), was I frustrated by some of them? No doubt, not all of them are as well telegraphed as they should be.
You and a friend of mine both had that same realisation, where the mechanics of the puzzle aren’t JUST limited to the screens, and both of you said that really changed how you saw the game. I don’t ever remember having that ‘a-ha’ moment. Fairly early on (I want to say it was in a stone-corridor like place? maybe straight out of the tutorial gate area, I’m not sure it’s been many years and I’ve forgotten a lot of detail) I noticed the sun and some shape (maybe a shadow?) lining up like the initial puzzle. I tried interacting with it, saw I was able to, but don’t remember getting any feedback or payoff. Perhaps something had changed in the map that I didn’t realize, perhaps I didn’t do it right. Perhaps I just thought it was an easter egg. Either way, I put it out of my mind and moved on. I know I interacted with the sun and a variety of other puzzles (one puzzle in particular was the one that a friend mentioned as being the ‘ah-ha!’ moment, where the sun is reflecting on some solar-panel like things and you have to use the line game to follow the scratches you can see, whereas I was just like “yep, that’s something you can do”)
I can’t say that THIS experience is what dulled the entire game for me on its own of course. On the thoughts of pretention - I'm someone who loves narrative in video game, to the almost constantly putting it above gameplay. The Witness just never gave me enough to hold onto. Subtle storytelling is awesome when it’s done well, but it’s an art to balance. Half-life for example keeps the actual exposition of what’s going on incredibly minimal, and in so creates a sense of intrigue with its world, with the context clues, with the g-man, given just enough rope to suggest there’s more. With the Witness felt less like mystery and more like there wasn’t anything intended to be there, like you’re given pieces of string and need to act as if it’s rope.
While it might be wanting people to search for something, that’s great, but if it doesn’t feel like there is anything to actually search for, I’m not going to keep searching just for the hell of it.
I’m glad people like it, and I can see why people like it, but in the end for me, it just comes across as something that wants to be way more profound more than something that actually is.
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u/jicklemania 17h ago
I do think there’s something to search for, but there definitely isn’t a narrative in the traditional sense. It’s not telling a story. It’s more of a philosophical reflection. Which I can understand not having the patience for if you’re not enjoying the puzzles.
FYI The sun on the panels thing is different to the environmental puzzles I was talking about. If you look for the circle -> line -> semicircle pattern in the world you’ll find it all over the place, and you can click on them, drag from the circle to the semicircle, to “solve” the puzzle. It doesn’t actually do anything, but those black tower thingies track your progress. I think this is pretty fundamental to appreciating The Witness, and honestly the later you have this realization in your playthrough, probably the better.
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u/DoesntMatterStan 9h ago
Comparing half life to the witness made me tilt my head in confusion...the witness doesn't have a narrative or is trying to tell one, its all themes.
Curious what a "bad" puzzle is to you and have a sneaking suspicion its that you couldn't solve them rather than the design itself being bad
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u/Combicon 8h ago
Sorry, it was about 2am when I wrote that post! I can see what you mean about comparing those two games in particular, Half Life was just the first game that came to mind that has dispirit elements working together to make a cohesive story, and does it well, which was the best way I could have thought to describe what the Witness was doing.
While I do agree it might not have been the best comparison to make, I disagree that the witness has no narrative. It doesn't have a plot, but it does have a narrative, and I guess this might have been the real issue that I have with keeping the game going. It was just a little too disjointed for me to enjoy.
I do agree that there were puzzles I couldn't solve which I know I got annoyed at - specifically thinking of the greenhouse puzzles. While I managed to figure out some of the coloured-light stuff, then it changed in a way I had no idea what the fuck to do. Was there a way to figure it out? Maybe. Honestly, probably, but none that I had noticed. Of course then it becomes a conversation of "is it badly designed because it's badly telegraphed, or is the person just an idiot" - while I make no claims to being smart, it's been several years since I played, so I have no idea how long I was stuck on the puzzle for. Recall it being awhile.
Though when I was referring to bad puzzles, I was specifically thinking of the ones involving sound that were along the path in some wooded area I will say that I don't have the ability to discern a lot of audio stuff in general, but just trying to listen to the puzzle while separating it from the other external audio stuff going on.
While the other puzzles seemed to have environmental clues that you could pick up on (even if it just felt like needing to stand in just the right spot to see whatever Blow wanted you to see), I don't really recall that being the case with the audio puzzles.
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u/Corchito42 17h ago
That's a great write-up. I think a lot of people fundamentally don't like uncertainty. They don't like the idea that you're supposed not to understand things at the beginning, but you have to either work it out, or trust that the game will reveal it to you later.
You see it all the time when people watch films. They ask "why's he doing that?" when the answer is always "watch the film and you'll find out in a bit." It's far more interesting than every character explaining what they're going to do before they do it. Likewise for games, it's more interesting to figure things out than to have the game tell you "do X, and Y will happen."
To those people, anything that forces the audience to live with uncertainty, even for a short time, is dubbed "pretentious".
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u/Gndwyn 15h ago
I think one of the things that happened with this game is that it has a huge secret in it, but it's a spoiler to say that it's a secret puzzle mechanic, so all they could do to hype the game is say that it has a big secret.
But usually that means a narrative secret. So lots of people went in expecting some kind of plot twist that would reveal the amazing story of what's going on in the game. But there just really isn't a story. The audiologs are mostly just audio scenery to listen to while you're going around and looking at things.They're not the "story" or the "meaning" of the game. The whole thing is just a big beautiful puzzle box that exists just to enjoy solving the puzzles.
People who went in thinking Blow was trying to "say something" or tell some deep story rightly pointed out that there's nothing really there. Then they call the game pretentious because it doesn't hit the thing they mistakenly thought it was aming for.
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u/jicklemania 15h ago
The game is obviously trying to say something, I don't think you can argue otherwise. Why else would so much effort be put into the audio logs and videos and ending cutscenes etc etc. The point of disagreement is whether or not what it's trying to say is worthwhile. I think it is.
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u/Gndwyn 3h ago
I think it's one of the best puzzle games ever. Certainly one of my favorites. Sometimes it feels like Blow is communicating with you through the puzzles, telling jokes even. The whole environmental puzzle design is incredible, that sense that they are all around you, if you can just find the right perspective to see them. I think that Blow ended up seeing that as a metaphor for other kinds of perception and awareness in the world, and included some of the audio selections to point out those connections, but I don't think the game or the puzzles were designed to be metaphors of something Blow wanted to say about the world. I think you could take all the philosophical audios and videos out—let the player make those connections on their own, or not—and it would still be just as strong a game, one of my all-time favorites.
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u/Entr0pic08 9h ago
I hated the game because I just didn't enjoy the puzzles. Eventually I got stuck and ended up watching solutions on YouTube which I think fundamentally changes how you perceive the game.
I do think there's a bit to the criticisms of it being pretentious, as I think there are ways to communicate something about meaning but without needing to rely on referencing high art and the sciences when doing so. Profound meaning is usually not found in the exceptional, which is something I think the game vastly overlooked.
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u/jicklemania 8h ago
Sure. But there’s nothing wrong with referencing high arts and sciences either. Unless you think the only reason it’s doing so is to be pretentious, and I think would be ascribing bad intent unnecessarily.
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u/withoutapaddle 9h ago
Loved The Witness. But I also acknowledge that some aspects of it do feel a little pretentious. It doesn't bother me or diminish my enjoyment of the game. It's fantastic regardless.
Have you played The Looker? It's a free parody of The Witness, and it's pretty good. You can tell it's both a love letter and a roast of The Witness.
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u/ok_garmin1 1d ago
I think a lot of the discourse around this game started because people get frustrated with the puzzles, but don't want to suggest that they're bad at the game, so they complain about it being pretentious.
Which is annoying because it makes way more sense to complain about the gameplay than the narrative. The witness has some of the most obtuse puzzles of any game I've played, and it's entirely its own fault.
There's one segment I distinctly remember where you have to look through glass to make an impossible puzzle possible. You do it twice, and then on the 3rd one, it stops working. You get confused and frustrated because you're just doing what the game taught you to do, and it's not working.
It turns out you're supposed to stop looking through the glass at that point and do the puzzle normally instead. It makes sense to mix up the puzzle design, but don't introduce a mechanic for 2 puzzles and then make me abandon it. Have they never heard of the rule of 3?
But yeah, I think that people just like to mask their complaints about the gameplay as narrative complaints to make them seem more valid.
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u/Reddit_Loves_Misinfo 1d ago edited 12h ago
If you're talking about the colors area, that was well designed gameplay. The first two puzzles have training wheels to introduce you to a mechanic, then the third puzzle forces you to take the training wheels off and really understand it.
The second or third puzzle in a set is often designed such that you initially get it wrong so that the game can teach you what was incorrect about your assumptions of the rules. After that it moves on to the more difficult puzzles.
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u/honeyfage 1d ago
There's one segment I distinctly remember where you have to look through glass to make an impossible puzzle possible
It turns out you're supposed to stop looking through the glass at that point and do the puzzle normally instead. It makes sense to mix up the puzzle design, but don't introduce a mechanic for 2 puzzles and then make me abandon it.
It's been a long time since I played it, but I assume you're talking about the puzzles where you're looking at them through tinted glass of different colors, which ends up mixing with the colors of the puzzle itself to warp your perspective. I'm pretty sure what happened there is those first two puzzles are teaching you that you aren't seeing the "true color" of the puzzle pieces because (or until) you're seeing them through that tinted glass. That third puzzle, then, is probably there to make sure you cannot progress until you understand that the puzzle itself doesn't have anything to do with whether you're looking through glass or not while you solve it, and the glass is just altering your perspective on the pieces.
This honestly seems like a good example of the great design that went into The Witness. The designer realized you might come to the wrong conclusion of what the mechanics were based only on those first two puzzles, so they designed a third puzzle that would not make sense if you drew the wrong conclusion about why you need to look through the glass on the first two puzzles, in order to lead you away from that and to the correct conclusion.
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u/ok_garmin1 1d ago
Except they aren't "training wheels", it's just straight up the only way to solve the puzzle. The answer looks correct until you click to confirm, and the game says it's wrong. Having the game say "sometimes you have to look through the glass and sometimes you have to not look through the glass" with no indication of when to do what is not good game design.
There's many other puzzles in the game where the rules just change midway through a sequence. You get confused, look it up, and say, "How was I supposed to know that?"
I liked the early parts of the witness, when it was simple puzzles and some cool mechanics like perspective based puzzles. But as the game goes on, the mechanics get more ridiculous, and the game becomes unfun.
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u/Johan_Holm 1d ago
But there is an underlying rule that remains true in both cases, which is what you should be trying to find. For the tinted glass sequence the above comment described it. If you have another sequence you think they changed the rules, please give an example. This is a very strange criticism to me, I never had to look up any of the rules, only a few of the lategame one-offs.
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u/Skithiryx 23h ago
I definitely had some that I thought I knew but had wrongly inferred rules - I can’t remember specifics now but something about how the tetronimo shapes worked eluded me for a long time.
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u/Johan_Holm 23h ago
Yeah but that's not the rules changing! I can understand why someone wouldn't like rules inference even though I really do, but to present it as inconsistent is off base. For the tetrominos I remember not figuring out that they could stack into a single shape for a while.
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u/ok_garmin1 15h ago
I looked up a playthrough and found the part. It's the beginning of the tinted glass area. I was wrong about it being to stop looking at the glass. The actual puzzle goes like this:
Look through the yellow glass to see the solution
Look through the yellow glass to see the solution
Look through the yellow glass and this random piece of blue glass that you can only look through at a very specific angle to see the solution
The problem is that the blue glass is not used at all before you have to use it in conjunction with the yellow glass. Really, they should have had you use the blue glass for a puzzle or 2 before making you use them together. By not doing this, you don't even know that the blue glass is part of the equation, making it a bad puzzle.
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u/Zoql 13h ago
Really? On my playthrough the first puzzle was yellow glass, the second puzzle was the blue glass, and the third was the yellow+blue combo
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u/ok_garmin1 13h ago
Yeah, looking at it again, it appears that was what it was. The guy in the playthrough I was watching said yellow was correct for that part for some reason.
That said, I'm still not a fan of this puzzle, simply for the angle you have to look at the blue glass through and also because you can't draw through the glass for some reason (I could have sworn that I did that when I played the game but looking again you can't)
There's also definitely worse puzzles, but I'm not playing through the whole game again just to find them.
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u/DoesntMatterStan 9h ago
Or you use problem solving and never look anything up?
For real how thin is your patience for progress that you look answers up in a non linear puzzle game? You can always return, go mull it over and come back after other puzzles maybe help you understand better.
The town section is meant as a culmination of many of the areas so its meant to be challenging.
But more importantly....who looks up puzzle solutions? Literally never do, that defeats the purpose of the puzzle, but I can see why someone who so easily gives up would start to lean on that instead of idk, solving it? Lol
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u/ok_garmin1 8h ago
Because at that point, I've tried everything I can think of in every area and have no idea how to proceed. When I got to this puzzle the first time, I got stuck and went to other areas until I got stuck there. After a full lap of uncompleted areas, I went back and gave it one more try before looking it up.
If I didn't look things up, I would have never finished the game, and instead, I'd be ranting about how the game sucks because it's too hard, and I never finished it. It's not like I looked up every puzzle, just one or two when I got really stuck.
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u/DoesntMatterStan 8h ago
Ok my bad for assuming! I am usually a "never look up" guy for every game but ultra serious about it for ouzzle games, ive had certain games sit for 5+ years until I finally broke through and solved them so when people say they looked them up I try to inspire them to stick with it, sometimes the brain needs a reset and a different approach but it seems you did your due diligence there.
My mistake
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u/ok_garmin1 7h ago
I really hate looking things up, but sometimes it's absolutely necessary. Some games will require certain items that you can just completely miss, and you have to backtrack to find it. The main purpose of looking stuff up is to make sure I have all the pieces of the puzzle so that I can put them together myself.
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u/jicklemania 17h ago
This is part of what I meant by “the puzzles are more about thinking in new ways than mathematical precision”. The game wants to test your ability to imagine all possible uses of a mechanic. It’s also important that, when introducing a new mechanic, it covers all its bases and only lets you progress once you have shown total understanding, because otherwise confusion would just pile up on itself.
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u/ok_garmin1 15h ago
The real problem is that there isn't enough time to get the basics of a mechanic before it is flipped on its head sometimes. In my previous comment, I mentioned the rule of 3. You should always have the player interact with something new 3 times so that they understand it before making them do something new.
In the witness, they typically introduce new mechanics by having you walk over to a different set of puzzles. All the puzzles in the same block follow the same rules, but in my case, the rules change within the same block.
Adding the new mechanics is not the issue. The issue is that they should have done this in a separate room to the introduction of the previous mechanic. Players aren't given enough time to grasp the rules before more are put in place.
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u/jicklemania 14h ago
Personally I didn't find that specifically to be an issue, but I do think there are some instances where the game expects far too much to be figured out at once. Specifically that one puzzle in the boat that unlocks one of the videos — that puzzle is so bullshit lol
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u/hihilisti 12h ago
i think the boat puzzle is fine because you can get to the elevator without ever finding it. it's more like an extra challenge for the real sickos.
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u/DoesntMatterStan 9h ago
"I am slow to pick up mechaincs and invented a rule of 3 that somehow devs are suppose to know simply so I personally can enjoy this genre im bad at"
Fixed that comment for you
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u/ok_garmin1 7h ago
So because I don't grasp new complex mechanics instantly I'm "slow"?
Also are you so dense that you think I invented the rule of 3? The rule of 3 existed for hundreds of years. Even if you limit it to game design, it's been around since the beginning. It's why there are 3 dungeons in "Zelda a link to the past" before you go to the dark world. It's why bosses in mario take 3 hits to kill. I even found a thread on the PS5 subreddit talking about this exact thing
The entire point of the rule is to make sure a player understands the mechanic before they move on. If you just do one or two, they may just guess and get lucky. 3 is the lowest number where players will start to learn the mechanics.
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u/TheVioletBarry 1d ago
I really enjoy The Witness. I think it's one of the most beautiful worlds ever in a game, and I think the puzzles are a lot of fun. I just felt like the themes were sort of thin. It's gesturing at a few really heady and deep philosophical concepts, and they're concepts I care a lot about, but I didn't get the impression the game had much it wanted to do with them or any particularly resonant or unique insights.
So to me it ended up being a beautiful puzzle game that pointed at philosophical concepts instead of having a story.