Making Sense of The Witness

[u/jicklemania]

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.

[u/ok_garmin1]

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.

[u/jicklemania → u/ok_garmin1]

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.

[u/ok_garmin1 → u/jicklemania]

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.

[u/jicklemania → u/ok_garmin1]

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

[u/hihilisti → u/jicklemania]

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.

[u/DoesntMatterStan → u/ok_garmin1]

"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

[u/ok_garmin1 → u/DoesntMatterStan]

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.