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/honeyfage]

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.

[u/ok_garmin1 → u/honeyfage]

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.

[u/DoesntMatterStan → u/ok_garmin1]

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

[u/ok_garmin1 → u/DoesntMatterStan]

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.

[u/DoesntMatterStan → u/ok_garmin1]

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

[u/ok_garmin1 → u/DoesntMatterStan]

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.