When you start the game there is no explicit setup, you jump right in without explanation. Even when you actually set foot in the world of vibrant colors and curious puzzles, you are not directed and instead left to wander and discover.
The Witness immediately feels like a sort of eerie simulation, oozing a sort of Truman Show ambiance that is filled with cryptic messages, familiar objects in strange places, and a distinct lack of music – it’s just you and the stillness of nature.
The map is a condensed globe of different climates, terrains, and ways of thinking. The desert, the autumn forest, the harbor, the castle, the village, and all other segments find new ways to utilize that elegant little puzzle square. The puzzles are quite diverse and include a variety of clever premises including: perspective, symmetry, framing, sectioning, spatial reasoning, reflections, and shadows to name a few. These mechanism and patterns are then combined across different sections of the map, which urges you to explore and learn little by little from the more accessible puzzles around the area. You really need to understand the world and how it works.
It begins deceptively easy, like a maze on the back of children’s menu at a steakhouse, but the intricate mess of paths and symbols eventually require you to take a moment and think. As I played I found myself intermittently reaching for a pad of paper in order to take notes about possible solutions and to document past solutions. At times it can be difficult to visualize all of your options on the screen and by having more manageable control of it on paper you can understand things better. By moving from the digital world into physical reality, it makes the game feel like a personal challenge instead of something a character is conquering.
When you start, the most challenge aspect is making sense of what you are looking at. You won’t feel like you have enough to establish a pattern, it won’t even feel like there are rules in this madness, until you uncover them.
It can be frustrating, but the great thing is that you can move onto something else, learn lessons from other puzzles then come back. You can take those lessons and return to that one daunting puzzle you saw in the beginning but had no sort of indication in how to approach it. You will slowly start to make sense of things with each small victory.
If you have not been educated on the process in which to accomplish these conundrums, it can make it quite difficult to come to an answer that is not driven by raw problem solving. In a way it feels like math class again. If you don’t understand, use or are not given the formula you will attempt to solve it your way. We may think a bit differently and although we will come to the same conclusion our journey and explanation of the solutions may differ – some convoluted and intricate and others elegantly straightforward. This is really giving you the freedom to accomplish things however you want – whether it’s relatively blind through raw problem solving or by your own exploratory research in the field.
As enjoyable and fair as the puzzles are some became mildly irksome to come across in a game of constant failure and adaptation. The only issue I had was with certain puzzles that needed to be reset. In some cases there are a string of puzzles you need to solve without error or else you need to go back and re-solve the previous one. I didn’t see the purpose in resetting things you have already done, as it doesn’t deter you from frivolously guessing, it just takes more time to complete. I can to some degree accept it as a part of the experience, but it felt unnecessary.
The Witness is a game unlike any other that I have played. From the very moment I completed the first puzzle, it consumed me. In the beginning it wasn’t just about the collection of ever changing and collaborating puzzles, but the enigma of its purpose. These beams of light concentrating on a single structure atop the peak of a mountain, served as a measure of the progress towards, “something”. During the game this was something to push me forward, but knowing the ending makes me realize the journey is far more rewarding than the prize.
It is very much your own experience. You have no tools, there are no interruptions, no tutorials, just your inquisitive nature and perseverance to learn and adopt. The game gives you so little that you will certainly be frustrated but cathartically relieved and delighted when you finally succeed in even the smallest of instances.