In 2008, a small puzzle game, “Braid” was released for XBOX 360’s downloadable marketplace. The game gave you the task of with playing as a man who had the power to rewind time while being set in a two-dimensional platforming game, à la Super Mario Bros. It became an unmitigated success, becoming the highest selling title on the downloadable marketplace and a critical darling.
The man behind that game, Johnathan Blow, then took eight years before releasing his next game, and that game blew “Braid” out of the water. “The Witness” is a first-person puzzle game, where you explore an island solving puzzles and attempting to figure out where you came from. However, the game never tells you any of this.
From the opening moments of the game, “The Witness” doesn’t give you any text prompts or instructions on how to solve its seemingly endless series of puzzles. It all requires player intuition and problem solving to determine what to do.
All of the game puzzles are based in the same style; a board with dots and lines. A dot represents where a line can begin, and you must trace the correct path to unlock the puzzle. The rate at which the ideas are introduced is so gradual that you feel like you’re being told how to solve them step by step.
But, as previously stated, the game never has any text to explain what to do, nor does it have any informative voice acting. It does have some voice acting as there are small USB like devices that you can activate that speak in long quotes from philosophers, but that’s it. No instructions are received from those devices.
Thus, the brilliance of the game comes out. You feel smart as you play because you have solved the various puzzles, and their more difficult incarnations, yourself. For example, one puzzle has two different colors sitting on top of each other. If you trace a line around them, it doesn’t work. Neither does tracing a line below them.
So, the next course of action is to trace a line through them, separating the two different colors, and the puzzle works. Thus, you’ve just learned how to solve this new set of puzzles. Later puzzles also use the environment. Approach a panel with an image of a line tree and more than five different end points.After a moment to look around, it is revealed that a tree in front of you has an apple in its branches, and tracing the line puzzle to end where the apple is on the tree works.
There are easily more than 100 different types of puzzles in the game, but that isn’t the most astonishing thing for this reviewer. It is that, as someone who has played games for his entire life, this game feels legitimately like anyone could play it. Any mom, dad, child, grandparent, businessman or ballerina could pick up the controller and slowly learn how to play.
It’s a kind of remarkable feat, that in a world where almost every game pollutes the screen with objective markers, text explaining what to do and how to do it and huge maps, that this game can have none of it. It has none of the clutter and all of the intelligence.
Photo Courtesy of Thekla, Inc.
