The Witness - review (Spoilers) (Gaming)

by Cody Miller , Music of the Spheres - Never Forgot, Monday, February 27, 2017, 21:01 (2830 days ago)

Lots to talk about here.

Let's start with the good. The game gets a huge amount of milage out of one simple type of puzzle: the line drawing. Not only does it stretch this simple idea very far, but it does so in a way that creates a bunch of thoughtful challenging puzzles. It is also expertly designed in that you learn very early on the rules of the puzzle. A lot of puzzle games have puzzles where the solution is not really discoverable. It's some wacky thing where you have to read the mind of the designers without clearly established rules. The witness isn't like that. Every single puzzle springs from a very simple set of rules that you learn early on. You are pretty much never in a situation where you don't have the knowledge to solve the puzzle.

What it does very well is give you the rules early on, and let you master those rules. It then throws a curve ball at you. Then another. Then another. But it doesn't change the rules, it just makes you think about how to solve the puzzle now that there are complications. This is most apparent when you are in sections where you must use the environment to solve the puzzles.

There's a section where you are in a forrest with trees, and you learn on the first panel to trace the shadows of the branches. Easy. But the next puzzle has only half the shadow… so what do you do? Well, there's a rock blocking the light for the other half, so if you look on the rock, you see the other half of the pattern. Combine the two, and there you go. The next puzzle might have no shadow at all, and so you have to piece it together by looking at the shadows of what would fall onto the panel if objects weren't in the way, forcing you to combine shadows of different sizes which are on objects different distances from the panel. Each puzzle builds on the last one, adding an additional layer of complexity, all without abandoning that first simple rule.

A couple of reviews have said some of the puzzle solutions are non sensical, which is proof positive that these reviewers looked up solutions and didn't come up with the answers themselves. Not a single puzzle was unsolvable or 'cheap'.

The biggest problem with the witness is that of immersion. Comparing it to Myst, the puzzles in Myst are with objects that have a place and purpose in the world. You're looking at clock towers, ancient machinery or books or what have you. Everything there fits into this world. But the panel puzzles have no place in the world: they are arbitrary and non functional. What sense does it make for a panel puzzle to open a door? The world is completely gamey and unbelievable. Yet the game seems to be asking you to take this world seriously. You can't. I can see if the panel puzzles were perhaps boxes of electronics, and your lines were wires. That could be justified functionally.

The game asks for you to take the world seriously, but you can't because it's not coherent. And that's a shame because the puzzles are definitely better with the environmental elements, which saves this game from being replicated by a mobile game with just line puzzle after line puzzle. But that is not implemented nearly as well as other games of the same type.

For being as smart of a game designer as he is, Johnathan Blow completely misses the mark when it comes to immersion and crafting coherent game worlds.