---
title: the witness
date: 2023-11-22
---

✒️ editors note: i started writing this review back in march or april and completely forgot about it. i sort of just charged ahead and finished the second half in a two hour session, so if it feels a little weird, sorry! i'll probably go through and edit it later

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i've been on a puzzle game kick recently; antichamber and manifold garden have always visually intrigued me, so i knocked them out in the beginnning of the year and found them pretty enjoyable. i had a crack at filament, which was a creative and interesting idea, but it went a little too hard too fast for my liking and i pretty quickly got demoralised and stopped playing. so what was next on the chopping block?

we're only a quarter of the way in, but the witness is potentially my favourite game of the year. it's been out for about seven years now so i've heard plenty of hot takes on it and frankly expected it to not hold up to the hype, but i was almost instantly swept up in the puzzles and world. i pretty quickly started making comparisons to myst, as you're dropped on a big island with no people but loads of weird mechanisms, cryptic mechanisms and a wide variety of architecture and flora. the location designers clearly had no shortage of inspiration, because you can find all kinds of weird perspective tricks and shapes in shadows and reflections if viewed from just the right angle. the look of the whole game is bright and warm and i spent a lot of time heading over to some exciting looking ruin or cluster of plants i saw out of the corner of my eye. this world design decision keeps the mystery high and makes exploration a reward unto itself!

<a href="https://www.giantbomb.com/images/1300-2603402">
    <img src="https://www.giantbomb.com/a/uploads/scale_super/1/16049/2603402-1392940491-1.jpg" onerror="this.onerror=null; this.src='/_assets/img/the_witness/000.jpg'">
</a>

puzzle-wise, the witness is structured extremely well to make you feel like a genius, regardless of how clever you actually are. different puzzles follow different "rules" that dictate the lines that you should be drawing, and the game (largely) eases you into how each rule works with a series of super simple puzzles that try to demonstrate the nuances, as well as the circumstances where a rule is broken. for a game considered rather pretentious, this method is surprisingly straightforward and unsubtle, a nice move that aims to avoid frustration early into an area. this also gets you in the headspace that if a puzzle is too complicated or the rules are entirely unfamiliar, you're probably in the wrong place. simlarly, theres nothing stopping you from putting an area down and checking out somewhere else if you you're completely stuck

there are a couple of exceptions to this, of course, but a lot of these really out-there examples are for puzzles meant as endgame // secret content, and i don't decry the game doing this. i've also heard some complaints that certain areas were impossible to understand without prodding for certain players. [joseph anderson](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZokQov_aH0) had trouble with the sound puzzles, whereas my highschool level musical education kicked in immediately and i absolutely blitzed through this area. conversely, i had trouble with the gate at the "tetris" area, and i actually had to ask for help

<a href="https://www.pushsquare.com/games/ps4/witness#enlarge-4">
    <img src="https://images.pushsquare.com/screenshots/74438/large.jpg" onerror="this.onerror=null; this.src='/_assets/img/the_witness/001.jpg'">
</a>

this brings up two tangential thoughts that i want to bring up: 
A. the witness was a difficult enough game that i needed to ask for help once, something that didn't happen with antichamber and manifold garden. despite this, i completed almost all of the rest of the game without prodding from my friend who had already completed it, and their only other contribution was secret areas that uncovered more for me to do.
B. i am totally in support of round-the-watercooler style sharing when it comes to games. it harkens back to the pre-internet sense of collaborative discovery, and allows you to control how much you get """spoiled""". and frankly, getting completely stuck on a game isnt fun. the witness encourages you to stop and think more about a problem, but completely depriving yourself past this point doesn't feel worthwhile to me. in any case, perfectly balancing a game like this has got to be an almost impossible task, and i think the move of babying you in the beginning and trying to teach you the deeper concepts in a more unconscious style works great

<details>
  <summary>
    spoilers
  </summary>
  it's a little unfortunate that this mystery is never explained, and i gather that's because it never really meant anything. the ending implies the game is simply <i>a game</i>, and that you are a developer playing a beta build of said game. one of the endings shows you unplugging from the beta build matrix and stumbling around your house, seeing circles and lines in the same way that any player who plays the witness will. it's a shame, but it's also not enough to ruin the experience. you can wax lyrical about what the game is trying to say (and many philosophically minded people on the internet already have) but, like antichamber and manifold garden, i'm happy to not let a heady universal truth get in the way of playing a fun brain scratcher that lets me explore a bizarre new digital world
</details>

<a href="https://www.pushsquare.com/games/ps4/witness#enlarge-3">
    <img src="https://images.pushsquare.com/screenshots/74437/large.jpg" onerror="this.onerror=null; this.src='/_assets/img/the_witness/002.jpg'">
</a>

i want to shout out the video that got me into the game in the first place, [this aforementioned video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZokQov_aH0) by the aforementioned joseph anderson. joseph has a bad habit of coming off a bit negative where i don't think he truly means to; he seems to like picking apart the real issues in experiences that are critically praised, which can sometimes make him sound like he hated it; he also loves to play games to absolute completion, and will criticise a game that has problems if you approach it from this angle. i disagree with a lot of his complaints about tedium in the witness; i truly thought that it was paced great, and the sometimes excess of simple puzzles are fine; they're there to make sure that everyone is on an even playing field. (i'm realising that i now sound guilty of doing the same thing that i criticised joseph anderson for! i really do enjoy his videos and would highly recommend his stuff, i just wouldn't let it stop you from playing this incredible experience)