I was 10 when Myst came out for PC. My dad and I would play it together after he’d come back from work.
The whole thing felt very adult — exhilarating, confusing, scary.
Most nights the desolation of that island world would get to me. I’d excuse myself, leaving my dad to fend for himself.
Myst was recently ported to iPhone. It hasn’t aged well.
The whole game is — we’re painfully reminded — just a series of clickable screens. Myst never made the leap to 3D, and a slew of failed sequels almost sank the parent company Cyan.
But: the puzzles are still challenging and engaging. Myst is full of maps and patterns and symbols and sounds. It’s impossible to keep track of them without the aid of a notebook.
Beautifully, Myst anticipates this and makes the notebook a centerpiece of the game. Special notebooks teleport you to different areas. And regular old notebooks often look quite a bit like your own, uniting you with the invisible characters of the game, all trying to solve the riddles of the island.
The Witness, Jonathan Blow’s abandoned-island puzzle game, suffers from the opposite problem as Myst.
The world is luscious and interesting and dynamic:
But the puzzles fall disappointingly flat.
The primary type of puzzle in The Witness is a maze in which the player navigates from point A to point B while meeting some set of conditions. For example, in the puzzles below, white squares may never be enclosed with black squares:
If this isn’t your idea of fun, I have bad news for you: there are hundreds and hundreds of mazes to solve in The Witness. You will spend the vast majority of your time staring at screens just like this one.
Mazes don’t get me super excited, but that’s just a matter of taste. I can’t fault The Witness for wanting to be the deepest maze game ever.
Where I can fault The Witness is the somewhat jarring process for solving these mazes. The harder ones take hours to work out, and I’ve found the notebook technique to be inadequate.
Instead, I’ve taken to capturing a photo of my TV screen, opening up an image editing app, and sketching ideas on top of the photo. Here’s what that looks like:
The puzzles in Myst were difficult to solve, but the workflow for solving them weaved beautifully into the gameplay. In contrast, solving a puzzle in The Witness entails turning off my TV and staring at my iPhone for a few hours.
I spend so much time in this mode that the world itself feels like an appendage.
This isn’t a deal-breaker, and I highly recommend The Witness to any fan of the puzzle genre. And without going into any detail, the game has a number of impressive “oh-shit” moments, which Blow calls epiphanies. Also, I haven’t reached the ending, so it’s possible an opinion-changing epiphany awaits me.
But it does seem that we’re still waiting for a true masterpiece in the abandoned-island puzzle genre, one in which the world, the puzzles, and the method for solving those puzzles are tied together in a rich and coherent way.
