Discovery in The Witness

When observation and curiosity drive progression

Each time we pick up a new video game, we’re faced with the same dilemma: “How do I play this game?” Most games now feature tutorials, which can range from the innocuous — gently introducing each mechanic at a time through natural gameplay — to downright disruptive — in which the gameplay freezes to text box after text box.

However some games opt for no tutorial at all. Games like Pong are fairly simple: move up and down and try to outscore your opponent. Because you have so few inputs at your disposal, everything you see in front of you is all you need to intuit how to play. Computers can even “learn” how to play many of these games on their own, sometimes outperforming their human counterparts.

“A good start would be to recognize within yourself the ability to understand anything, because that ability’s there, as long as it’s explained clearly enough.“

— James Burke

But even in these games without instruction, the absence of a tutorial is coincidental. The designers didn’t include one because they thought none was necessary. What if having no explicit tutorial was one of the key features of the gameplay? The Witness sets out to achieve exactly that. In this puzzle game, discovering the rules for yourself is the driving experience.

All you need to navigate the island is a willingness to discern for yourself how the world works. Early puzzles are very simple, where you can naturally deduce your objectives. Every successive puzzle beyond those is meant to refine your understanding of the environment. If you’ve stumbled upon a solution haphazardly, you may want to investigate it further before proceeding — later puzzles can be quite unforgiving.

Each region of the island is littered with its own bespoke set of puzzles that alter the parameters of the game, with a steep learning curve as you delve further into each territory. Every now and again you’ll find puzzles that combine several of these elements to form some truly hostile challenges. Be careful not to lose your wits.

Fortunately, when you do find yourself in need of relief from the puzzles that ail you, you’ve no shortage of options to explore. Among the biomes you’ll encounter are a monastery tucked away beside a chirping forest, a fortress teeming with hedge mazes and pressure panels, and a prismatic greenhouse overlooking the coast. For the most part, you won’t find any music in the game to accompany your travel, making for an immersive experience.

There’s not much in the way of a narrative that is presented to you. But there is such clear attention to detail in the structures which span the island that you may find yourself speculating all the while. There’s a constant struggle between monuments and nature that give each part of the island its own character, imbued with varying degrees of disrepair. Stone figures populate various destinations as if frozen in time, awaiting a backstory of your choosing.

Now if this game were just a vibrant island filled with line tracing puzzles, you’d probably still enjoy it all the same. The Witness provides an engaging succession of puzzling one-upsmanship that is sure to be worth your time. But there’s more than meets the eye. If you’re fortunate, you’ll find a mechanic in the game that stands apart from the rest. That is the set of puzzles that don’t introduce themselves as puzzles at all.

Chances are, the first time you encounter one of these hidden puzzles, you’ll simply stumble upon it. You’ll stop for moment in your tracks, perceive that something is afoot, and realize that what lies before your eyes is unmistakably yet another puzzle. Surely the mere existence of this one hidden puzzle implies the presence of more. This newfound prospect of discovery is what makes the experience so exhilarating. It is unabashedly awesome.

“Awesome things don’t hold anything back. Awesome things are rich and generous. The treasure is right there.”

— Brian Moriarty

It’s even crazier to think that they were right under your nose the whole time. This one pivotal experience changes the nature of the game completely, forcing a radical rethink of the environment you’ve come to know up until this point. If you’ve found the standard puzzles rather drab or unengaging thus far, this new set of puzzles will reinvigorate the gameplay, as anything and everything has become fair game in the hunt for the secrets of the island.

And it was no mere coincidence that you made your discovery. Granted, you almost certainly discovered your first hidden puzzle without intending to do so, because you weren’t looking for it and no one told you to look for it. But in the back of your mind, you saw something that gave you pause, something you recognized. When you could have seen merely what was in front of you and been none the wiser, you instead made an observation and thought to yourself, “What if there’s something more?” It was your curiosity that drove you to look beyond what you initially understood about the world around you.

So often, we take for granted our surroundings because they were simply always there and we never stop to question it. Take gravity: there’s the iconic story of Isaac Newton and the falling apple. Gravity predates Newton by at least a few years and was readily evident for all to see. But it was not well understood until it occurred to Newton to study it and challenge any preconceived notion of how it behaved.

And that is perhaps my key personal takeaway from The Witness. There’s an entire world right in front of us full of discoveries to be made. It’s incumbent upon us to be mindful of our surroundings and alert at every moment, so that when serendipity strikes, we’re in a position to capitalize on that opportunity. Inspiration, revelation, creativity — all these things are rendered fruitless if we’re not prepared and willing to capture what that moment has brought us.

That moment of epiphany is one of the most integral experiences in The Witness, be it whether you’re solving an especially challenging puzzle that the game lays in front of you or one of the hidden puzzles. It can be quite elusive, but if you pay attention long enough and loosen any prior assumptions you’ve held, eventually opportunity will strike. And it is at precisely that moment where everything seems to fall into place. The world is exactly the way it was before, only we’re different for having truly understood, experienced, and witnessed it in all its complexity.