The Enigmatic Beauty of The Witness
An exploration of the game’s many mysteries, philosophies, and design elements
Playing The Witness is a lot like tumbling into a vivid fever dream, with numbers and symbols streaking by as your grasp of time and space ceases to exist. You find yourself on a kaleidoscopic island, a mishmash of radiant colors and varied biomes all flowing together into a sumptuous tapestry. Abstruse statues are posed all around the island: hunched over in dusty underground pathways, pondering the sky on mountaintops, blissfully gazing over castles and color-saturated swamplands. You’ve just stepped out of a pitch-black, claustrophobic tunnel and into paradise. Tree leaves flutter in the wind. Wires haphazardly wrap around dilapidated stone ruins and dance along balmy beaches. Sparks cascade from strange machinery built into verdant hillsides and buried deep within decrepit windmills. A cornucopia of lush ambient sounds swirl in your eardrums. You can spot esoteric panels — they look like mazes — along the walls and floors of the island. Are those important? What is your purpose here? Where do you go next in this sprawling, prismatic domain?
It’s all so beautiful. The only problem is that you have no semblance of a clue of what you’re supposed to do. All you know, is that before you exited that gloomy tunnel, you were greeted with this bizarre puzzle at the door leading outwards…
The Witness is an ostensibly hollow game that relies on environmental scrutinization and deeply felt personal epiphanies to drive you forward. The geographic spaces are littered with a myriad of gentle clues — there to be found, or there to be walked over — that softly guide you in unexpected directions.
It’s a puzzle game, yes, but it’s also a deep exploration of human nature, understanding, and the pursuit of epistemology — the study of knowledge. The puzzles start off very simple, like with that first one in the tunnel: move the cursor from the start of the graph to the little rounded bulb at the end; then, boom, the latch on the door clicks and it swings open with a metallic clack. At this point, you stumble upon more puzzles that are similar, but with a labyrinth of path options. The objectives of these ones are the same, just with an added layer of complexity that involves finding the correct path to the rounded bulb at the end. Most players would respond to this with a response like, “okay, simple enough.”
You eventually leave the comfort of the dilapidated castle ruins that function as a starting point for the game, however, and you’re greeted with a dozen different directions to head in. You’ll likely stumble into two different sets of panels, both involving new symbols and mysteries, both there to teach you new concepts.
One of these sets of panels rests within a grove of psychedelic cherry blossom trees, their neon pink florets contrasting with the nearby yellow pastures.
At first, the average player will be mystified be these seemingly pointless puzzle panels which are arbitrarily strewn around the orchard. A closer scrutinization, however, reveals two very important pieces of information. They’re connected to each other via wires which lead to a closed gate at the back of the grove. And, most essentially, the players can deduce that the panels are shaped like the trees via their juxtaposition skills. Then they realize that all of the trees have a single apple located on one of their branches; this provides the information needed to know which circular nub to end at on the panel. This is what you’d call one of those “eureka” moments. Just from walking around and observing the panels and using their own logical intuitions, the player learns a new concept: that they can sometimes observe the areas around them to solve riddles.
The whole game flows in tandem with these epiphanies. Your perception of the game’s world ebbs and morphs along with these logical deductions you learn along the way, bit by bit, all without the help of a single tutorial.
This is something I would label as brilliant game design. You’re able to learn about the game bit by bit just by methodically moving through its areas and levels. It’s prudent, however, to always remember that it’s an open-world game. This means that it’s possible to wander into areas you haven’t acquired the knowledge to triumph over yet. Some players might get discouraged or feel indignant by these setbacks; this sort of freeform, non-linear exploration teaches you a very imperative lesson though: you must always keep moving, keep your head up, and keep aspiring to learn and overcome.
That’s really the heart of this game. It’s all about observation and analysis. And logical deduction. And grim persistence. And self-motivation.
It’s a blessing that the game’s island setting is such a well-crafted and idyllic masterpiece, because you’ll be wandering in it for a long, long time. The game wants you to be cognizant of the environments. It wants you to relish the sounds and scenery while you’re also honing your mind into an intellectual machine. It wants your placid thoughts to constantly question the world; the players should be intermittently asking themselves questions like, “what is my grand purpose on this island?”
If you’ve dawdled in enough of the biomes on the island and delved into their idiosyncrasies, the true end-goal will begin to take form. All of these seemingly unconnected areas have one goal that binds them together: a laser-beam machine pops out of them all upon completion, shining its luminosity towards the mountain in the distance. Suddenly it’s clear that your main goal is to connect all the lasers to that landmark.
Figuring out the purpose of these enigmatic lasers was what really set my mind on fire with fervor and a hunger for exploration. I had the ultimate visual clue pointing me towards that mountain, and I was filled with a dogged need to reach it and see the treasures and revelations that awaited me.
This curiosity propelled me around the island on a cloud of wanderlust. I solved riddles in underground caverns filled with mildew and water, lurking deep below plains of wind-swept sand and eroded ruins. I overcame puzzles in dense forests filled to the brim with towering trees, their masses connected by wooden bridges that creaked with every step. I strolled through the lonely buildings of an abandoned town, a relic of humanity on an island fallen to nature long ago. I plodded through gentle waves on a small boat, analyzing the peculiarities of the island from afar while little puffs of exhaust smoke bellowed out behind me. The island was beauty incarnate, and I luxuriated in every moment of it.
It’s within this journey of discovery that another element of the game starts to materialize, a new piece of the puzzle that adds new dimensions of meaning to it all.
The Philosophy of The Witness
You’ll serendipitously stumble upon audio logs and video clips while exploring all the sections of the island, and these all sort of amalgamate together over the course of the game — as long as you were observant enough to unearth them — to form a sort of thesis that the developers were basically trying to get at.
As individuals, our lives are a pursuit for truth and understanding. Though our lights will eventually flicker into dull embers and smoke. All of our learning can ebb away for the rest of eternity within the space of a single blink. That is, of course, unless we combine our learnings and experiences over eons to form a collective knowledge; it’s only within this collective understanding that we can begin to truly achieve enlightenment and upper-level truth about the world and ourselves.
The mountain on the island functions as a physical manifestation of the apogee of human learning. It represents everything that the human species is working towards as a united group of minds and personalities. It’s the culmination of science and art colliding to form what is essentially the human spirit distilled into physical form.
One of the most enthralling mysteries of the island are the statues that you can find sprinkled across its areas. What do they represent? Why are they there? If you contemplate this for a while and observe, you’ll start to notice certain details about them that elucidate their true purpose; these statues represent the individuals of humanity — their clothes and features reveal that they stem from all the eras of human history — and their moments of greatness. Some of them are artists. Others are filmmakers. You can even find astronauts and scientists. They come from all walks of life, emblematic of humanity’s greatest achievements, each of them stuck within their own sphere. The artist completes his masterpiece while gazing out at the placid and cool waters of the ocean. The scientist forms theories while pondering the sky from atop his tower in the town. An explorer scribbles notes while nestled in a burrow, surrounded by the plentiful trees of a dense forest. And the only thing connecting them all is that their greatest achievements have since faded into obscurity; all we have is a small statue to inform us that they once existed, but even these statues will eventually crumble from the ceaseless passage of time.
That is, of course, unless we form a collective experience by passing our knowledge onto others and appreciating the idiosyncrasies of each individual, which can coalesce together to create the concept we know as humanity. Nowhere in the game is this concept better realized than in the color-saturated marshlands.
This area is replete with statues of mankind, their individualistic achievements inundated in the sludgy mud of the marshes. You can spot heads barely bobbing above the soupy waters of the area. There are people trying to crawl their way to safety. All of their greatest accomplishments are obfuscated by the murkiness of the water they’ve fallen into. The kaleidoscopic marshes are colored by the diversity of those who have fallen victim to them; their wisdoms broken down into molecules that pervade the pools.
The marshlands squat next to the soaring spires of the island’s snow-capped mountain. A player with a keen eye might be able to spot an optical illusion within this area involving two statues that are close together. One specific viewing angle creates an optical illusion where it looks like some ethereal goddess on the mountain is pulling another woman up and out of the muck and gloom of the swamps. This goddess, of course, is trying to save the other woman from her own individuality; she’s attempting to add the woman’s learnings to the collective trove of all of mankind on the mountaintop. She’s trying to save her.
So what sort of illustrious knowledge awaits you on the mountaintop once it’s been ignited with the energy of all those scattered lasers? It’s either going to delight the player or exasperate them depending on their mindset.
Another epiphany awaits you. This one is the king of all the game’s epiphanies. The mountain represents the collective insight of all those before you — mental aptitudes, erudite discoveries, love, loss, hope, all whipped into an inclement snowstorm at the peak. The fundamental laws of the universe rooted in science — the concept of “heat,” particles frenetically dancing in jitters to form energy — are swirled without care into the other spectrum of human desire like arts and emotions. It all collides into a conglomeration of enlightenment at this zenith of your travels and humanity itself. What do you see?
Another panel. Another puzzle. Does this one seems too straightforward though?
It only takes a few seconds. You stare at the panel and a myriad of transmitters within your brain spark to life. The nerves behind your eyes send lightning-quick signals along their flowing pathways to the brain. All of the gray matter within your brain strains and contracts to process the input into another epiphany: the world itself is a puzzle.
Your juxtaposition skills allow you to see the curvy lines of the panel alongside the same shapes and lines in the river below. And it doesn’t stop there. As you continue to bask in the sights and sounds of the island, you see the shapes everywhere: floating within diaphanous clouds, etched into rocks, formed via twigs and leaves in trees.
This is that sense of self-taught learning and introspection taken to the extreme. This is the moment where the game really opens up like an oyster before your eyes, the entirety of the island one big pearlescent ball of discovery. The world has once again reconstructed itself before your eyes. All those inscrutable, brain-melting puzzles over the last fifty hours have consolidated to change your outlook for the final time.
You are an individual who has observed other individuals — the statues, the audio logs, the film clips — and taken their knowledge to scale the mountain and empower yourself to look further than they ever could.
What do you do with that knowledge? It gives you the perception to open up the mountaintop, to dive into its depths, to seek new insights. And what awaits you down there? Is it something new and miraculous? Will your life as a whole be changed at its most fundamental level for the rest of eternity? Will you acquire raw data that allows you to bypass your earthly body and ascend to greater heights and resonate with the divine?
It’s at this point that the game laughs at you with a wry wink and a hard nudge. The mountain just leads to more puzzles. More puzzles contained within a clinical, mechanical facility devoid of art or passion. Puzzles that tax your brain and drive you crazy. Puzzles that enervate you more than you could ever believe. Puzzles that throw all that joy of discovery from earlier in the game into disarray and pulverize it with a hammer of hard-edged mockery. There’s nothing new to see down there.
And the mountain’s interior reveals even more self-defeating details upon closer inspection. The very fabric of the island’s natural beauty is questioned at its most primordial level. You can see water pipes and valves sloshing their liquids towards waterfalls on the outside. There are machines that generate clouds and wind, their rusted faces pointed towards pores in the side of the mountain. Diagrams of the island whirl and clatter with the energy of robotic cogs and pumps. All of the artifice is unceremoniously blown wide open for the player to scoff at with horror and repulsion.
All of this leads to the player questioning the purpose of the island. They’ve likely just been immersed in the stunning and majestic scenery of the island for weeks, expecting an end to their travels that would touch their souls with emotion and suffuse them with joys beyond their greatest comprehensions.
There are many people who label the mountain as the worst area of the game in terms of game design. This is simply because the area teaches you nothing new. The joys of exploration and discovery are replaced with busywork and tedium. This is what you’d typically call a “challenge area” in basic game design. I agree with people’s criticisms if you’re looking at the interior of the mountain superficially. The puzzles are way too long and offer nothing new. What a lot of people don’t realize, however, is that this place is teaching the players their final lesson.
Discovery and achievement isn’t always bliss. And it definitely doesn’t lead to enchantment or rapture if you’re doing it in complete solitude. There’s a reason the interior of the mountain is so hollow and lacking in detail. You’re supposed to feel lonely in there. It’s meant to function as an arduous trek where you’re simply applying all of the collective knowledge you’ve gathered over the course of the game.
The most vital takeaway from this is that, sometimes, it’s okay to just slow down and relax. Sometimes true enlightenment is found within. It’s fully acceptable to just bask in the world and not question it. Knowledge won’t always lead you to a greater feeling of contentment; it might actually throw your very spirit into turmoil. Maybe, in all honesty, you could have just stopped at the mountaintop to breathe in the balmy, fragrant scents of the island, refusing to proceed any farther.
At the very end of the game, after spending way too many hours trudging and crawling through those mountain puzzles, you’re plopped into an elevator. It ascends to the heavens, fluttering over the vibrant landscapes of the island. For a second your heart palpitates as you think there might actually be a greater meaning to it all. And then it happens. The elevator retraces the steps of your journey. And as it retraces those steps you behold the very puzzles you anguished over resetting. Their mazes fade back into incompletion and the biomes of the island once again sit in quiet solitude as you float past them.
This heartbreaking journey ends with the elevator depositing you right back in the shadowy corridors of that tunnel you started in. All of your work has been undone. You’re left feeling betrayed and empty. What does this mean? What even was the grand purpose of this whole futile adventure?
To answer this, you need to be cognizant of what that elevator ride represented. It was death. It was the process of all your aspirations and dreams being swallowed into an abyss of utter blackness. It was emblematic of what it’s like to work so hard your whole life, toiling away at all its questions, only to have no one to share those discoveries with. If you’re never able to share those feelings that swirl within your heart and mind, then you are truly lost. You’re stuck back at the very beginning of life like nothing even happened at all.
Memories will be forgotten. Physical artifacts will become deformed. Achievements will be twisted and warped. All your time in the game is equally pointless. Unless, of course, you do the right thing and share your experience with someone. Tell them about your journey through the island. Tell them about those initial butterflies you felt in your stomach as you solved your first puzzle. Edify them about all those crazy thoughts you had frenetically bouncing around in your mind as you worked your way towards the mountain.
You’ll regain that joy once again as you recount your escapades on the island and the ways you observantly traveled across its surfaces. The smile on the other person’s face as you regale them with details will ignite a firestorm of contentment within your heart once again. And now it’s a story you can start to share with everyone.
Now you’ve regained your sense of fulfillment. You feel revitalized once again. And you can return to the island once more. You can appreciate the statues and the scenery. All of it feels special to you again. A waterfall is a waterfall. A beach is a beach. And the puzzles are riddles you solved and deserve to feel proud of. You can return to the island and appreciate all those perspective puzzles, like the river one you first witnessed at the top of the mountain with that grand epiphany.
Now you know the ultimate truth: that humanity can and should seek explanations and the truth, but your discoveries only mean anything if you pass them onto others and share your experiences with others. Therefore, you can glean the name of the game from this: life only matters if you have others to witness it with. You are the witness, observing the great deeds of all these people’s statues and their past lives.
This is powerful stuff. It’s also highly pretentious, and you’re still able to relish your time in the game’s world without ever pondering the message these audio logs and video clips are trying to get at. The philosophers, scientists, and artists all have amazing insights which shed a light on what the game is trying to say, but you can also glean inspiration from the world itself and the way you discover it.
No matter what, you’ll walk away from The Witness with a new appreciation for observation. All of those sleepless nights lying awake in your bed, where you’d suddenly spring up with a huge “eureka” moment, were worthwhile.
This quote from the audio log on top of the mountain explains it the best. It’s an excerpt from Apollo astronaut Russell “Rusty” Schweickart as he reflects on humanity from his new galactic point-of-view.
“It’s not a special thing for you,” he said. “You know very well at that moment — and it comes through to you so powerfully — that you’re the sensing element for man. You look down and see the surface of that globe that you’ve lived on all this time, and you know all those people down there — they are like you. They are you. And somehow you represent them when you are up there. A sensing element. [You are] that point out on the end, and that’s a humbling feeling. It’s a feeling that says you have a responsibility. It’s not for yourself.”
The Effect It Had on Me
I serendipitously stumbled upon The Witness a few months into the Covid-19 pandemic and quarantine. It was just a typical night. I was feeling drained from the self-isolation, a husk of a human being just perfunctorily performing his day-to-day duties. My body was aching with a sense of crushing exhaustion, and I decided to languidly plop myself down on the couch and flick on the Xbox One. My fingers robotically whisked around the controller as my eyes leafed through game after game on the store; I was looking for some sort of inspiration, some sort of new endeavor to save me from the drudgery of myself.
The games continued to trudge by my eyes as I browsed, a sea of gray blandness that left me feeling hollow. I had fallen into this nebulous headspace at the time where movies and games had started to feel like busywork to me, their artistic meanings and vibrant worlds enfeebled by this monster we call loneliness.
And then I saw it. The Witness poked its little head out of the store interface, my eyes instantly enthralled with its warm-hued, pastel color palette and the inviting aura that seemed to be emanating from it.
That night was amazing. I spent a few hours just wandering aimlessly in the world, my eyes lit up with the colors of the game’s island. I was barely even solving the puzzles. Something about the rustic nature of the setting and the ambient sounds ringing in my ears just calmed my heart in ways I couldn’t describe.
The world suddenly felt a little warmer. A little more vital. And I slept like an absolute baby that night for the first time in what felt like forever.
I experienced my first epiphany when I returned to the game the next day. It was those puzzle panels towards the start of the game with the black and white circles inside of the mazes. At first, I had passed by them, incognizant of what they actually meant. And I continued to see those little black and white circles all over the island. It just so happened that I strolled back to the starting area again out of pure luck. And I started to tinker with those early panels again featuring the circles.
A little bit of experimentation later, and I had the sudden revelation: the black and white circles always need to be separated via my movements through the panels. Now I fully understood what those symbols meant, and realized they were all over the island. There were now a dozen new areas I could access with that knowledge.
My mind was suddenly enkindled with a deep need to further my explorations, a whirlwind of excitement spiraling within. I had seen so many other symbols besides the black and white circles out there on the island. What did they mean? What secrets did they protect? What area was there to head to next?
It was at that point, after my first epiphany, that I got extremely enthralled with the game. It pulled me out of the stupor I had been in for months.
I was so excited, in fact, that I actually restarted the game and pleaded with my girlfriend to play it with me. And it was one of the best choices I made during this mess of a quarantine we’ve all been dealing with.
A week later, and we were both hopelessly immersed in the game’s world. We started to create a whole compendium of detailed notes on the symbols and patterns we were coming across. We scribbled rough drawings of areas we were planning to explore later. And we developed a habit of babbling about the game late into the night even when we weren’t playing. The dreams in our minds would be filled with a vortex of notions and theories on all the anomalies we’d stumbled upon that day. Almost always, one of us would wake up with a massive, euphoric screech as the dots in our minds connected and an epiphany struck. Then we’d share that moment of exhilaration together. And it was glorious and sublime.
It was so comforting that we both had these brain-teasers to obsess over together. A link between our minds. Puzzle games had never really been our forte before, so this was a totally new and peculiar experience for both of us. It was almost a spiritual exercise, with our minds being lifted into a new state that relaxed and focused us. A shared state of some sort of obscure enlightenment.
We continued like this for a solid month, and it was fantastic. The Witness had completely and utterly managed to engross both of us. This was before I even fell down the whole rabbit hole of audio logs and film clips.
That was a whole new ball game. Falling down that rabbit hole opened up new avenues of self-exploration and mental gymnastics for myself. And it couldn’t have been more auspicious under the circumstances. Pondering all those theories from different philosophers and scientists and delving into the game’s idiosyncrasies was a great form of decompression for my mind. It began the process of me finding myself again in all the madness. My mind, my energy, my very self — it had all been recalibrated with laser-precision.
The Witness set me on the right path again. I began to read more. I began to reconnect with friends via Discord and other programs once again. I found myself seeking out self-expression like I used to. It was actually possible to focus on tasks at work once again with a new sense of drive and vigor. The game had truly managed to fortify me against the crippling exhaustion of the pandemic. It made me resilient, like a suit of metal had encased my body and turned me into a warrior. A warrior that could plow through life and appreciate it.
Final Thoughts
I’ve never had a proclivity for puzzles games, but The Witness is such an inimitable experience that I would basically recommend it to anyone. It does so many things right: resplendent and captivating graphics, deep mechanics, exquisite world design, lush audio, and a staggering supply of hidden secrets and goodies.
Not only will the game make you feel like an erudite scholar, but it’s also a really therapeutic experience for the stresses of life. You’ll work your mind. Calm your nerves. And it might even open your eyes to a whole genre of video games you’ve never been fond of before.
There’s also the fact that it’s a living, breathing experience. If the puzzles are ever too taxing, it’s equally pleasant and rewarding to just walk around and meditate on the scenery while losing yourself in a canopy of thoughts. The audio logs, scattered all over the island in their hard-to-reach spots, are brimming with arresting people and topics that will open your eyes to the world around you. And the perspective puzzles, where you’re seeing lines and shapes in all the crevices and ranges of the island, are so fulfilling to stumble upon while you’re strolling through the paradisal environments.
This is a game that challenges the very fabric of reward structure in video games. There are no grand cutscenes to be unlocked. You won’t be able to reach checkpoints and story points which beautifully tie all the audio logs and videos together. It’s really up to the player to glean some semblance of meaning from all the scattered pieces. And it’s up to the players to stoke the fires of their curiosities, forming the embers of their minds into smoldering power-cells that launch them from one puzzle to the next.
There is a true “ending” to be found within the game after you’ve been unceremoniously plopped back into the gloomy starting tunnel by the elevator. You’ll likely find that The Witness has managed to entirely alter the way you perceive the island. This true “ending” has been there since the start, but at the time you just didn’t have the mental tools to seek it out. Will the ending satisfy you and provide a typical conclusion to the island’s narrative? No. But it’s a really nice reward that allows you to finally feel like you’ve made progress in that customary way you’d expect from most games.
Of all the game’s effects that have been discussed here, the most paramount of them all is likely this: you will walk away from The Witness with a new approach to playing the games you venture into afterwards. You’ll be more methodical. And you’ll begin to detect all the nuances of these hand-crafted worlds. The designers’ methods and ingenuities will become far more evident to you, and you’ll be able to view games as more than just an experience; now there’s a science to them. You can analyze the connective tissue that binds all the disparate parts together. There’s a whole patchwork of rickety components behind the veil of every game’s front-facing exterior, surreptitiously bound together with rudimentary globs of glue and scotch tape. Games are a creative endeavor, built upon years of hard work that is rife with crushing problems and delays. The final product is a nexus of talents: designers, engineers, artists, writers, producers, and quality assurance testers. Maybe now you’ll be able to discern the way that all those components are jumbled together, and you’ll truly be able to value the sheer quantity of sleepless nights and inordinate quantities of coffee that fueled the project as a whole. Game development is a mind-boggling place.
So let’s walk across the picturesque majesty of The Witness’ island one last time. You can feel the grainy warmth of the sand as you saunter across the beach. A canvas of blue skies and cotton-candy clouds stretches out before your eyes. Your nostrils flare up as a current of balmy, fragrant scents — sour berries, spicy cinnamon, silky jade — all leap off the tropical pages of the artwork before you.
You gaze far into the distance. A monolithic mountain reaches towards the far-away stars. Upon its snow-capped peak rests an enigmatic monument. To the right of the mountain, huddled among a kaleidoscopic range of vibrant flowers — hues of deep red and orange, green and blue — rests an impenetrable bunker.
A series of crunches fill your eardrums as you make your way along the grass fields leading to the bamboo forests below the mountain. You can hear a symphony of mellifluous chirps as birds soar overhead, their acrobatic whooshes creating slipstream paths through the floating leaves and cracking branches. The sound of cold, rippling water from the nearby river suffuses the area with indescribable harmony.
As the mountain grows larger — the base only a couple hundred yards away — the soles of your feet vibrate with thrums of ancient machinery deep underground. A nervous system of paths and tunnels are nestled within the moisture-laden earth below your feet. Panels flicker and wires spark in a pyrotechnic show within those dust-saturated burrows. Little flares of electricity briefly illuminate the tunnels in a brilliant aura of light, only to be swallowed by inexplicable darkness once again mere moments later.
You ascend the precarious trails of the mountain, the air growing scarcer, the dirt and mud being enveloped in a blanket of snow. Behind you, the island slumbers. The silhouettes of its many spaces — stoic castles, depleted salt quarries, creaking boat sheds — all fade into a soup of gray as your distance from them elongates.
The apex of the mountain is bitterly cold. Ice-tinged air showers you in a barrage of crystalline flakes. A balmy and idyllic landscape is sprawled out far below you, the colors obfuscated by a gentle flow of clouds being blown over it.
All of that is now forgotten. You stare up at the monument. The surrounding statues all stare up at you, too. Your hands reach towards it. The air crackles with the energy of a millennium of human experiences, all harnessed within the very ground you stand on. You take your first step down the stairs into the mountain. The steps are sporadic, your eyes darting side to side as you scan the mountain’s interior. Sharp notes of metal and copper shift along your tastebuds as you descend farther.
The air buzzes with static as pumps gyrate and water bubbles in super-heated tanks. Incandescent bulbs above your head are white-hot with electricity, spurred on by power sources far below the ground. A series of elevators take you farther down, the air growing balmier the lower you go, with notes of petrichor forming as unknown water sources dribble down the arid, cracked surfaces of cavern walls.
You eventually reach that same elevator again from earlier and step inside. The doors clack closed along with the sound of a shrill vacuum seal. It careens upwards — rain pelting the glass exterior in a series of brilliantly colored streaks — as you gasp from the sheer speed of the takeoff. The island grows smaller. It fades into obscurity. At first, it’s a recognizable circle of landmarks and places. Then it’s an iota of color in a sea of white-blue ocean. And then you’re out in the nebulous reaches of space itself. The dot that was the island is gone, dissipated, taken over by the looming magnificence of the Earth.
The elevator just floats there for what feels like an eternity. Your heart palpitations settle down to a gentle roar. Your eyes focus intently as you take in every vivid detail you can make out from down below.
Now you’re seeing lines and shapes, bulbs and swirls, all over the whole planet. Now you’re realizing it’s all one giant puzzle. And now, if you’re anything like me, you’re really hoping that this won’t be the last great open-world puzzle game. We need another industry-altering release to come out like the Myst series.
You touch the glass of the elevator, your eyes wide, nose pressed to the cold of its surface. There’s so much to be explored down there. Which makes you ask the question, “will there be more games like The Witness?”
I hope so. I really, really hope so.
To end things, here’s another quote from one of the game’s many audio logs, this time from Richard Feynman. It’s both succinct and beautiful, and it eloquently encapsulates the game’s message:
“It is a great adventure to contemplate the universe, beyond man, to contemplate what it would be like without man, as it was in a great part of its long history and as it is in a great majority of places. When this objective view is finally attained, and the mystery and majesty of matter are truly appreciated, to then turn the objective eye back on man viewed as matter, to view life as part of this universal mystery of greatest depth, is to sense an experience which is very rare, and very exciting. It usually ends in laughter and a delight in the futility of trying to understand what this atom in the universe is, this thing — atoms with curiosity — that looks at itself and wonders why it wonders. Well, these scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man’s struggle for good and evil seems inadequate.”
