The Witness, It’s Neat
Let’s just start out easy, with an early-year title that everyone got into. The Witness is really good! I just still haven’t finished it, and I’m not sure I ever will.
Tutorials
The Witness has one of the very best tutorials I’ve ever seen, in that it’s basically completely invisible. The very beginning forces you to interact with the core element, a screen you can draw a line on. Do it, and it opens a door into a cute little courtyard that lets you find 3 or 4 simple puzzles, each one adding another wrinkle to the line-drawing gameplay, and then suddenly you’re let out into the world, free to explore literally the entire island at your leisure.
But in front of you is a tree-lined path (with no puzzles). A little ways on there’s a door to your left and another puzzle, but this one is completely out of your league, with all these dots on a huge grid. You go further forward and end up in a little clearing with a house, and two more sets of puzzles that introduce totally new concepts to you, without ever saying a word. The Witness never tells you how to solve puzzles in words; it trusts that it has laid itself out well-enough, that it introduces its own concepts in an intuitive-enough way that the majority of its players will just figure them out. And it absolutely does. It holds your hand throughout this entire sequence but lets you go at your own pace, and lets you opt out of it completely by just walking off the path and finding one of the other puzzle areas.
But everywhere you go, the very first puzzle you interact with will almost always be the simplest possible riff on the theme of the area. Sometimes your lines have to draw shapes. Sometimes they have to partition black and white dots. Sometimes the solution comes from the environment around you. But in all cases the very first puzzle you run into makes very clear exactly what this solving-condition is. And you do it and suddenly the random door you saw half an hour ago with a completely indecipherable grid clicks and oh-shit-I-have-to-run-back-there-and-check-it-out-again and god, it’s so good!
The tutorial fades seamlessly into the gameplay, and in truth it doesn’t disappear completely until the game is over. The Witness is worth playing solely to see how it teaches you to play itself, because it’s absolutely brilliant.
Virtual Physicality
I feel like there’s a better word for this feeling, but whatever. I really love the way the game is both a simple puzzle game and a first person… point and click adventure, though that doesn’t quite capture it. The core of this game could easily have been a mobile game with a list of puzzles to solve, all ranked easy-medium-hard, but the physicality imparted by having a character who wanders around a map transforms it into something else entirely. The ability to walk away from a puzzle inside the game — let it simmer in your head while still being immersed in this world — is unique to any puzzle game I’ve played. I found myself losing hours just wandering around ingame, completely consumed by the 2–3 puzzles I was stuck on at any given time. It’s like Professor Layton but taken a step further, because the screen by screen nature of those games gives you this sense that you’re looking at tableaus, at individual comic panels, instead of being a part of that world.
Having to walk between locations gives you time to sort of mentally set yourself for whatever area you want to tackle next when the previous one has gotten kinda old, or just wonder what kind of puzzles you’ll find in this completely new environment. The areas are distinct and memorable, so that as soon as you step into one for the first time in hours you’re already mentally preparing for the puzzles you’re stuck on there. The feeling of having a body disconnected from my own but also somehow disconnected from my analytical, puzzle-solving mind is something I’ve never experienced and I thought that was really neat.
The island itself is beautiful, filled with visually distinct areas and fantastic forced perspective illusions, many of which are actually meta-puzzles that I felt extremely clever for finding. I love solving little puzzles just for their own sake, but the doors they unlock, the new spaces for my new body to explore, even the silly collectibles with pretentious quotes all make every single solve that much more satisfying.
But yet…
I’ll never beat it, probably. The sequences towards the end that depend on your character’s physical location feel so tedious an un-fun that every time I try them I get frustrated and quit. Suddenly my character’s physicality becomes a limitation, and I guess for me that breaks the illusion of physicality that the game built up for me. Why is this metal bar blocking my puzzle progress? In real life I’d just look around it and finish the damn thing.
I know I’m so close to the end, but what this game was to me was a wonderful playground where I could tunnel vision in on a small, solvable problem, the kind of task I tend to be best at in real life, and solve the hell out of it. Maybe it’s kind of nice to feel like there’s always more puzzles out there, just waiting for me to solve them. Maybe I just don’t feel like the end of the game has much more to offer me. I’m not really sure.
