Review: Enigmatic ‘The Witness’ Is Big on Challenge, Light on Reward

Island of mystery. (Image: Thekla)

Jonathan Blow is trying to make me feel stupid. Scratch that — Jonathan Blow is succeeding at making me feel stupid.

Blow, an indie developer whose 2008 puzzle-platformer Braid dazzled gamers with its winning combination of devious level design, twee art direction, and somber emotion, is back with a new opus. The Witness is strange, austere, infuriating, and occasionally brilliant. Some are hailing it as a masterpiece.

I regretfully report that I am not going to be one of those people.

The overall concept recalls 1993’s seminal adventure game Myst. You wander an isolated island, encountering puzzles around every corner. There’s nobody else here. The atmosphere is mysterious, serene yet vaguely sinister. You solve a puzzle. You solve another puzzle. New areas are gradually unlocked. What are you doing here? What does it all add up to?

Answers are seldom forthcoming. In their absence, your imagination runs wild. You begin to see significance in everything. See how those clouds are positioned? See that pattern in the flower garden? It must mean something. But what? The game freely exploits that trick of human psychology whereby we interpret obscurity as profundity.

The puzzles themselves — nestled in terminal screens all over the 3D island — are almost shockingly low-tech affairs. The vast majority of them are small, two-dimensional, and mazelike, something that could just as well have run on an Intellivision as a PlayStation 4.

The puzzles are childishly simple at first, but they rapidly increase in complexity. The game teaches you to play it by introducing simple concepts and then building on these.

For example, you may be presented with a simple grid. On one of the squares is a particular shape. That shape informs, somehow, the way you must navigate a line through the grid. Once you’ve solved that, different shapes are introduced, or multiple ones combined, or new colors added. Bit by bit, you come to understand how these parts interact, and puzzles that once seemed insoluble start to become approachable. It’s like learning a new language; when it’s clicking, there’s the thrill of new knowledge gained.

But — in part because of the nonlinear structure of the setting — this training is inconsistent. You might stumble on a set of puzzles you aren’t prepared for, only you don’t know you aren’t prepared for them, and you’ll bang your head against the wall for an hour before retreating in frustration. The game, implacable, doesn’t care how much time you waste in this way.

Even when you solve a puzzle, your reward, typically, is just another puzzle. There are audio logs scattered around the island, but they aren’t positioned in such a way as to reward success — they’re just there. Maybe they mean something; maybe they’re just something Blow thought was cool and worth listening to. (One, for example, is an extended quote from the astronaut Rusty Schweickart.) The Witness is stingy with its dopamine drip. If solving each puzzle isn’t its own reward for you, it’ll be hard going.

Riddles within riddles. (Image: Thekla)

For the first few hours, there’s a subtle fascination in poking around The Witness’s beautiful, spooky setting. The bright, cheery colors provide an eerie counterpoint to the desolation and the vague sense that something has gone very wrong here. All around, you’ll find statues in strange poses, as if frozen in the middle of some activity. Are they merely sculptures? Victims of a calamity? What’s the backstory? Is there a backstory? These questions nudge you forward.

Unfortunately, the game eschews the conveniences that have become typical of the open-world genre. Fast travel is extremely limited; if you clamber up a mountain to try some puzzles and find yourself stuck, you’ll have to clamber back down again to try others. There’s no log keeping track of puzzles completed, nor any dynamic map chronicling which areas you’ve already explored.

You have to admire the singularity of vision, the austerity, with which The Witness is designed. It doesn’t seem to be trying very hard to entertain you, and that, ironically, adds to its interest — up to a point. After many hours of play with no indication that the game’s mysteries are going to be unlocked anytime soon, you start to wonder if all this effort is worth it. Die-hard puzzleheads will stick it out, but what about the rest of us? Do I want to put in the time necessary to master Jonathan Blow’s semiotic vocabulary?

For me, the answer in the end was no. Too often while playing The Witness, I realized that there were a lot of other things I’d rather be doing than playing The Witness. I respect it; I admire it. I just didn’t enjoy it all that much.

What’s Hot: Haunting, enigmatic atmosphere; tons of challenging puzzles to solve

What’s Not: Challenges greatly outnumber rewards; core puzzle gameplay often more frustrating than engaging

You can email Gordon Cameron here.