The important thing to note is that, from the start, The Witness never exactly tells you to do anything, but it does show you how its various systems work, if you know where to look. Likewise, you’re probably aware that completing puzzles typically only activates more puzzle panels, and that the simple mazes soon expand into a much more insidious chimera of all the brainteasers in your newspaper’s “Fun & Games” section. But if you’ve heard of The Witness at this point, you probably already know that. You walk up to a brightly colored, electric panel, akin to a touchscreen kiosk, and draw a line on the presented grid that traverses a maze from start to finish. The core mode of engagement with The Witness is through line puzzles. Yet the game’s pervasive emphasis on imparting the wisdom of its own design ethos, particularly through scattered audio diaries, actually diminishes the self-empowerment of its otherwise player-driven structure. Unlike the demo event I attended, players of retail copies of The Witness are not offered a developer-lead introduction to the island. This knowing and beautiful artificiality is one of the ways The Witness self-reflexively confronts what videogames historically have been. Then again, videogames have for decades teleported players from ice levels to volcano worlds and everywhere in between. Subtle transitions guide players from one temperate zone to the next, never batting an eye to justify how this could have naturally come to be. In less than two minutes you can run from a bamboo forest to a cherry blossom orchard to the shade of a line of palms to a dense banyan forest. The island where the entirety of the game takes place is an immaculately rendered low-poly theme park of climates, topography, and eroded architecture. And while all videogames are designed spaces in their own right, The Witness does away with the façade that it’s anything but a designed space. The Witness is, above all else, a designed space. The Witness self-reflexively confronts what videogames historically have been Sure enough, in the final version of The Witness, the desert shoreline contains a particularly treacherous puzzle panel and you can no longer stride through the solid rock near the windmill. A member of the development team noted the boulder’s lack of solid form - something to fix later. Later I clipped through some large boulders that were supposed to form a funneling barricade leading to the entrance of a windmill. True enough, there wasn’t much to do except watch the waves roll in and take note of how the red stone wall of the cliff face cut into the uncompromisingly blue sky. I strolled down to a seashore under a desert cliff where a voice over my shoulder assured me that the area had not been fully implemented. I chose the latter option, only encountered a handful of the game’s signature line-tracing puzzle panels, and spent the rest of my time gawking at the natural and architectural framework of the island. When I played a demo version of The Witness at a Sony event in 2013, I was offered two approaches: 1) I could be lead through a basic tutorial of the way the game’s puzzle systems work, or 2) I could be left to wander around the island landscape and discover it at my whim.
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