The Witness is a puzzle game with walking sim elements developed by Thecla, Inc. It engages the player with an open world, encouraging them to step out of a tunnel and into seemingly abandoned ruins to piece together the story themselves. As Sean Krankel, co-creator of “Oxenfree”, comments on, walking sims lack immediate danger, time limit, or failstates to drive the player forward. However, The Witness combines freedom of exploration, clues embedded in the world, and a steady flow of information to spark curiosity that encourages the player to keep exploring, even when there isn’t a threat pushing players to act.
The first 5 minutes of the game use a relatively closed off environment to set the player’s expectations around exploration, clues, and puzzles. The player begins in a small castle, blocked by a wall of lasers. There are wires going through the area, acting as breadcrumb trails to follow. As we’ve seen in our readings, plunging the player into a puzzle that they are underequipped to solve makes them feel bored, because they’re not learning. This area is an effective introduction, because it provides a scaled down environment for the player to learn the fundamental mechanics, before they have to learn harder mechanics through trial and error, before they can enter into the full world. This keeps the player learning at a consistent pace.
[a very simple puzzle, the 3rd the player is exposed to]
[a puzzle with panels covering it. Each panel has a wire coming out of it, which lights up when the attached puzzle is completed]
After this area, the world opens up, allowing the player to experience areas and challenges in any order. Firstly, this provides the player with the feeling of exploration, which is enjoyable in itself. Immediately after escaping the starting area, I went through the bushes and found myself on the catwalk surrounding the castle I started in. This made me feel clever, like I had outsmarted the designer.
[a view of the starting area from atop the spawn room. To get here, I had to go off-road and walk around the perimeter]
This open-ended exploration allows players to discover puzzles before they know the mechanics. In other words, I saw a “lock” before I saw a “key”. This created curiosity in me, because I knew the basic mechanics, but I wasn’t sure what these added elements meant. I kept returning to this puzzle as I learned new things, until the fourth time, when I realized I finally knew how to solve it. Knowing the problem and then finding the pieces to solve it is much more exciting than finding pieces along the way, and then running into a problem that fits neatly with what you already know.
[A puzzle I discovered before I understood the mechanics]
Furthermore, the open world environment allows players to discover the story on their own. As I was exploring, I ran into a bigger castle area, where I found a person (like me!) seemingly turned to stone. This caused me to feel fear, curiosity, and fascination. Firstly, the threat that something happened here meant that there was danger here. This adds a sense of urgency, without immediately threatening the player. Secondly, I wanted to know what had happened to this person. The rest of the world was somewhat unremarkable; there were some buildings, lots of trees, and some pretty rock formations. But this suggested a bigger mystery. This is an example of an embedded narrative, where the designer puts pieces of information about the world into the world, and allows the player to discover them episodically and piece together the story themselves. Lastly, this discovery of a civilization and a people before me was simply thrilling. I felt like I had stumbled upon something I wasn’t supposed to know.
[someone turned to stone, with an anguished expression and pose. What happened here?]
Violence is only indirectly present (in the form of this person turned to stone), yet it adds emotion to the game without terrifying the player or encouraging them to act violently in turn. The player never has to experience violence to advance the game, either as a perpetrator or victim. In fact, there is no ability to be violent. Instead, the player learns about violence in the world through these embedded narratives. This helps keep the game accessible for those who are sensitive to trauma or gun violence. At the same time, it acknowledges the reality that violence exists, and creates sympathy in the player, by giving them a window into the emotions of those who have been affected by violence in the world of the game.
The open world environment with a lack of instructions creates curiosity and fascination. Rather than feeling shapeless, or lacking a direction, the world has clues embedded in it: A wire, a path, panels with progressively harder puzzles. Each of these suggest a direction to the player, while slowly unveiling the story alongside mechanics.
