I played the Witness for this, but didn’t really write about it then. School’s hard!
The Witness is a rather beautiful puzzle game with a silent, emergent narrative. Puzzles are not explained to the player, and they’re pretty much all variations on the very first puzzles you are introduced to. Instead, the game guides you on how to complete puzzles by making them exceedingly simple to begin with, and just gradually ramping up the difficulty in one very long crescendo. On the left is one of the first puzzles in the game. The one on the right comes later on.
See, the thing about the Witness is that it’s not just a puzzle game. It’s maybe one of the most explicit examples of an “emergent narrative” that I’ve ever played. You wake up in a weird facility and are on an island, and the only way to get anywhere is to solve puzzles. The island is split into many different sectors, each of which have their own colorful environments, which are often integrated into the puzzles. For example, take this puzzle in the cherry blossom tree zone.
You’re never given “words” that you should do this, it just uses the UI very effectively to guide you into it. It may seem obvious from this picture, but in a mostly silent experience, it felt really quite amazing to get it right.
Of course, we talked a lot about making puzzles not too hard during class. Making it feel like the player can always get past them, giving them hints, etc. The Witness throws a giant middle finger to absolutely all of those ideas. The game is long. It is brutal. There is no guidance, and anytime you look something up (I did a few times!) you feel like you just desecrated the shrine of some sleeping deity. It challenges you every step of the way, asking if you’re willing to throw in the towel. There’s no punishment, no one watching you, you’re all alone in the island and you’re probably playing the game alone as well. It’s just you and what you decide to do.
The game does throw you a bit of a bone though. The island is mostly open from the beginning, and you can choose which paths you want to take. If an area ever frustrates you too hard, you (usually) have plenty others to choose from until you’re willing to go back and figure it out. The game is also long. I did not beat the Witness and I do not know if I ever will.
Why are you on this island? Who are you? Why are you solving these puzzles? Who made these puzzles? What’s the history of this place? These are the implicit questions that the game is constantly forcing you to ask. I did not really encounter any dialogue in the game, but a bit of google cheating informs me that there exists some small amounts, but that it is… hidden behind puzzles. Puzzle after puzzle after puzzle. It’s just a nonstop barrage of these simple puzzles. It’s really rather meditative. I’m someone who frequently grows impatient with puzzles in games but for some reason, I never got that way with the Witness. It’s often when a game is an Action RPG first, and it just forces me to complete some dumbass puzzle that I get annoyed and google it (e.g., Skyrim). The Witness never pretends like it is anything except a puzzle game, and I find it to be a very fascinating little example of the genre. I’d strongly recommend it. There’s a mobile version too for ios, which I’m debating getting for playing on the go. Puzzles don’t “influence the experience of the game” – they are the game, and they form the bulk of the game’s narrative, block your progression, are 95% of the gameplay, and the other 5% of gameplay is walking around the pretty scenery to get to the next puzzle. It compels you to look for patterns where you might otherwise never have seen them. What a beautiful game.
