The Witness

The Witness

This is almost one-man job as Jonathan Blow appears to be the director, producer and designer of this game as well as one out of the four lead programmers like Ignacio, 

Castaño Salvador, Bel Murciano and Andrew Smith and even the script-writing is also done by him alongside with the cooperative help by Goeun Lee. Only that he is not in

the artists section as there we have Luis Antonio, Eric A. Anderson and Orsolya Spanyol. It is being developed and published by Thekla, Inc. (his company) for the PC, PS4,

Android, macOS, iOS and Xbox One platforms back on 26-th of January 2016. It is again puzzle single-player vidseo game but this time, the visuals and graphics are very very

similar to Firewatch, if you remember that indie game. It really doesn’t take high system requirements as it only takes 4GB RAM, 5GB free space and DX10 even as recommended

requirements. Though, it will take GeForce GTX780.

Jonathan Blow, the game's lead designer, desired to create a game around non-verbal communication, wanting players to learn from observation and to come to epiphanies in finding

solutions and leading to a greater sense of involvement and accomplishment with each success. The game includes around 650 puzzles, which Jonathan Blow estimates will take the

average player about 80 hours to solve, though you are not obliged to solve them all in order to finish the game. The puzzles include one that Blow believed that less than 1% of the players

would be able to solve.

The Witness is a puzzle adventure game, experienced in the first-person view. You are, again, an unnamed character that explores an island with numerous structures and natural formations.

The island is roughly divided into eleven sections, arranged around a mountain that represents the ultimate goal for you. Within each section is a gold box that must be reached to activate it,

requiring you to complete a sequence of puzzles within that section to reach it. Once activated, a turret emerges from the box and shines a light towards the top of the mountain, indicating that

section is complete. You will need to activate some of the boxes in the game to be able to access the inside of the mountain and ultimately reach the game's final goal, though additional puzzles can

be discovered if all eleven turrets are activated. There are additional optional puzzles scattered around the island. One optional set of puzzles, accessible after entering the mountain and colloquially

referred to as "The Challenge", is a time-based test to complete about a dozen algorithmically-generated mazes within seven minutes, set to music from

Edvard Grieg's "Anitra's Dance" and "In the Hall of the Mountain King". 

P.S.: The art style was influenced by a simplification approach, eliminating enough details but keeping overall shapes to make objects clearly recognizable. According to Antonio, they took inspiration for

simplification from real-world photography, artwork, and from the environments of the games Journey, Team Fortress 2, and Mirror's Edge.

Written by: Adrian Dimitrijeski

Watch for more:

The Witness first official gameplay trailer