You don’t feel too stupid for the witness until it’s too late, just like real life
Dunning-Kruger simulator 2k16
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I just fired this off as a joke but it’s real.
The Witness is more than JBlow pantomime-masturbating. It’s an attempt to convey something without metaphor or symbolism or shorthand etc. It is exactly what it appears to be. Braid was a frustrating creative writing exercise in wrapping meaning around a mechanic. The Witness is a reaction - there’s no “there” there and interpreting it is a waste of time.
I found it really frustrating when every piece of writing or take at its time of release was tripping to do a hagiography or hit piece (the latter of which make me very uncomfortable because of generalizations about autism) because it’s not about JBlow. He’s just a guy. The criticism sometimes brushed with references to Ways of Seeing or the like, but Blow’s tai chi practices were also somehow relevant.
The value of The Witness is engaging with different parts of your… (ugh) perceptive apparatus and reflecting on how your brain is configured. For bonus points play it with someone else and learn about their brain.
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I’ve watched many people play about 20 minutes of The Witness (by my request) and they always misinterpret the tutorial set at the start about white/black dot segregation and they sound vaguely less-than-satisfied when they discover the correct rule (after falsely but reasonably assuming other things, like that the line is supposed to go above the white dots, since the first several always have the white dots on the bottom and I’m starting to empathize and I’m surprised none of those Galaxy Brain “this is problematic” hot takes didn’t obsessively focus on this particular logic set or maybe I just forgot them all.
Anyway the game properly introduces itself which the symmetry puzzles that most people will encounter next, which do a good job of introducing subversion rhythms and environmental reference without yet expecting you to do hard(er) logic.
This has somehow made me more genuinely enthusiastic about than anything else I’ve read (sorry, other Select Butts, if you’ve written anything similar and I’ve glossed over it until now)
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Yeah, the game essentially revolves around massive twists and secrets and optical illusions involving the geometry of the island itself and even the clouds in the sky for you to discover at any random point in time, whenever you happen to do so intuitively, and you might not at all since the game has so much content and doesn’t force you to see even half of it. It’s very spoilable so try to go into it as blind as possible.
It’s a legit masterpiece regardless of what one thinks of Blow, and Blow’s presence in it is relatively restrained (the audio quotes there are to find are optional, easily missed [and their placement doesn’t scream “secret treasure” either] and almost entirely not written by him, thankfully).
It is a game with much content, most of which is optional, that profoundly respects your time and intelligence (that which doesn’t is buried deep and by then you might relish an indulgent easter egg or two). It is also low-key funny and even charmingly subverts its own more superficially pretentious moments, wordlessly.
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Challenging your assumptions about the rules is like the whole game, though! What do you dislike about that in the initial puzzles? Later puzzles also intentionally mislead/don’t give you enough information to deduce the rules unless the you go out of your way to test your assumptions.
The whole game is building a mental model of the rules, and obsessively testing and adapting that model until you’re finally confident it’s correct.
Gotta disagree with this
Its a game that advertises how it has hundreds of puzzles yet most of them are filler. Its a game set on a fantastic looking island that just exists as background decoration or ‘trace the dick’ dioramas. Its a game made by someone trying to “fix” myst who doubled down on fucking sound puzzles, the lowest form of puzzle design.
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i’m gonna play the shit out of that call of duty multiplayer
hit me up when it comes out
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Obligatory reminder to all that Infinite Warfare is legit.
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I just gotta thank, I think it was Felix, for sending out the PSA to purchase Devotion before it was taken down. I usually don’t buy video games these days but I’m really, really glad I did this time.
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I just mean very literally, in that particular puzzle set, that the last thing many newbies think of is segregating the whites and blacks. I’ve seen them go through every conceivable assumption of the solution condition except that lol. There’s also no payoff after figuring out that set until later and elsewhere (since it’s just a tutorial line), so many of them taper off interest at that point. It’s not a serious criticism, just something I’ve observed.
this is one of my favourite succinct pieces of analysis here in a good while
I agree that the sound puzzles are trash, but there aren’t many of them outside one relegated area (the sun temple puzzles are even worse), and I don’t engage with a narrative of it “fixing” Myst because I like Myst and that would piss me off as much as it probably does you.
I don’t have a problem with the island just looking pretty because the specific geometric way it looks, and how you look at it, is the broader point of the game, and it would either distract from that or make it impossible if the island had a purpose other than to look pretty, unless it were given a not-very-meaningful fiction that had no ramifications on the shape or design of the island (or J. Blow spent five more years of dev time coming up with a bad story). But I knew going in that there wasn’t going to be much of a story, and it really would be just puzzles for puzzles sake and some cool twists and secrets, and that’s what I got.
I disagree with most of the puzzles being “filler”; most iterations of a set are similar but they each do something meaningfully different with the logic that either gently suggests or disproves to you something about the rules, and the game is at its best when a single slight alteration between two panels completely changes the solution and how you have to look at it. There are very few puzzles that are gratuitously big or time-consuming to solve; they each are a direct interrogation of your evolving understanding of the rules.
Also, what is “obvious” and “filler” is highly subjective across different people playing the game; my friends have gotten stuck in places I wouldn’t and vice versa. “Hundreds of puzzles” isn’t a huge claim if you understand it as “hundreds of panels”, which was what I bought the game for and I don’t feel I was misled.
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Moreso than most games, Witness is one you should play until you have had enough and then not a moment more of. It is fortunately designed in such a way that you can get to an ending with only having to solve maybe 70% of the “main” puzzles (I didn’t do the math, don’t quote me on that). It is unfortunately designed in a way that you know it is holding secret stuff aside (like the actual ending) that pushes you to finish that remaining 30% or so of stuff you decided to skip initially, basically resulting in you grinding through the stuff you either didn’t understand or didn’t care for all in a row. The the stuff you get to afterwards is basically extra cut panels that were cut for good reason and a challenge which is probably the most iffily designed non-sound puzzle in the game, the reward for finishing it being a time wasting troll.
Also the actual ending. Said ending is cute (the initial ending is underwhelming even accounting for it being a game without a story), but I’d have rather just quit hours earlier.
That comes off negative. Do play it, it is swell! It just reaches a point where it no longer is so and doesn’t recapture that.
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Here’s my counter opinion! I played the witness for 20 minutes and scream I Hate This and quit and everyone that played it told me I was right. I did hate it.
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Thanks I am working up to writing down more of the things that have been rattling around in my head! This one’s been in the oven for three years. 
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I liked the Witness cuz it had nice colors and let me inhabit a world and I ignored all the videos and shit.
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Alternatively you can look up some puzzle solutions on the internet when you’ve gotten to that 70% stage and really ran dry. As I recall, I did that at least for a sound puzzle, and I think three others that weren’t especially unfair but I just was obtusely making the wrong assumption about how they worked. Then I was unblocked for everything else.
I don’t disagree about the challenge not being very balanced and about the reward being a troll, but I also think they’re definitely worth seeing as they’re refreshing and cool variations substantively different from the rest of the game.
I had to look up the answer for a sound puzzle or two as I might literally be tone deaf (even after knowing the right solution I couldn’t hear it) and one other one that I likely would have never figured out what they were going for.
I say skip the challenge as success is so RNG dependent and that is just bad in a puzzle game.