Thoughts on the Witness (2016)
fgiesen.wordpress.com
fgiesen.wordpress.com
On a surface level you explore the world, find puzzles, and solve them.
On the next level is the scenery. There are visual perspective curiosities (e.g. the man who's shadow is juggling, or the statue with the tree forming a tentacle-like body). Then there are the meta-puzzles -- telegraphed at the top of the mountain -- for you to find and complete.
On the next level are the audio devices and the windmill. These cover different aspects of science, philosophy, and religion, but all on the same overall theme -- the sense of discovery, identity, and what it means to be human and to be a witness of life and the world around us. This builds to a kind of meta-commentary of the game, but also to an interesting outlook on life.
Of course everyone is different, but it felt very overhyped to me, definitely wasn’t for me, I guess. Incidentally I also didn’t really enjoy Braid, so I’m not really excited about Jon’s future games although I suppose he could surprise me.
It’s weird because on paper his games are the exact things I should love, but so far they didn’t resonante with me.
My specific issue (in both games) was that I solved later puzzles by just exploring the problem space and not understanding the logic behind them. Like just try this ... uh no that didn't work ... try that, oh good right, onto the next... I was felt deaf to whatever the game was trying to tell me, and it became endless chores with no motivation behind them.
I respect what the Witness does and the craft of how it's all put together, very clever. But it just ends up feeling like a bumper book of puzzles to me, after a few dozen of the same kind of puzzle I just get very irritable. I was expecting a more Myst-like experience where the puzzles are varied and integrated into the environment, where there's equal focus between world/story building and the puzzling. To me The Witness felt like it took a long time to say very little, it's very rare that I use the term pretentious but I do feel like it applies here.
The Outer Wilds also has some very innovative and interesting ideas and craft, but left me very underwhelmed. I won't go into details but I honestly think it's pretty overrated. It all hinges on how well the story and world captivates you though, I can see how many people would like it.
Riven is still the absolute high point of the explorative puzzle genre for me.
The Witness and to a lesser extend OW were evidently influenced by these games. Overall, I liked them more! Subtle and clever in ways the Cyan predesessors are not.
... many of the puzzles have multiple solutions depending on what you want them to activate when you solve them, or on the perspective you have when solving them. I don't think your assessment of the message is very generous.
This "secret ending" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yMw0l26Jvs where he leaves the game and tries to look for the same pattern in the real world but obviously nothing happens. IRL this is like conspiracy theorists who filter all events through their worldview. I remember in college playing so much Katamari Damacy that I couldn't help imagining rolling up cars in the street.
EDIT: Another layer is it's also a game about making games, ways to communicate to the player, and how to make a stripped down interaction scheme rich. I've def found more game developers who like it than non-game developers.
It was interesting for it’s puzzles, but having just come out of The Talos Principle -which had both great puzzles and a great story- it fell a bit flat for me.
The puzzles are fun, but the world looks it has a story behind it, and as you go along you find out that that’s just not really the case (or extremely minimal).
I think this was a fair critique of the Witness and why it lacks respect for the player:
The Witness - A Great Game That You Shouldn't Play https://youtu.be/KZokQov_aH0
Just to put some counter weight to it - I had the exact opposite experience: Deep excitement and curiosity throughout the game. It felt like stepping into a different world of discovery and learning.
I think that's the main reason why Witness contains no meaningful conclusion or explanation to the world.
The game doesn't really require a conclusion tbh.
It's somewhat more like abstract art or perhaps lyrical poetry than it is to normal story telling, but that doesn't inherently detract from its quality. The quotes and clips it uses have a very clear theme and the idea of making a game about discovery, as the blog here I think correctly puts it, is interesting and at the very least different from most games.
Was it a 90 hour immersive story, no way, but it's an atmosphere I love and that few games provide.
It is probably why I also loved Fallout76 and Cyberpunk2077 from release day while others didn't, bugs excluded, to me both were huge worlds that I could wander and explore on my own terms.
The gameplay mechanics best suited for that I think get discussed as "environmental storytelling" but I think in this case the storytelling was pretty light and it was the atmosphere that I was there for. Just existing in these worlds is enough for me to enjoy for a while.
The Talos Principle and The Witness have always seemed interesting to me but I've never played them. I think part of it is that with both of them I've had trouble figuring out what they're like.
Talos, the more I looked into it, seemed sort of like the puzzles were sort of arbitrary or contrived something? I'm not sure what the right words are.
I tend to be more interested in adventure games per se, where the puzzles are ideally fully diagetic in nature, in the sense they're integrated well into the narrative. You're in X narrative scenario, and the problem to solve makes sense as a consequence of the narrative context. It doesn't feel added on post hoc.
With both The Witness and Talos Principle I've had trouble figuring out what the gameplay and puzzles are like. I loved Portal and Portal 2 but felt like it was constantly tiptoeing this boundary of where the puzzles would feel too contrived, but without really going over that, maybe because of the testing environment conceit.
I'm not sure what I'm saying other than that for me, part of what makes a great puzzle in a computer game is that the puzzle is seamlessly integrated into the narrative, and feels diagetic rather than nondiagetic in nature.
The Witness is part normal puzzle game and part more like Myst/Riven where you really have to dig deeper to find the answer. In a way they're about as diagetic as you can get, but some of that digging deeper can be a chore and wasn't fun for me, so I stopped playing The Witness after finding the normal ending and enjoyed playing it up to that point. I'd like to pickup the Outer Wilds though, and I like a balance of adventure/puzzles within games too. I suppose environmental puzzle games really have to click for me to enjoy them.
I definitely do not agree with that assessment. Outside of the challenge areas pretty much every single puzzle exists to teach you something about the mechanics, or the conceptual space of the puzzles, even if what it teaches you is not necessarily helpful to completing the game[0]. The challenge sections of course are meant to test your understanding.
> It didn't help my opinion that it goes for the modern writing story writing trope of "say a bunch of interesting things but use player agency as an excuse to not actually tie them together into a coherent narrative with events and consequences".
I can see how you get that feeling, and truth be told so did I early on in my playthrough, but I really don't think that's the case here at all. It's more like, the things that Jon is trying to communicate in The Witness simply do not lend themselves to easy explanation and are, in fact, kind of difficult to fit into a mental framework that demands concreteness in the first place.
As far as tediousness, I think the key there is that it is probably not a good idea to try and play in long sessions. Certainly the longer I would play the more I just kinda wanted the game to be over, at least until I quit and came back to it. The Fool and His Money[1] often makes me feel like that after a single puzzle, so I don't think The Witness is that bad in this regard.
[0] Some of the puzzles are jokes, or even a commentary, told in the language of the puzzle.
[1] I think I've been playing it for 2 years now, and I'm still not even half way through.
I don’t really enjoy solving the puzzle simply for the sake of the puzzle.
And on the flip side, I didn't find the story engaging at all. Although it could've been fine for what it was trying to do, if it wasn't so pretentious.
Funny enough, I loved Talos Principle and all of the games in the Myst franchise.
By opening these links YOU WILL BE IMMEDIATELY EXPOSED TO SERIOUS SPOILERS. Stop watching if you have decided you want to tackle the game in the future (but you can still repeat the process with the other video).
There were also a few puzzles which required near pixel-perfect positioning and orientation, which is one of the least fun things to do in 3D space and games need to stop doing it (I'm looking at you Horizon Forbidden West); others which required quite being able to pick up on quite sensitive audio differences.
So as a whole, the game jumped from being highly rewarding to highly frustrating a little too quickly.
My friend said during development he thought the same exact thing and sent an email to JBlow about asking if he based the themes off "Godel, Escher, Bach", who said he hadn't ever read the book before!
I'm a pretty quick reader, so the first time I read it I got through the first third easily but then had difficulty and quit. The second time I read it I took it more slowly and did the exercises and got through it without it feeling weighty. Even if you don't want to do the exercises/examples in it, I'd say it's still worth reading and a good chunk of it very readable without playing along - you don't HAVE to get to the end to get something out of it.
It gets denser as you go on because it builds on previous arguments, but if you take the time to absorb what he writes and do exercises it never gets super dense. It's kind of like in math when a symbol will represent a whole idea - if you already know that idea well it won't feel dense, but not knowing it so well will slow you down.
Well, different strokes and all that I guess. Anyway, I strongly support your recommendations.
What drove me to eventually give up on it, was the monotony of the puzzles.
I can appreciate it as an unique game design, but IMO it doesn't make for an interesting gameplay.
It is essentially a puzzle game though, so if you get frustrated by being stuck on things you may not like it. I found it pretty relaxing personally, and it feels great to figure a puzzle out.
On the surface, it's a puzzle game. I bought it (for something ridiculous like €5 on the iPad I believe) expecting to enjoy a few logic puzzles and remembering the games of my childhood like Myst and The 7th Guest (and I was also happy that, unlike many games it wasn't about shooting people). But it ended up a much bigger deal than that. I found The Witness (which doesn't have dialog or a plot) immersive like no other game and I think about it every week, years after completing the game.
If it's not about the puzzles, what is it about? To avoid spoilers, here are just a few hints:
• The Witness is a game about learning and perception. And about meditation. (That's only my interpretation, though; like any work of art, you may have another valid interpretation).
• The author, Jonathan Blow, is a "programmer's programmer", who built his own game engine for The Witness and is in the process of writing his own programming language for his next project. He's also an interesting speaker. Here he talks about depression: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7kh8pNRWOo&ab_channel=Jonat...
• The Witness is as close to a video game equivalent of "film d'auteur" as you can get (at least compared to most of the other games out there, which are commercial Hollywood productions)
(Disclaimer: I'm not a gamer, and haven't played more than 2-3 games in the last decade.)
It also felt very self-important to me. There are a bunch of audio-logs scattered about the island that are people reading profound-sounding quotes of famous people. It never felt like the game itself actually had anything interesting to say though
In particular many people seem to hate that The Challenge doesn't reward the player (much) for finishing it. Jon definitely has things to say about completionism[0][1], and if I recall correctly, Jon once responded to that specific complaint with something along the lines of "expecting a reward just because you did a difficult thing is kind of childish", which is something that resonated with me. No one made me do the optional challenge, I did it because I wanted the satisfaction of having done it[2]. One wonders what it does to a society to instill in people the idea that they should be rewarded for doing difficult things that are necessary, ethical, or just, the way games often do, and by implication that the lack of reward is sufficient to justify the alternative.
[0] In both Braid and The Witness Jon has made the player do something ridiculous, time consuming, and tedious in order to technically 100% the game. In both games there are tasks that require the player to wait for literal hours to, essentially, check off a box.
[1] Interestingly, Jon has stated something to the effect that he knowingly puts 'unfun' puzzles in his games because they are necessary for a complete exploration of the concept space exposed by the mechanics.
[2] I also loved Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, so make of that what you will.
Playing a game is kind of childish. That’s kind of the point.
I get more praise out of my boss during my day job than I ever got out of The Witness.
Not really. The term "game" gets applied to this kind of interactive media, but that doesn't make it any more childish than watching a film or reading a novel. Or, you know, playing baseball or hockey.