The Witness (puzzle game)

The Game Room
1

This game was mentioned here before, but specifically in comparison to another game (Puzzle game difficulty: "Baba is You" vs "The witness"). I just got it on sale, and I’d like to talk about The Witness specifically.

All of the puzzles involve creating paths on graphs. “Path” here is a technical term, meaning that each vertex of the graph is visited at most once. The simplest ones are straightforward mazes, but more complicated ones add other features, like having to pass through a certain set of points, or making two symmetric paths at once. Most notably, the game doesn’t give any directions: It just shows you the graph, and tells you whether you got it right or wrong. So sometimes, you know what’s expected and the challenge is figuring out how to get it, and sometimes the challenge is figuring out what’s even expected.

It’s all embedded in a rather pretty first-person-perspective 3D world: You get from one puzzle to another by walking from one screen mounted on a wall or a pedestal or something to another. I have mixed feelings about this: On the one hand, the world is pretty. But on the other hand, it adds yet a third kind of puzzle, that I don’t find nearly as entertaining, that of “find exactly where the walkable path is, and where there’s a gap in the bushes that you can go through to reach another area with puzzles”.

Some quality-of-life observations:
The game would really benefit from a “sketch mode”, where you can draw freely on the screen. As it is, I’m re-drawing a lot of the puzzles with paper and pencil, so I can mark them up.
It’d also benefit from a world map, preferably with a click-to-fast-travel option. If I figure out overnight how to do a puzzle that I skipped over, I want to be able to find where I left the darned thing.
As-is, you default to walking slowly, and can hold shift while moving to run. It’d be nice if it were the other way around. I thought there might be an option to change this, but I can’t find it.

Some questions: Is there ever any sort of a story to this that you discover? I’ve reached some areas that have some creepy things about them that seem like they might sort of hint at something, but it’s hard to tell if they’re connected, or even if the creepiness is intentional.

Does the overworld have any real significance? I’ve found a couple of small areas where the immediate vicinity connects to the specific puzzle there, but I mean as a whole. I did find in an out-of-the-way spot a piece of paper, with what could be the solution to a puzzle on it, except I haven’t seen any puzzle that matches it… or might it be a simplified map to the overworld, showing the shortcut way to hit only the essential puzzles, or something like that?

2

I do not remember a story in the normal sense, like a narrative. You will just have to unpack the imagery and concepts the game surrounds you with.

But the overworld absolutely has significance, or else I do not really understand what you are asking.

The pieces of paper are optional IIRC for completing the game; it’s not a map you need or anything like that.

3

I just bought this based on a recommendation here, and have been playing it for about a week, and that lack of an overview map is making me a little crazy. This is my first “puzzle game”, and I’m not feeling it so far, but I’ll play with it for a while longer.

4

There is a kind of overview map you can locate.

5

I did find a tall mountain with a great view; is that what you mean?

(not a particularly big spoiler, but I figured that since you didn’t say it directly, I shouldn’t either)

6

Goodness gracious, this is on my pretty small 10 out of 10 games. My wife and I solved every puzzle with no guide. We had to make physical models of mid-to-late game puzzles, but we did it.

Story? I have no idea. Nope, it’s more atmospheric.

There is a map. It would be spoiler to tell you about it and how you get it, etc.

The mountain in the middle? No, that isn’t the map, but is pretty darn important to the game. I won’t get into why.

Please post your gaming thoughts and so forth. My wife and I were obsessed with this game to the point I began to see lines with little circles on the end everywhere I went.

7

The reason I explored the mountain was because a puzzle I did ended up with a very dramatic looking laser unfurling and shooting a beam at the mountain.

Once atop the mountain, though, all I found was a bunch of petrified surveyors, some of whom seemed pretty angry about something, and a single very easy puzzle that didn’t seem to unlock anything.

Right now, I’m in a sort of plant nursery, and most of the puzzles have been of the separate the colors from each other variety. But I’ve gotten to one where I’ve very conclusively proven to myself that that’s not possible. So now I need to figure out what’s different about that puzzle.

I could just skip it and move on to another area, but I’m reluctant to do that, because first, it’d be tough to find it again to come back to it, and second, because the last time I skipped something and moved ahead, I encountered another puzzle that appeared to have that same gimmick and then some. Better to figure out that gimmick first in isolation, before it gets tougher.

8

Your strategy is the same as mind. The Witness has been described as a game about learning. Jonathan Blow guides you, step by step, until you are a master of a series of skills you had no idea you needed to master.

If you can screenshot any puzzles you get stuck on, I’d love to see them.

9

Yep, you are doing well. Just keep going with other things. That is later for sure.

10

It definitely helps to keep a pencil and notebook handy. Especially when you have to remember the path through a particular puzzle, but upside down or reversed.

And yeah, there is both a world map and faster travel option that you should come across at some point.

I don’t remember how spoilery it is, but I did a walkthrough thread here as I was playing it several years ago. Pretty sure @Mahaloth gave me a lot of help then too. :slightly_smiling_face:

11

Probably, I love the game.

I said @Chronos is right to solve one area, but in another way, this game is the Elden Ring of deceptively foolish puzzles. If you are truly stuck, go ahead and wander off to some other area.

Locked off areas do, I think, require multiple methods and a variety of knowledge to open them. I remember literal gates/doors that required two or more regions’ knowledge to open.

12

It encourages exploration. Discovering the really really really hidden puzzles was a revelation for me.

13

Yep, there is a lot out there people don’t always realize when they begin and once you realize a few things about the game and world, you can’t go back. It’s kind of incredible.

I can’t think of a more unique game out there.

14

And I think I figured out the puzzle I was stuck on, though without power I can’t go into the game to test it:

I think that there’s one color in the puzzle that doesn’t show up among the nearby flowers, and therefore “doesn’t exist”, and the spots in the puzzle with that color can be treated as not having a color-spot on them

15

So, I did get back to the game, and the solution to the puzzle I was stuck on was, in fact, what I thought it was. That and subsequent puzzles led me to a second laser beam to the mountaintop, which partially exposed another puzzle there. I’m guessing that, once I get all of those, that’s the win condition for the game.

I also found the map, and the boat, but while it’s a transport system, I wouldn’t call it a fast transport system. It’d a little faster than running (once you realize that it has a speed control), but not by much. I get that the scenery is pretty, and we want to see it, but once we’ve seen it once, we don’t need to keep on seeing it.

Also, what I know and am guessing about the “story thus far”:

  • There’s a lot of petrified people around.
  • A lot of those petrified people seem to be pretty violent.
  • Somebody’s been going around trying to sabotage puzzles.
  • There’s at least one wrecked ship.

I’m guessing that… something… happened that caused a lot of people to go crazy, and that there was a small group of Smart People that knew that something had to be done about that, but didn’t know what… but they were able to petrify everyone on the island, with the hope that someone would eventually reverse the petrification, after the crazy-causing-thing had gone away. The puzzles are a test to make sure you’re not a violent psycho. The player (and someone else) escaped both the crazy-making and the petrification by virtue of being… somewhere… deep underground at the time. The other person was released first, and was partially affected by the last vestiges of the crazy-making, and so they’re sane enough to get through the puzzles but crazy enough to try to prevent anyone else. Now you’re released, and sane, and have to (eventually) restore everyone else.

16

I think you do need to keep seeing it, to be honest.

17

OK, now I’m really stumped. I’m in the treehouse area. Most of the puzzles have included orange eight-pointed stars. The rule for those is that the stars need to be paired off, exactly two each, in “rooms”. But I’ve just started encountering puzzles with white and black eight-pointed stars (along with white and black dots). I’ve completed one with two white stars, and one with two black stars. In the one with two white stars, it works if the white stars are both isolated from the white dots, and in the one with two black stars, they have to both be isolated from the black dots. I’ve tried many possible paths in both these puzzles, and in all the paths, even if I violate the white-dot-black-dot rule, the stars flash an angry red if I don’t do that (both of them, even if only one is in violation), and don’t flash if I do do that.

So it sounds like I have that puzzle element figured out, right? Wrong. Because the next puzzle has only one black star. And in this one, the black star is happy whenever it’s in a room with exactly one black dot, and flashes an angry red otherwise. And based on other tests, it looks like the rule for the black and white dots is still exactly the same as it’s always been. But if this is so, then the puzzle is unsolvable, because all of the black dots have to be in the same room, but exactly one of them has to be in the same room as the star, i.e., in a different room from the other three. And further, assuming that the black-dot-white-dot rule is intact, then half of the solution is forced by that, and what’s left is simple enough to brute-force try every possible path… and none of them worked.

Ugh.

18

Oh, one other question: Is sound ever important? Sometimes I don’t bother putting on my headphones, and I want to make sure I’m not missing anything that way.

19

Aren’t there some sound-based puzzles? You would need the sound on for those, at least.

20

Plus all the other audio stuff.