![]() ![]() The island is as sunnily inviting, as reach-out-and-touch tactile, as it is eerie and remote. And although it has a certain cool minimalism in its presentation - there's no music, and the island is a deliberately hushed and lifeless place - The Witness is a quite gorgeous example of the 3D modeller's art, characterised by washes of rich, soothing pastel colour and a sculptural attention to detail. It took me 23 hours to see the end of the game, at which point I'd solved 365 puzzles, but many puzzles remain unsolved and many mysteries undiscovered. What might surprise you more is the scale and opulence of The Witness. This much you might expect if you have followed Blow or played Braid, a simple puzzle-platformer which gained great layers of challenge and ingenuity from, essentially, a rewind button. The Witness is a work of incredible intellectual virtuosity it's the Goldberg Variations of puzzle games. It is the ultimate purist challenge in the art of game design: to take a simple, abstract mechanic, dominated by a single inviolable rule, and then make it sing for dozens of hours. The Witness is made of puzzles, but it also is a single, grand puzzle that Blow set himself. It's a hacking mini-game as its own art form. It's a hacking mini-game that constantly rewrites and reinvents itself, and also develops its own language, articulating complex ideas without ever needing a single word of explanation or instruction. I explained this to my colleague Chris Bratt on our podcast and he protested: "That sounds like a hacking mini-game!" And he's right, that's very much what it's like: it's a hacking mini-game that one of the world's cleverest game designers has spent seven years of his life on, and probably a considerable chunk of the personal fortune he earned from Braid. Availability: Out now on Xbox One, PS4 and Windows PC.The big picture is how you use these puzzles to expand your knowledge of and access to the island, but the puzzles, which number in the hundreds, are the meat of the game. The line can never cross itself, and the route you must take is (often, but not always) dictated by rules expressed in symbols on the maze join the dots, keep white squares separated from black, and so on. On each panel is a maze, which you must resolve by drawing a single, unbroken line from an entry point to an exit point. In The Witness, the new game by Jonathan Blow - the indie star who kickstarted an arthouse game industry with 2008's Braid - you explore a lonely and mysterious island, solving puzzles which you find installed around the place on touch panels. Here's our original review of the PC version, first published on 25th January 2016. The Witness is released on Xbox One today. ![]() Big, beautiful and rewarding, Jon Blow's enigmatic puzzle epic is virtuoso game design - and only a fraction too clever for its own good. ![]()
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