The Witness (

2016

)

Ok, stop me if you've heard this one before. Today we're looking at a first-person game where you wake up on a mysterious island. The player has no idea how they got there or any information whatsoever about the island's nature. In order to progress through the island's comically diverse biomes (think one of those maps in a geography textbook that illustrates all the different geographical features in a region the size of Delaware), the player must solve a series of intricate puzzles. No, I'm not talking about Myst [1993], the subject of today's review is Johnathan Blow's latest game, The Witness.

Obviously, The Witness is treading a fine line between deliberate homage to and a shameless ripoff of Myst [1993]. However, the ways in which the two games differ are almost universally tilted in favor of the earlier title. For one thing, The Witness has no music whatsoever while Myst [1993] can boast a memorable synthetic score. I suspect that this was a decision to heighten the player's feeling of solitude as they traversed the lonely island in The Witness, with only the sound of their own footsteps for company. However, in practice, the lack of music just makes the game feel dull and causes each distinct environment to blend in with all the others.

Myst [1993] also has The Witness beat in terms of puzzle variety. While the Witness tries to pretend in its advertising copy that it has 500 unique puzzles, it's really more like one puzzle copy-pasted five hundred times with various slight tweaks of the rules and requirements. Every puzzle in the game will consist of drawing a line from a starting point through some kind of grid pattern, to an ending point, while satisfying an ever-growing variety of requirements. To be fair, the one puzzle that The Witness has is not a bad one. It's easy to grasp the basics, allows for a fair bit of variety, and lets you quickly try a bunch of solutions until you grasp the underlying principles of whatever new mechanic the game has introduced. The puzzle only starts to wear a bit thin after five hours, which is impressive for such a simple formula. Too bad it will probably take you fifteen hours to beat the game!

The attempts to add new rules to the puzzle as you progress through the game's environments are a mixed bag. Some rules like the marks that negate other rules are a fun addition to the formula that will expand how you think about the challenges. Others, like the puzzles where you need to separate blocks by colors, are fairly mundane and obvious additions. Some are downright annoying, like the puzzles where you need to line up with random bric-a-brac in the environment to see the correct path to draw. I don't know how many minutes I wasted taking incredibly small steps backward and forwards, trying to line everything up perfectly.

Even the game itself is aware that the puzzles are getting tedious, as towards the end it starts throwing in malfunctioning screens that drift, spin, have pieces missing, or flash various random colors. The problem with these is that they don't enhance the difficulty of the core challenge, they are either just annoying to complete, tedious, or painful to the eyes. By this point, the puzzles have ceased to be about testing the player's intellect and more about testing their endurance. A clear sign that perhaps, Blow and his team should have added either added a second puzzle or cut the game down to size.

There's also not much of a story in The Witness, as the closest thing to exposition you will find are audio logs, all of which are just some unknown voice reading a quote from a book that Johnathan Blow was probably assigned as reading in college. Presumably, you could listen to all these audio logs, and use them to piece together a story about what is going on on the island, but as I played through the Witness I found myself with no desire to do so. This issue is not that there isn't a mystery here, it's that the player is given no reason to actually care about the mystery. Our character is a complete nonentity, literally just a shadow cast on the ground. Likewise, the island itself is completely sterile, and the closest thing to life is the statues popping up all over the place. There's simply no human hook here to draw the player in.

The obvious point of comparison is Dark Souls [2011], where the player is given just enough information about the world to compel them to dig deeper and understand its nature and their role within it. You know right from the start that sometime in the distant past there was a Utopia age of fire, where the Gods and giants built a thriving civilization, and that this civilization in turn has fallen to ruins. You know that you are marked with the Dark Sign, and can never truly die and that this pseudo-immortality is both a blessing and a curse. Finally, you're quickly told that to fulfill the destiny of the Chosen Undead you must ring the Bells of Awakening and Link the Fires. You may not know what “link the fires” means but it gives you something to go off of. There are still plenty of mysteries here to unravel, but because you are given some basic understanding of the world and your relationship to it right at the start you have the motivation to piece these clues together and unravel the world's mysteries.

The Witnesses' reliance on using philosophic audio logs as its only means of storytelling is also indicative of its largest failure: Namely that it is unfathomably pretentious. This was a problem with Johnathan Blow's previous outing, Braid [2008], but at least there the game could boast some unique mechanics to make it palatable. Here, there's just one puzzle that you solve five hundred times until you get to the game's non-ending. Seriously, playing through this game feels like being locked in a room with a pot-smoking philosophy major and being unable to leave until you complete a stack of Sudoku puzzles.

What really makes me cross the line from bored and frustrated to outright raging though is the lies. The Witness's own marketing material claims that it's a game that “respects you as an intelligent player and it treats your time as precious.” While it may respect your intelligence it sure does seem committed to wasting as much of your time as possible. Otherwise, why would every mechanical device in this game be so insufferably slow? The worst example of this is an elevator that lets you bypass going through a factory and up a staircase, but the damn thing moves at a snail's pace and it's actually much faster to just walk rather than use it. The “fast” travel system likewise is a boat that moves at school zone speeds around the island. This is not a game that “treats your time as precious” it is very deliberately wasting your time.