The public parts of my notebook.
Warning: big spoilers. Don’t read on if you intend to play the game.
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Many of the environmental puzzles (the trees with apples, the shadows thrown by the branches, the bird song) feel trite in comparison to the symbol-based puzzles. Each has a single idea, whereas the symbols build into more complex, interesting structures.
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The puzzles that rely on the interaction of symbols succeed in a way that feels similar to Braid. Each element is simple, but their combination produces an interesting complexity.
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I played the game with my wife, Lauren. We switched off on the controller, and spent most of our time talking things through. It was strange to play the game this way because we had to communicate our thoughts about non-verbal things. A lot of our communication ended up being gestural, rather than verbal.
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Free of the environmental threats that are typical in first-person games, Lauren learnt to navigate a 3D world with the twin sticks on the controller. I wish we’d played this game before playing The Last of Us.
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Jonathan Blow, the game’s lead creator, advocates that games emphasise the thing that sets them apart from other mediums: interactivity. This makes The Witness a little disappointing. Interactivity isn’t very important in the puzzles. You could input your solutions on paper. Certainly, moving your POV around the world is interactive, but it’s not a new thing.
There’s a wonderful exception that comes late in the game when you solve a set of puzzles on broken monitors that rotate or translate their image depending on the position of your pointer.
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The puzzles can be very roughly grouped into two categories: environmental and symbolic. The environmental ones require you to reproduce on a puzzle a pattern that is represented in the environment.
These puzzles are mostly uninteresting because the possibilities are unconstrained. Am I supposed to be observing the colors peeking through those slats in the wooden floor? The arrangement of leaves on the ground? The shadows made by the foliage on the trellis? You can find patterns in anything, and the puzzles are mostly a matter of figuring out which pattern has been selected by the game maker to be represented in the puzzle.
The successful environmental puzzles make the relationship between the environment and the puzzle very clear by making the puzzle affect the environment in an obvious way. Then, the constraints are clear. Some examples. The line drawn on a puzzle produces a beam that you have to weave around real objects in the room. A set of puzzles where you have to move your POV around so you can sight puzzles through the right colour of glass to see them clearly. Puzzles where the exit you choose changes something about the world.
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Part of the goal of The Witness appears to be to demonstrate interesting phenomena about things in the physical world: spatial constraints, light, colour and so on. It’s unfortunate that the player’s exploratory tools are limited to a POV in 3D space and, occasionally, the ability to move a thing on a predefined path.
In a set of puzzles that involve reflection, there are some lights and a body of water. In a set of puzzles about shadows, there is a sun and some branches. The player’s ability to explore the interactions between these elements is limited because the degrees of freedom for these items are severely restricted. The water may be raised or lowered. The sun and branches are fixed. The POV can be rotated, or moved along the ground. As a cognitive media, The Witness is poor. My understanding of the phenomena ended up hazy.
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Some of the themes in The Witness echo things I’ve felt when I’m programming: the beauty of seeing a connection after learning something new, seeing a concept have relevance elsewhere in my life, the joy of going from not understanding to understanding, the joy of increasing skill. But these sensations in The Witness are poor imitations of the ones I’ve had with programming, because I care a lot about programming but I only care a little about spatial phenomena.
#notebook