HiGame

The clue that there was something wrong should have been that I was writhing around on the floor, sobbing. Yet at the time it made perfect sense. When you’re ambushed by approximately half a million Tetris-style bricks that won’t stop haunting you and taunting you even as you start hitting them and screaming at them to go away, this kind of thing happens. Sometimes you just want to be left alone, safe from the torment, and be allowed to once again live in a manner close to the way you see fit. So the sweat that was pouring and the tears that were flowing just didn’t seem like that big of a deal. Scratch that: They weren’t a big deal at all.
It’s only now that I can look back on this that I realize I had a problem. A big problem. I was addicted to Blow. Or, maybe more accurately, I was hooked on doing lines.

Lines aligning

Looking at it from a distance, The Witness is not hard to unpack on its most elemental level. You begin in a dark tunnel, trudging ever forward toward a glimmer of light that eventually resolves itself as a simple shape: a circle with a short horizontal line connected to it. By selecting the circle and then dragging the pointer you fill the complete shape, and then something happens. In this case, a door opens and you move on, before long facing something that’s slightly more advanced (a line with a 90-degree turn). Solve that one and before long you’re in the broad, bright, beautiful island, à la Myst, where you’ll encounter literally hundreds of puzzles like these.



They get a lot harder very quickly, of course. Sooner than you might expect, you’re progressing from basic mazes to challenges involving separation (there must always be a line between all the black and white squares); symmetry (your line is matched, in mirror image, on the other side of the board); color pairing; connect the dots; my personal ligne noir, shape matching, in which the figures you draw must outline one or more geometrical forms you’re provided (in theory—though the difficulty I had solving these left me seriously wondering); and plenty more.
But even though its riddles rapidly evolve from mild to maddening, The Witness is structured so that you always have the essential tools you need to solve them: Built-in tutorials guide you gracefully through new concepts over half a dozen puzzles, for example, and when ideas are combined, you get a chance to acquaint yourself with the new relationship before things start getting really nutty. Blow may be a gleefully evil sadist, but he’s a fair gleefully evil sadist.



He’s not necessarily an overly obvious one, however. During the course of your time on the island, you’ll discover what appears to be a story: a community frozen in time, with people changed into statues while doing ordinary, everyday things. Who are they? Why are they here? And can you help them—or is your destiny to become one of them? These questions are not easily answered, even if you discover many of the audio and video recordings scattered around that investigate the scientific and spiritual relationships that seem to underlie the land’s logic. Even so, you’ll ponder them as you move from one section of the island to another, either trying to track down the next hint you need or giving yourself a respite from your present frustrations by doing something easier for a few minutes.


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