The Witness is a game about communication. It's a game about understanding the world, and about having a conversation without saying a word. The game, in development for more than six years at a cost of more than $5 million, is the long-awaited follow up to indie godfather Jonathan Blow's Braid.
It's a quiet game, literally (there isn't any music at all) and thematically. It's subtle and introspective. It's a puzzle game, but so much more than that, despite being a game about drawing a line through a grid-shaped maze, over and over and over again. And it's great.
In 2008, Blow released Braid, a puzzle-platformer with a time-rewinding mechanic, for Xbox 360. The game was an instant success, going on to sell millions of copies across multiple platforms. Along with a few other notable titles, it showed that indie games could be more than half-baked mechanics and crudely-drawn blobs from wannabe designers. Its success was chronicled in Indie Game: The Movie, which set up Blow as one of the few "indie game auteurs"—designers with the style, vision, and ability to produce consistent, exceptional work.
Blow announced his follow-up in 2009. The Witness, he called it, would be a 3-D puzzle game set on a large, open-world island. It's finally coming out for PC and PlayStation 4 on January 26. Why'd it take so long?
"Because it's big," Blow says, "and we're a small team."
I'm chatting with Blow over tea on a sweltering day in San Francisco. Two weeks earlier, I'd received a near-final build of The Witness. After around 25 hours of play, I've completed a large portion of the game's curious panel-based puzzles. And yet, I feel I've barely started.
