![]() You won’t find the man behind the curtain. Once you realize how little is actually happening in the world of The Witness, progression relies more on endurance than curiosity. All that has happened is The Witness has taught you its made-up language of stars and Tetris shapes and squirming lines worming through seemingly countless mazes. What will be different is your understanding of them.īut these changes are less meaningful because they have no impact on the game world. What will you see when you get there? Just more puzzles. As you range not very far and not very wide across this open-world island, it sits impassive, stoic, disinterested, unresistant to you going wherever you want to go, so long as you understand the vocabulary of whatever puzzles stand in your way. This is a game about you learning things, about you changing while the world waits impassively for you to figure out its heiroglyphics. As simple inviolable rules undergo Newtonian shifts, the only thing that changes is your perspective. They’re more meaningful in that the dramatic arc of this game is less about the game world and more about your understanding of it. The ways The Witness changes are both more and less meaningful. Will it turn clockwise or counterclockwise? That’s the level of drama in The Witness. The changes in this world are as insubstantial as sunbeams, which is ironic on an island where not even the sun changes. Each puzzle more or less opens a door to more puzzles, which in turn open doors to more puzzles. In The Witness, you’re just a finger swiping iPad puzzles and the island never changes. You arrive from the sky, a mysterious stranger destined to power up the island one puzzle at a time, turning on generators and waking up majestic clockwork machinery, draining lakes and shifting massive metal rails, bringing to life a giant edifice to reveal what happened here, why it happened, and to whom it happened. Although something has clearly gone wrong on this little island, it’s only gently dilapidated, as if it has been visited by a noncommital catastrophe. But mostly quaint, as precious as a diorama. Sometimes mysterious, occasionally even eerie. It’s as quaint and colorful as a Team Fortress 2 map. But to what end?Īfter the jump, ssentiW ehT, dnalsi na, nalp a, man a. And, to be fair, they’re fairly frequent. What seemed impossible is now as simple as letting gravity take an apple. Maybe Newtonain shift is a better way to put it. It feels like a miracle of geometry, of logic, like oh, hey, a fourth dimension has opened up where a wall used to be. The center has moved and now everything turns into something else entirely. A Copernican shift introduces itself into a simple set of inviolable rules. But then something clicks, suddenly and decisively. You might as well ask me to make two plus two equal five. I’m pretty sure there’s no way to solve it. ![]()
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