Hours played according to Steam: 11
Finished?: Not yet
Portal is the Citizen Kane of video games. Maybe. More on that in a future entry. But coming to that tentative conclusion, I am finally ready to write some words on The Witness. The Witness seems destined to be closer in kin to Moby Dick or Joyce's Ulysses, in that I suspect it will be much studied and discussed, lauded and listed, but largely left unfinished by the majority of people making such use of it. I do plan to finish it--or, rather, I should say, we plan to finish it, since my wife and I are working our way through it together, as we did with Portal--but this is a game that requires pauses. I have largely avoided the critical discussion happening around the game, but the negative responses I've encountered have been over spikes in difficulty and obtuse signposting throughout. I suspect these frustrations can be avoided by simply taking your time. The designers took seven years to produce this experience, and while a sprint button has been graciously included, it feels like a concession to players who would rather treat the game like a Sudoku book instead of the Myst-ery that it is.
That said, I think the Sudoku players will get their money's worth here. 70% or better of the puzzles that I've solved could have been as easily accomplished on my Atari Flashback and I'll be surprised if some kind of scaled back iPad/iPhone version of this doesn't come out. One of my first favorite games was Atari's Maze Craze and The Witness's puzzles are literally just a series of virtual tablet screens with elaborate iterations on that game's mechanics. Yup, you read that right. This is a video game that takes place in a virtual world that is inexplicably dotted with touch screens: touch screens on doors; touch screens on walls; touch screens on weird little museum pedestals... Dotted is probably not the right word... Awash. The Witness's island is awash with touch screens and--so far, at least--each of those screens presents a single, static maze puzzle.
The island itself is gorgeous. Filled with lush, carefully composed vistas and a variety of distinctive foliage and structural themes, it feels like a place that has been shaped over a long period of time by very patient, very resourceful hands. A few years back, I had the good fortune to spend a week biking and hiking around Mount Desert Island, just off the coast of Maine. Celebrated by the Hudson Valley School painters, Mount Desert Island came to the attention and fell under the influence of Gilded Age millionaires, who, in turn, brought landscape architects, gardeners, and engineers. The result is a nature preserve that is subtly but thoroughly manicured and extraordinarily accessible. In many respects, The Witness's island feels like a digitally enhanced version of this--with colors that are impossibly saturated and pushed to the limits of compositional believability, but not to the point of keeping you from thinking that such a place could be created by someone with infinite resources and their pick of soil and geography.
In other words, this is a world that cries out for attention. At times, it cries a bit too loudly. I don't think the Mount Desert Island millionaires would have approved of the bombast in The Witness's statuary, for example. But it could also be that The Witness is trying to use these to tell me some things that I'm just not ready to hear yet. While they are still tablet based, the best puzzles in the game are the ones where the puzzle has some kind of impact on the environment, or the environment has an impact on the puzzle. I won't go into details, but I spent a good 30 minutes working on a puzzle: I knew how it should work because I had been trained to spot the patterns in that particular puzzle type by the previous half dozen puzzles. But something was off. The answer was simple, but there was a clue nearby that simply hadn't entered my awareness yet, I burst out laughing when I spotted it. At its best, The Witness makes observation--careful, thoughtful, deliberate observation--the player's chief verb.
That experience isn't half so rewarding when all that you're looking at is one of the tablets. Unfortunately, that's what you're doing most of the time. Like I said earlier, the player who could do without the beauty and mystery will find the game accommodating. The reflection of gently waving foliage that shows up on the virtual tablet is probably just that. It may be ignored. There's plenty of complexity and variation without it anyway. My wife and I spent half an hour looking at one such puzzle and went to bed thinking we had exhausted every possibility. The answer popped into my head as it hit the pillow. No insight from the game world needed.
This is a let down. So much care has gone into crafting this world, it feels perverse to spend the majority of my time in it staring at screens. But still, it's preferable to the likely alternative given this medium: killing things and blowing stuff up. Maybe these are some of the ideas that the game is trying to address. At this point, my hope is that the non-environmental puzzles are training me for some kind of puzzle gauntlet where I use the mastered concepts in concert with versions that are keyed into the island.
Even so, I don't think it will make up for the time and opportunity lost in getting there. In Portal, studying the environment and solving the puzzle was one and the same. There was not the sense that an arbitrary puzzle mechanic had been grafted onto the game space--or an arbitrary locale created to house the core puzzle mechanic--which is the feeling one often has while traveling from tablet to tablet in The Witness.. It's in the Witness's favor that its puzzle design winds up being more versatile because it is able to shift modes, Its method of teaching and reteaching puzzle rules wordlessly and the diversity of possibilities that it finds in the simple maze format is ingenious and extraordinary. And where The Witness allows its players to wonder and learn at their own pace, Portal was strictly linear. But where Portal's environments were austere for the sake of clarity, that game's designers made a virtue of necessity: they provided a backstory and characters with warmth, levity and pathos, and the contrast between these aesthetics gives the game its unique character.
The Witness features a similar contrast. The saturated, painterly quality of its island oozes warmth, while its tablets are cold and unyielding. But spend enough time crisscrossing the island and it starts to feel rather lonely. While the environment and structures are evidence of a lively and brilliant mind (or minds), they have long since abandoned the place and/or turned to stone. It is possible that a more cogent story will begin to take shape and keep me company as I continue to explore and solve. There are clues galore: in addition to the aforementioned statues, there are scattered audio clips and a little movie theater that has so far played for me a lengthy clip from a Tarkovsky movie and a bit of a BBC documentary. All of these are disjointed--clippings perhaps--a sampling of a few favorite things from the island's creator(s). As of now, it all seems needlessly obtuse.
The Witness wears a suit of lovely but inscrutable armor. To describe my experiences with it in any greater specificity than I have here would feel like robbing potential players of a piece of the game. Ironically, Tom Bissell--a writer who has spoken ardently against the cult of No Spoilers--was at one point hired to work on the game's story. Whatever work he did was--I suppose--discarded or stripped out. What's left are the puzzles. Some of them are extraordinary. A lot of them are pretty good. Others are probably necessary but forgettable. I don't want to take any of them away from you because if you're into puzzles, they are a unique and worthwhile experience. I'm going to keep at it. In a cerebral, patient, dispassionate way, I will keep at it. That's my best guess, for now, anyway.
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