In The Witness, the new game by Jonathan Blow - the indie star who kickstarted an arthouse game industry with 2008's Braid - you explore a lonely and mysterious island, solving puzzles which you find installed around the place on touch panels. On each panel is a maze, which you must resolve by drawing a single, unbroken line from an entry point to an exit point. The line can never cross itself, and the route you must take is (often, but not always) dictated by rules expressed in symbols on the maze; join the dots, keep white squares separated from black, and so on. The big picture is how you use these puzzles to expand your knowledge of and access to the island, but the puzzles, which number in the hundreds, are the meat of the game.
I explained this to my colleague Chris Bratt on our podcast and he protested: "That sounds like a hacking mini-game!" And he's right, that's very much what it's like: it's a hacking mini-game that one of the world's cleverest game designers has spent seven years of his life on, and probably a considerable chunk of the personal fortune he earned from Braid. It's a hacking mini-game that constantly rewrites and reinvents itself, and also develops its own language, articulating complex ideas without ever needing a single word of explanation or instruction. It's a hacking mini-game as its own art form.
The Witness is made of puzzles, but it also is a single, grand puzzle that Blow set himself. It is the ultimate purist challenge in the art of game design: to take a simple, abstract mechanic, dominated by a single inviolable rule, and then make it sing for dozens of hours. As such, it is a great success. The Witness is a work of incredible intellectual virtuosity; it's the Goldberg Variations of puzzle games.
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