I was staying up too late one night, going down a youtube rabbit hole when a thought occurred to me. What was behind that one sunken ship door in that game I never finished a few years ago? I could never quite make out the solution. So I dug into videos on how to complete it, what the solution was, what the breakdown of the puzzles were and so on for the absolute masterpiece of a game that is The Witness.

The Witness came out in 2016, the follow up to Jonathan Blow's famous indie game hit Braid. The game took over seven years to complete, going over its initial release date substantially. In interviews and on the development blog, the game's architects reveal that the initial gameplay prototype was completed relatively early and the final few years were spent mostly on polish. In the game, you can see and feel that time spent in every corner of every environment of the world.

The Witness is a puzzle game, in which the central mechanic is drawing a line between a circular origin point and a destination. This is primarily presented through the use of panels in the game world which usually unlock a door or the next panel in a sequence. The twist comes when variations in the puzzle panels are presented. There are dots along the path that you have to cross over, shapes you have to outline, colored squares you have to separate, etc.

The real ingenuity and beauty of the game becomes apparent in some of the more advanced puzzles, in which there are no obvious clues on the panel toward its solution and too many possibilities to try each one individually. A player (you) has to use clues from the surrounding environment to find the correct path to trace.

A beautiful example comes in the orchard section of the game, where the panels are not their usual grid shape but instead laid out in the shape of exponentially branching trees. There are hundreds of possible solutions, which would take quite a while to trace individually. The beauty comes when you notice, just behind and off to the left of the panel, a tree in a somewhat similar shape to the puzzle. The tree has only one apple hanging from its branches, and when you trace the path of the branches that ends in the apple, the pleasant sound of a panel successfully completed greets you and a lighted wire leads you to the next location.

This helps to teach you some of the lessons that the game will expand upon in wonderful and unexpected ways. Heavy spoilers lie ahead. I honestly recommend you play this game so much that if you might have any interest or desire to play this game, playing it unspoiled is the only real way to understand what the game is trying to communicate. So read no further, ye who wish to have one of the most absolutely unique experiences in the field of gaming unspoiled.

The years of polish they spent on this game come through most clearly in the environmental design. Puzzles completely aside, every different location on the island is located relatively closely to one another, has its own distinct aesthetic, color pallette, and soundscape. There is no background music in the game, aside from where it factors into a puzzle or two. Instead, there are the ambient sounds of the wind, the beach and your footsteps as you walk to different locations on the island. But the best part of the soundscape is that the sound of your footsteps change depending upon the environment, the crunch of sand in the desert is a far cry from the metallic clank of walking on platforms in the swamp. The sharp taps of the quarry contrast with the muffled thumps in the forest. All these areas sit close enough to one another to be able to walk back and forth in a minute or two, but the from within each area very rarely distracts from your objectives there. As a player, I could almost see the immense amount of tweaking and moving things around slightly to create each area's own sense of space and location. Not to mention how each area's theme plays into its puzzles.

The quarry's concept deals with subtracting areas from puzzle grids that you were already familiar with. The desert deals with the reflections of the sun and other objects to clue you in to the solution. The treetops deal with connecting isolated areas, both in form and puzzle function. The town in the middle of the island displays a mixture of the puzzle types of all the surrounding areas.

But the in-game metaphor goes further than that. If you're still reading and feeling intrigued about this game, stop and go play it instead of reading on. I assure you, the actual gameplay is better than reading about it here! Also, because I am going to talk about one of the absolutely sublime things the game does with its themes and I would rather you experience it firsthand from a game that took years to make rather than my writing which took significantly less. I'm going to talk about THE MOMENT.

THE MOMENT

So eventually the time comes where you have been conditioned to look in more detail at the environment around you. There are many puzzles that use the environment, one in particular that I banged my head against for quite a while featured a transparent panel. No other panel in the game up to that point is transparent so it initially sticks out. I went round and round until I realized that it must have been transparent for a reason so I started looking around to see what might give me clues to the solution. This panel is located near the shore of the island, with a beautiful coastline in the distance spotted with several bright green palm trees. The trees contrast against the rocky brown surface of the island outcropping and they are just the right distance away to all be seen through the panel I was wrestling with. If you treat them like some of the surrounding puzzle elements, they point the way to solve the puzzle. It takes a few leaps of logic to solve this one, and for an optional puzzle no less!

But that’s just one trick the game has for you, in a quiver that seems bottomless. As you’re wandering about the island, you will have seen places, perhaps on walls, perhaps outlined in the trees, that remind you of the shape of the puzzles you’ve been seeing on the panels this whole time.

Wouldn’t it be funny, you smirkingly think to yourself, if…

And then you click and see that it works! You can trace these patterns in the environment! Your mind is blown, you had no idea this was even possible. Your expectations have been shattered and a sense of wonder fills you as you try to discern exactly what is happening. The limit of what is possible in a game seems much bigger than you initially thought.

Meanwhile, the game is giving you audio and visual feedback as you move your cursor through the line you’ve spotted in a garden or walkway. Completing the line, the game gives you a thunderous, resounding echo and a trail of sparkles that point you to the previously inscrutable obelisks you may have already run across. These obelisks now show the pattern you just outlined brightly on one of its sides, while the rest of the sides show darkened patterns that await you to find them.

You were never explicitly told to find these patterns or to try and click on them. But the game has been conditioning you to see both the elements of the puzzle and to pay attention to your environment to be able to progress. To get that little hit of dopamine when you solve a puzzle. While it may only be tracing a line, it feels like enlightenment the first time you do it.

And then you start noticing these patterns everywhere. They were there from the beginning, hiding in plain sight. The game was pushing you towards this epiphany. It wanted you to see it, it gave you a starting point and clues from your environment to help you find the intended destination.

But that’s not the end of the game. To finish the game, you have to complete enough puzzles in enough areas to alight the lasers at the end of each sequence. Once finished, a laser will emerge that points towards the mountain that has been looming over you while you have been exploring the island. Making your way up there, you find the summit locked by another beautifully unique puzzle involving perspective. Solving it, the peak of the mountain opens. Within is a labyrinth you descend which functions as a kind of final thesis of the ideas and themes of the game.

Now, an admission. In my gameplay, I had descended deep within the mountain, finding both the intended route and the alternate deeper path which lead further into the caverns. However, I was distracted by outside life events and ended up never completing the game from that point forward. Oddly like many other games I had gotten 95% of the way through and abandoned (Warcraft II, various Final Fantasies, etc.) I never returned to it. Until late one night where my curiosity got the better of me.

I resigned my gameplay fully believing that, spatially and thematically, you would finish the game by rising up through the same tunnel you started the game in. Watching through a handful of YouTube videos that night proved my inclination right. You see, aside from just puzzles the game also contains audio recordings of voice actors reciting quotes from various sources including philosophical texts, famous scientists and the Diamond Sutra.

As I’m sure you all know, the Diamond Sutra is a foundational work in the practice of Zen Buddhism. I certainly didn’t have to look that up. Anyway, another practice of Zen you might be familiar with is that of a koan. In short, a koan is a saying or piece of text that tries to induce a sense of uncertainty or contradiction in order to break through false understanding to try and bring a greater or more intuitive understanding.

In this sense, the game functions as a zen koan. It gives you patterns, lets you solve them and then deliberately changes the rules to give you a greater understanding of the world the puzzles inhabit. The environmental puzzles, too serve this purpose as both an extension and breaking of the rules of the world.

I have come to similar understandings through various methods in my own life. Perhaps the easiest for me to explain is through, surprisingly, statistics. If you’re trying to build a statistical model of a system, let’s say a six-sided dice roll, you can easily tell a computer to randomly choose a number between one and six. But there are always problems with any simulation. If you’re a student of computer science, you know that computers are not really all that great at choosing truly random numbers. It might not matter for a single 1/6 chance, but run the simulation thousands or millions of times and biases reveal themselves. Conversely, your simulation might not account for a tiny chip in your die that leads to one number being favored over another if rolled a certain way. In either case, the computer model of the d6 might work for just about any purpose you might want, but it’s not a perfect model.

In statistics, this was made clear to me in the phrase, “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” This phrase is attributed to George Box in the 1970s. But as the wikipedia page I just pulled that from notes, the sentiment has been expressed many times throughout history with one of my favorites being, “The map is not the terrain.” by Korzybski, 1933. This jives with the many references towards scientific understanding in the game as well.

But I think the game posits that this metaphor extends to enlightenment as well, with the Buddha himself saying in the Diamond Sutra that, “All that has a form is illusive and unreal. When you see that all forms are illusive and unreal, then you will begin to perceive your true Buddha nature.” While I don’t call myself a Buddhist, I take this to mean the same thing, that capital-t Truth is unknowable. But our senses can give us useful impressions and ideas of the universe that can increase our understanding of it. In this way, I think that enlightenment is an ongoing process, not a linear path to an end.

Which brings us back to the game. Solving line puzzles over and over eventually brings you to the game’s main ending, which as I later found out takes you on a tour of the island, resetting all the puzzles you’ve completed and returning you to the tunnel you began in. Is the game saying that our time doing all of that was wasted? No, I think it’s trying to say something a bit deeper. It’s not the act of tracing lines that’s important, it’s the journey you took, the things you learned along the way. To be blunt, the things you witnessed or that inspired you or surprised you or frustrated you or blew your mind were what really mattered.

But all these themes and gameplay mechanics coming together with the story and textual references to such a point to prime you to that feeling of epiphany, it’s an incredible achievement. And not just to experience it, but to interrogate it, to feel it over and over again and try to get you to ask the question why? An incredible achievement. Where some games can’t even keep their mechanics and story coherent between one cutscene and the next, Jonathan Blow has created gameplay so enmeshed within its themes that it’s breathtaking. For all these reasons I recommend playing it. Spoiling yourself is denying you the experience of climbing to these heights and is, I propose, another false enlightenment. Sure, why not save time and look up the puzzle solutions? Why think hard about things when I can just get the answer whenever? Why climb a mountain when I can just look at a picture of it? Why try to change myself when I can just cruise through life from one experience to the next. This game is not for those type of people.

Endings and pretentiousness

Which brings me to the topic of the second ending. If you manage to light all the lasers from every area, find all the environmental puzzles and thoroughly explore the underground area you will find a new set of caves with more audio recordings. These, though, are not of famous scientists or religious experts but conversations between people that detail their experience with the island. Some have been profoundly changed by it, some don’t remember their time there. It’s remarked on that the island is a simulation and that each individual has to choose when they want to exit.

Here’s where the ‘story’ of the game might be said to be hidden, in that the island was apparently constructed to be a tool to induce and examine these feelings of enlightenment and self-awareness. There is one last hidden puzzle here, which gives you an alternate solution for the gate of the first area of the game. Instead of opening that gate and allowing you into the remainder of the island, it opens a gateway to what might be termed a developer room. This takes the form of a luxury resort, showing photos and other items from the process of creating the game. Following this newly opened path to it’s end, you are treated to a video in first person of someone emerging from what looks like a dream.

The person interacts with their environment as though still in the simulation, aka the game, touching circles and tracing lines along furniture in their surroundings. But here in the ‘real’ world, there’s no feedback or reward to continuing these activities. This downer ending is where a lot of the negative feedback and accusations of pretentiousness have come up after the game’s release.

First, a few disclaimers. I never personally achieved this ending, or any ending within the game. As I said earlier, I quit probably minutes before I reached the end. And as previously mentioned I’m not an expert on Buddhism or statistics or anything like that. But I do think this ending is open to interpretation (and there has been a lot of it out there, to be sure).

I think this video was included for the extraordinarily devout that went and solved every last damn puzzle the game offered. The character in the movie seems unable to move past their time in the simulation, almost broken or crippled by their compulsion to see everything as a puzzle to be solved. I feel this was intended as a warning by the developers for those chasing nirvana or easy answers within the game. If life, understanding, and enlightenment are processes, then getting stuck in our understanding of one portion of any of them is a false enlightenment. Like a doctor who insists on treating patients the way they always have despite new and better medicines being available. Or a person who has overcome trauma in their life only to look down upon others who have not had to struggle.

I think this game tries to help us to progress towards understanding, but obsessing over it, taking it for more than was intended only leaves us more poorly equipped to understand the world around us and ourselves. We have to choose to exit the island to get back to reality. If we don’t we’re stuck, literally and metaphorically.

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Recommended readings:

The Unbearable Now: An Interpretation of The Witness https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOJC62t4JfA

The Diamond Sutra: https://diamond-sutra.com/read-the-diamond-sutra-here/

Literary Analysis of the Witness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0HbiCLiWu8

The Witness Dev Blog: http://the-witness.net/news/

Also, since I thought I understood what the game was trying to say and didn’t feel the need to finish every last puzzle or even complete the game means that I ‘won’ the game in the truest sense and am better than anyone else at everything.