Jonathan Blow's new game, The Witness, is out

http://store.steampowered.com/app/210970/

by Audiophilip • 10 years ago

520 262 10 years ago

store.steampowered.com

sp332• 10 years ago

Although it's tempting, this is a game you really don't want any spoilers about (if you are ever going to play it). Vi Hart, who has been playtesting the game for months, said:

Tips for playing The Witness: give yourself a week or two, no hints, no reviews. Sleep on it. Take breaks. It's a big game. Nothing like it.
If you can't spend all day every day playing The Witness, give yourself months. Engage deeply with The Witness and it will stare back.
Don't watch twitch streams or look at screenshots or read reviews. Just play it, seriously.

simoncion5• 10 years ago

...this is a game you really don't want any spoilers about...

I couldn't possibly agree more. But, just so others don't end up making (or not making!) a blind purchase, I present a spoiler-free summary:

It's a puzzle game. I'm likely not nearly done with the game and the puzzles have ranged from trivial to really, really, rather hard. The guy who made Braid is the designer of and one of the programmers of this game. It's also rather pretty, and the art (and foley) directions [0] are solid.

[0] Yes, plural.

Tepix2• 10 years ago

Do you think it will be possible to turn it into a mobile game?

cstuder3• 10 years ago

Since the game turns out to be pretty polarizing, I would suggest reading a review or two. Most reviewers appreciate the design of the game and keep it spoiler free.

My recommendation: http://www.polygon.com/2016/1/25/10817632/the-witness-review...

"The Witness is maze puzzles. Full Stop."

moultano3• 10 years ago

"The Witness is maze puzzles. Full Stop."

While this is technically true, I really think it gives people the wrong impression. The colored mazes are the universal UI widget but many of them are switchboards that control the environment in the game in ways typical to 3d puzzlers (turning on lights, moving platforms, aligning objects.)

Many of the puzzles are the sort of abstract logic puzzles you'd see in an IQ test or mobile game, but most of them revolve around paying close attention to your environment and seeing it in different ways. I'd love to describe a few of them, but wouldn't want to spoil the moments of euphoria from noticing them yourself.

It's unfortunate that the game starts with some of the more abstract ones, because the real joy lies elsewhere in the game, but I would say that if you don't enjoy an abstract intellectual challenge you probably won't enjoy it.

teddyh• 10 years ago

"The Witness is maze puzzles. Full Stop."

You cut out the important bit of the very next sentence:

‘That's also a highly reductionist take. It's like saying that a book is "just words."’

lgieron• 10 years ago

Ugh. Sounds interesting, but I'll probably be saving it for retirement.

Jach• 10 years ago

I'm looking forward to the inevitable steam sale / indie bundle in a year or so. Plenty of things to play beforehand.

s_kilk3• 10 years ago

Although it's tempting, this is a game you really don't want any spoilers about

Agreed, definitely don't want spoilers.

I've set up a subreddit specifically for spoiler-free gentle hints: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheWitnessHints/

The main /r/TheWitness sub is starting to get quite spoilery.

tobr• 10 years ago

Anyone who wants to avoid spoilers: you should avoid this thread too, including replies to sp332's comment.

StavrosK3• 10 years ago

Thank you. Ctrl+W

pferde4• 10 years ago

Is that the guy who was unable to install Ubuntu properly, so he declared that supporting Linux versions of his game is not worth the effort? Color me disinterested. "No Tux, no bucks."

newjersey• 10 years ago

I agree. Here is a relevant Reddit discussion https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmasterrace/comments/3c508j/my_...

joncampbelldev• 10 years ago

Sounds like people are shifting the blame for JB's frustration with linux onto hardware vendors for not providing drivers ... that's not really going to be acceptable to a perfectionist like JB.

"Oh here's my game on linux, please address any questions or problems to those shitty hardware vendors"

No, he's just going to release it on a platform where he can guarantee compatibility and functionality with minimum effort on his part.

fsloth• 10 years ago

The post at the top is a pretty horrible rant but the following discussion is surprisingly civil and to the point.

hurricaneSlider• 10 years ago

I'm 100% sure Jonathan Blow can install Ubuntu. He is writing his own programming language. For a game like that, it just isn't economically feasible to develop for Linux. Especially since the engine was written from scratch.

He spent more or less all of the profits on his previous release on this new game. From the videos I've watched about the dev, he is somewhat of a perfectionist. It would likely rankle him to release a subpar experience on a given platform, which given the economic incentives, it would likely be.

dharma13• 10 years ago

I had a quick look at the trailer and it looked to me like it could have been built with Unity or Unreal Engine... wondering why own engine, given the effort to then port the game to other platforms?

colinramsay• 10 years ago

This is going to be one of the most popular games of 2016, and is releasing for Windows and PS4. Compared to those platforms, do you think that the time it would take to get a Linux version up and running would be cost-effective?

There are some Linux sales figures kicking around [1] and they generally show that the Linux share is under 3%.

[1] https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/sales-statistics-for-...

hellofunk• 10 years ago

And OSX. Apparently Macs are the fastest growing segment of the desktop/laptop industry, but they are often the last to get the big games.

pferde4• 10 years ago

Of course, the cost/benefit ratio has to be evaluated by the developer, and I don't want to force anyone into anything. I'm just aware that plenty other developers have no problems making their games available on the OS I am running. And since their games are more than enough to fill whatever free time I have for computer games, I won't be missing this one.

douche• 10 years ago

Anyone tried running it under WINE yet?

sandGorgon2• 10 years ago

I would say - skip the Linux port and instead build an Android version.

I have high hopes for the beginning for the convergence (that is already happening with RemixOS) of ChromeOS and android during google i/o.

simoncion5• 10 years ago

Is that the guy who was unable to install Ubuntu properly...

Frankly, Ubuntu 15.04 and 15.whatever_the_last_release_was have been really, really, really bad. I say this as a gamer, Linux power user, and sysadmin who's been using various flavors of Linux for ~fifteen years and who's quite happy managing his Gentoo Linux boxes, but really happy when he finds a largely-hands-off distro, because that means he can recommend a distro to his friends.

What's more, if you are using Ubuntu 15.latest, Steam doesn't work out of the box. It won't start. You get no error messages or anything. You have to move a bundled copy of -IIRC- glibc out of the way before Steam will work. Reports on the interwebs indicate that the moved file comes back when the Steam client updates itself, so this isn't a permanent fix!

Maybe Valve can't be arsed to target anything other than SteamOS, but it's not a good sign when the company that's -arguably- doing the most good for Linux gaming out of anyone out there doesn't ship a client that works on the latest version of one of the more (if not the most) popular Linux distros.

I'mma have to make a note to go back and remind myself about how dynamic linking and .so versioning works on Linux. I had thought that the tools to make this shit work correctly were widespread and relatively easy to use, but the state of Linux gaming leads me to question my memory. :/

loudmax• 10 years ago

That is a pity. We had to wait a few years for Braid to come out on Linux, but now that it's here it works well. Presumably the graphics requirements for The Witness are a lot higher. I'll keep an eye out for The Witness to make it to my desktop.

em3rgent0rdr2• 10 years ago

I'm going to wait for Linux version to buy...that way will incentivize devs to make Linux versions.

aikah• 10 years ago

You're going to have to wait a long time ... the problem is would you develop something on a OS that represents 0.5% of your market ? it often doesn't make sense financially. Things may get better, ironically, since MS seems to be invested in porting its tools and frameworks to Linux, so popular game engines and SDKs might finally be available on the platform.

slantyyz2• 10 years ago

I'm going to wait for Linux version to buy...that way will incentivize devs to make Linux versions.

I'm not sure that's going to incentivize anyone, especially if they're making plenty of money on the platforms they chose to release on.

Spending your money on existing Linux games in the same genre (and encouraging your Linux friends to as well) is more likely to incentivize devs. At least they can see that a Linux port sells, and they can find sales stats to assess whether the market for a particular genre is large enough to be worth the investment.

JabavuAdams7• 10 years ago

Er, no it won't. If everyone who shared your opinion could convince 100-1000 other people to do the same, then maybe it would work.

Fundamentally, though, some kinds of customer aren't worth the trouble. I'm not going to sell Lamborghinis to people who don't really care about flashy cars. So, why would I expect to sell AAA polished games to people who won't install a gamer OS, out of principle?

sandGorgon2• 10 years ago

Jonathan posts on HN. Here was his post defending his position on the poor productivity of Linux game dev - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5125078

FYI - I have only used Linux as my main laptop for the past 15 years. But he's right. I had really hoped that Steam Linux would be based on Android or something and build that friendly layer.. I'm still not sure why they went with Debian.

unixhero2• 10 years ago

All his arguments from that post are today FOO.

uxcn• 10 years ago

Some of it might have to do with familiarity. Working in * nix, you tend to combine tools to do stuff, whereas with Windows or OSX everything is normally only a few clicks away. I think it's probably a bit of a barrier for using * nix coming from something else. I'm personally used to it though, and it's a lot more productive for me than Windows. That's not to say there are a lot of tools that unfortunately just don't exist yet.

egypturnash• 10 years ago

Some very cursory research suggests that the sales numbers on computer games tend to be about 93% Windows, 5% Mac, and 2% Linux.

I'll let you pull your own estimate out of the air for how much extra development time/money supporting a decent cross-section of popular Linux distributions will take. Oh, and don't forget to add in time for testing it, too.

This may change if Valve can make the Steam Box happen, but right now it sure doesn't sound like a sound business decision to bother looking for those last few extra bucks from Tux. Honestly I'm surprised anyone releases anything for Linux or for Macs now that I look at the numbers; I suspect we have the rise of cross-platform general-purpose game engines (which this game doesn't rely on) to thank for that.

krige2• 10 years ago

Oh goodie, he's moving complaints and unfavourable opinions to "Dumb Internet Questions". I recommend reading the reviews, especially the longer ones, before buying.

donatj• 10 years ago

Windows and PS4 huh? As the exclusive owner of Macs and an Xbox One, that's little irritating. I'd at least imagine a Windows to Xbox One port to be reasonable.

fulafel• 10 years ago

They have a timed exclusivity agreement with Sony, hence PS4 first.

"It will be released on the PC and the PlayStation 4 on January 26, 2016. The game will come to iOS some months after that, and other platforms a bit later." (http://the-witness.net/news/about/)

Fingers crossed for a Linux port at some point! For Blow's last game (Braid) I think the Linux port was done by a third party.

Or maybe it's time to get a copy of Windows and set up a VM with GPU passthrough...

jamesgeck0• 10 years ago

Blow made a comment a few years ago along the lines that even if there wasn't a console exclusivity agreement, they didn't have the resources to launch on multiple consoles simultaneously.

mwill3• 10 years ago

Bit of info why Blow went PS4 over XBO:

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/09/how-sony-snagged-jonat...

chrismbarr2• 10 years ago

Well, I was about to add it to my Steam wish list until I read this. My only non-work computer is a Mac, so I guess I won't be playing it until it's released there.

abrkn• 10 years ago

I'm in the same situation. Perhaps we can hope to play the game in a year or so. If The Witness is even close to the quality of Braid, I'll wait.

archagon4• 10 years ago

FYI, Bootcamp improves graphics performance by 1.5-2x.

nailer• 10 years ago

For those wondering, Jonathan Blow is the author of the critically acclaimed time travel platform game 'Braid'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Blow

chrismbarr2• 10 years ago

And for all those wondering, YES you should go buy & play Braid if you haven't already. It's an astounding game. A 2D platformer-style game that deals with in-game undo, time travel, time distortion, and multiple realities. It's mind bending, fun, and beautiful. Watch the trailer for it here if you haven't seen it before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqtSKkyJgFM

StavrosK3• 10 years ago

Braid is a masterpiece, just go get it now and play it WITHOUT WALKTHROUGHS (they'll just spoil the game for you).

I'm not sure the Witness can live up to Braid, but we'll see.

explorigin• 10 years ago

That look at 0:50 perfectly describes how I felt playing Braid.

cpach• 10 years ago

Great to see OS X-compatible game recommendations on HN. Personally I find it quite challenging to find interesting games for OS X.

ionised• 10 years ago

I got it in a Humble Indie Bundle a while back.

I tried my best to enjoy it (Fez too) but I can't seem to get past the fact that they are platformers, which I have discovered I just flat-out do not like.

seivan5• 10 years ago

It's hard not to admire Blow. Not only does he make amazing games, but he actually powers through and finishes them. That's a talent on its own. I mean put aside his engineering and design skill-sets, actually finishing should be part of what one would have to 'learn'. At least for me.

test1235• 10 years ago

After Braid, Blow (rightly or wrongly) took an immense amount of criticism for his views and opinions. Even more admirable is that he shrug all that off to come thru' with another game (unlike Phil Fish who took all his criticism rather badly).

ericye16• 10 years ago

One of my favourite talks from a developer was his talk on "Deep Work,"[0] where he talks about how he manages to keep working on projects that take a very long time to complete. He has some pretty good advice with regards to managing one's own psychology and avoiding burnout while being productive.

[0] https://vimeo.com/94259578

drzaiusapelord2• 10 years ago

Yeah, agreed, he's quite the talent. I was more than a little pissed off when Indie Game: The Movie made a special effort to make him look like some kind of nutball for the audience to laugh at. I can't stress how terrible that documentary was. It played up hateful stereotypes of "pathetic geeks" and other things best found on sitcoms like The Big Bang Theory.

Blow was treated very unfairly, imo. He's actually interesting to listen to and something of a deep and critical thinker. Clearly he's someone who understands that games can be a transcendent experience like any art.

I just hope he's working on a VR game soon. I suspect the Vive is going to change everything in a couple months. I'd love to VR in the kinds of worlds he builds.

minimaxir3• 10 years ago

It's worth noting that Blow used all the money earned from Braid to develop The Witness (as a result of long development time, though)

http://www.engadget.com/2015/02/06/the-witness-money/

drdrey• 10 years ago

It's probably more correct to say that all the money used to develop The Witness comes from the money earned from Braid.

Kurtz79• 10 years ago

Although I have a backlog of unplayed games which could last me for an eternity or two, I will probably buy the game regardless at full price now, instead of waiting for the inevitable sale a few months down the line.

While Jonathan's opinions can be a bit divisive, he is obviously a passionate programmer and gamer, and he financed the game from the sales of Braid, without kickstarter shenanigans.

(And of course the game appeals to me regardless as an old-school adventure games lover).

tgb• 10 years ago

Some of my absolute favorite memories are playing Myst as a kid with my family. We'd huddle around the computer, take notes, kibitz about where to explore, be amazed at the visuals (those gondola-style rides were breathtaking at the time!). Riven might have been the high point of the series for us with the feeling of exploration it had being so great and involving.

I wish modern exploration/puzzle adventures in the Myst vein were made to be more easily navigated by my parents, who just can't handle FPS-style controls, quick action, jumping puzzles, etc. So I can't have them try Braid or Fez or most other modern games despite having some great puzzles. Machinarium worked great, Her Story was good but quite different, but other than that we'll probably never get to share that same Myst-style experience again. At least Cyan is working on a Myst-esque game again, Obduction.

nilkn2• 10 years ago

I'm just waiting for the inevitable Myst game in VR. It's pretty much the perfect medium for it, since it solves the locomotion problem by just removing locomotion and replacing it with a set of discrete locations to stand at.

The only downside is that it would be a very solo experience and certainly couldn't be enjoyed as a family.

edem• 10 years ago

It is interesting that the game's rating is very positive but no one recommends it if I read the reviews. It seems that this game is not like Myst but a sterile puzzle collection without a story. Did I miss something?

abcd_f• 10 years ago

That's perfectly normal.

If you don't like something, you are much more likely to vent than when you like it. Besides, it's a new release, so those who like it are still busy playing it.

clentaminator4• 10 years ago

I think the default sorting for Steam reviews is by how helpful a review was.

Looking through some of the positive and negative reviews, it seems like the positive reviews are fairly short and don't say much about the game, while the negative reviews are longer and the reviewers do mention what they thought did and didn't work about the game, so the longer reviews that have a negative opinion end up being the most helpful. Just telling someone you liked something isn't going to cut it for everyone.

I can only guess that everyone who wanted to write a more in-depth positive review was just so keen to get back to playing the game that they cut their review short ;)

Gigablah• 10 years ago

The proportion of votes for negative vs positive reviews seem way off. I wouldn't be surprised if there was some vote brigading going on for whatever reason. Either that or people mindlessly vote for the longest review.

saluk3• 10 years ago

Sterile puzzle collection; or clean, pure set of puzzles that interplay on each other within a larger interlocking puzzle.

moultano3• 10 years ago

I'm a few hours in and have already had so many moments of pure euphoria. It is a full sensory game. It uses my whole brain. Aesthetically, intellectually, even spiritually.

A quote in one of the audio logs is so exquisite that I just have to share.

One nature perfect and pervading circulates in all natures

One reality, all comprehensive, contains within itself all realities

The one Moon reflects itself wherever there is a sheet of water

And all the moons in the waters are embraced within the one moon

The Dharma body [the Absolute] of all Buddhas enters into my own being

And my own being is found in union with theirs

The Inner Light is beyond praise and blame

Like space it knows no boundaries

Yet it is even here, within us, ever retaining its serenity and fullness

It is only when you hunt for it that you lose it

You cannot take hold of it, but equally you cannot get rid of it

And while you can do neither, it goes on its own way

You remain silent and it speaks, you speak and it is dumb

The great gate of charity is wide open, with no obstacles before it.

- Yung-Chia Ta-Shih

hbex5• 10 years ago

And it is wonderful.

It's one of those games that manages to push buttons in your brain you never knew you had, and make you feel like a genius when something finally clicks.

And it does all this without ever needing to explain anything.

Jonathan Blow's enigma variations. A meandering meditation on the means by which humans gain knowledge and understanding of the world, by standing on the shoulders of a hacking minigame.

Also it's gorgeous.

Did I mention it's BRILLIANT?

amichail2• 10 years ago

Isn't it like those ill-defined puzzles where you need to say what number comes next? Any number can come next.

azzafazza• 10 years ago

Pretty much this. It isn't a very good game. It's padded to kingdom come, there is a lack of motivation to keep going and no music kills any atmosphere it might potentially create.

grabcocque• 10 years ago

Not even remotely.

mwill3• 10 years ago

I've solved ~300 puzzles (out of 600) but am able to trigger the ending, so I am finished but not 100% completed yet.

I haven't found ANY puzzles where I feel like you're guessing at the solution. Every puzzle I've solved has had well defined rules. I don't want to give too much away, but broadly speaking there are two types of puzzles: Those that rely on the symbols, where whats on the screen in front of you is all thats required and those that...don't.

The first category, you slowly build up your understanding of the various rules as you progress, and they all play by the same rules. The second category though, the real puzzle is to figure out what you're missing, generally by observation.

But once you learn the difference between the puzzles that you can take a face value, and the puzzles where you should look around, it feels much more fair.

The only time I felt truly frustrated was the few puzzles that introduce audio as a mechanic. I think deaf players will be unable to 100% this game because of a handful of puzzles, and theres no indication that the piece of the puzzle you're missing is sound.

pdabbadabba• 10 years ago

I think you may be making the mistake of viewing these puzzles as purely mathematical instead of also psychological. Mathematically its true, of course, that any number can come next in an arbitrary sequence. But its not true that each of the possible interrelations between those numbers is equally likely to be selected by human puzzle designer (*especially a good puzzle designer who is attempting to make the puzzle fun, challenging, but not impossible). Of course, that doesn't mean there is no such thing as a bad puzzle...

nilkn2• 10 years ago

No, I'd actually say it's designed to avoid issues of that nature. In my opinion, while the game derives some (actually rather minimal) inspiration from Myst and Riven, its puzzles are much more structured and logical.

This does come at the cost of their not being quite as wholly integrated into the environment as some of Riven's puzzles, for instance, but it also means a lot of the arbitrariness and guessing is gone.

(There are environmental connections with the puzzles, just to be clear. The game is simply a lot more careful and conservative with them.)

lkozma2• 10 years ago

I think it is a common misconception that in the kind of puzzles you mention any number can come next in an equally meaningful way.

There are well-defined (mathematically) and natural ways in which 6 is a better continuation to 1,2,3,4,5,... than say 15 or whatever else.

hibikir3• 10 years ago

There are two major kinds of puzzles:

1)Puzzles about getting a solution that follows a set of rules, which can be deduced, and are reused from puzzle to puzzle. The game just checks that the rules are followed, so there is more than one valid solution sometimes. The different solutions might even have different effects.

2)Environmental puzzles, where the right solution is indicated by the environment. Without giving too much away, imagine that there's a line near the puzzle, matching the puzzle's grid, and the solution is just to trace that same line in the puzzle.

So there's never an arbitrary rule that you can't figure out. That said, a part that is difficult for some people is that they make assumptions about what the rules of the puzzles are, and the assumptions might be incomplete, or outright wrong. There's typically simple puzzles that are trying to teach you the rules. Part of the game's progression is to find those tutorial puzzles.

evancordell• 10 years ago

I just watched a review yesterday that I thoroughly enjoyed: http://youtu.be/xH7nnPnc56Y

Made me very interested in playing it!

jcl• 10 years ago

If anyone is interested in how the game's beautiful lighting works, Ignacio Castaño wrote several articles about his work on it:

http://www.ludicon.com/castano/blog/tag/witness/

daodedickinson• 10 years ago

makes you feel like a genius Blow said having a game make you feel like a genius is a disease, looks like he completely fails to understand his audience again!

mrmondo• 10 years ago

Looks really very intriguing, I'm not about to install Windows to play it though - it doesn't seem there is a Mac / Linux version available?

cstuder3• 10 years ago

Coming to iOS "in a couple of months", other platforms later.

Currently Windows and PS4 only.

Qwertious• 10 years ago

Well, that certainly simplifies the "do I buy it" problem. No tux, no bux.

galapago• 10 years ago

Source?

Narishma3• 10 years ago

It's currently available on PS4 as well, and may come to other platforms in the future.

baddox• 10 years ago

It looks great and I would definitely be playing it this weekend, but Windows-only is a nonstarter. I'm rather surprised to see an indie title like this not support OS X.

Keyframe2• 10 years ago

Premise sounds exactly like Myst.

krige2• 10 years ago

It's quite unlike Myst actually, lacking anything resembling a story, and the interaction with environment is minimal.

Keyframe2• 10 years ago

I don't know what the game is like, but I've said the premise sounds exactly like Myst. Even the video supports that. Here's a brief from the linked page:

You wake up, alone, on a strange island full of puzzles that will challenge and surprise you.

You don't remember who you are, and you don't remember how you got here, but there's one thing you can do: explore the island in hope of discovering clues, regaining your memory, and somehow finding your way home.

The Witness is a single-player game in an open world with dozens of locations to explore and over 500 puzzles. This game respects you as an intelligent player and it treats your time as precious. There's no filler; each of those puzzles brings its own new idea into the mix. So, this is a game full of ideas.

Difference in the premise being instead of your amnesia and finding about you, there's a book and you're finding about island's characters.

danso• 10 years ago

I've been wanting to play this ever since Casey Muratori wrote about the process of generating grass for the terrain in an eye-pleasing distribution:

http://mollyrocket.com/casey/stream_0015.html (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7692332)

remybach• 10 years ago

Well there goes my afternoon.

hoorayimhelping• 10 years ago

The bulk of the game feels like taking an IQ test.

This is from a negative (but helpful) review of this game and it echoes exactly how I felt about playing Braid. His games feel like they're constructed so everyone will admire the genius of the creator for thinking up these kinds of interesting puzzles. And if the player ends up enjoying the game while they're admiring its creator, well that's an added benefit I guess.

eamsen• 10 years ago

I've tried hard to like Braid despite it being a platform game (Flashback (1992) is the only game in that genre that I've enjoyed so far). It's gorgeous, clever and polished, yet it felt pretentious to the point where it would distract from the beauty of the game. And I didn't know anything about the creator of the game before trying, so that couldn't have been personal bias (not implying that would have been the case otherwise).

blablablame• 10 years ago

I agree. I tried to play Braid many times but just couldn't get myself to play for more than a bit and switch to another game. Interesting enough, Flashback is probably one of the games I use as a reference for platform games so maybe that has something to do with it.

For anyone that hasn't played Flashback, give it a go. The graphics while low res now, still look very much alive and nice to look at even on modern monitors.

gknoy• 10 years ago

I find it interesting that you felt it was pretentious. What made it feel that way to you? I ask, because I never felt like that. I felt curiosity about what the Real Plot was about, I felt challenged (and frustrated) by the puzzles, and really enjoyed the art and music style.

It felt like each mechanic was introduced once I'd mastered the previous ones, and other puzzles made it worthwhile to replay things once I had already passed a level. To me, it felt like it did for Time what Portal did for space -- made me think about interactions in a new way. It didn't feel like it was trying to impress me, or wow me with the creator's brilliance (other than "this was made by one guy??") so much as make a game that made me think differently.

I think its similarity to Portal is something I hadn't thought of before now, but that explains a lot about why I liked it.

fasteo2• 10 years ago

Anyone knows the music of the first teaser ?

fasteo2• 10 years ago

Shazam to the rescue: Zoe Keating, escape artist

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ufe2JtYqZI

Mahn• 10 years ago

Looks like it's getting panned in steam reviews as people play it. Very surprising.

moultano3• 10 years ago

I think it's too hard to explain what's good about the game without spoilers, so the positive reviews don't have much content.

tdsamardzhiev• 10 years ago

I think posting a review of a game after playing it for 1 hour is awkward. But what is more awkward is upvoting reviews of other people that played it for 1 hour.

nickpeterson2• 10 years ago

My daughter is going to be about 4, and she loves puzzles. I was thinking about picking this up for the apple tv to play along with her. Is it conceptually too difficult for children?

minimaxir3• 10 years ago

The Witness is not available for iOS yet.

6x9equals42• 10 years ago

The world is beautiful so she might enjoy playing it, but you would be doing the actual puzzle solving. It gets very challenging.

nickpeterson2• 10 years ago

Thanks, I couldn't gauge from the pictures how hard it actually is.

eXpl0it3r• 10 years ago

And why exactly is this on Hacker News?

clentaminator4• 10 years ago

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

An open world puzzle game seems exactly like the kind of thing that might gratify one's intellectual curiosity. Plus it does make a nice change from reading the latest thing about React ;)

dang• 10 years ago

That, plus its creator is one of us: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=jblow. Of course this belongs on HN.

minimaxir3• 10 years ago

Honestly, I'd like to see more about gaming on Hacker News. (I've been submitting what I can, although it's hard to find good sources)

JabavuAdams7• 10 years ago

Because it's a way more technically demanding product than the typical HN "I made this CRUD thing to disrupt yadda yadda" product?

imron• 10 years ago

Excellent. Now hopefully he has more time to work on his programming language :-)

myth_buster2• 10 years ago

JBlow is featured in the documentary Indie Game[0][1] which follows the trials and tribulations of development and launch of two indie games Super Meat Boy and Fez.

It's surprising how similar the whole experience is to launching a startup!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indie_Game:_The_Movie

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1942884/

seivan5• 10 years ago

I feel like it's hard to launch a game as an MVP. You can try it out, but actually selling it without having all the aspects of the game (sound, graphics, performance, etc) might be hard.

j2bax• 10 years ago

It seems that this is the purpose that Steam's Early Access program fulfills. Players know well that the game is unfinished, but there is still enough there to explore. Users even pay for this early access and then they provide valuable feedback to the developers. Sounds like an MVP to me!

drzaiusapelord2• 10 years ago

That movie is really unfair to him. It more or less mocks him and paints him as this out of touch primadonna instead of focusing on his work. I feel it was very unfair to him and dramatized for the audience at his expense.

myth_buster2• 10 years ago

I came out thinking that he is an idealist and I respected him for that.

hnal943• 10 years ago

Indie Game: The Movie is one of the best documentaries I've ever seen. The cinematography is amazing, and they tell a great story about each of the dev teams they follow. Definitely worth a watch.

AsyncAwait• 10 years ago

I like the potential of the game, but sadly it did not meet my expectations.

I saw it as a Myst-style game, where you have puzzles, but you also have a lot of interactive environment around you to explore.

Here, I was getting taken it by a lot of beautiful scenarios in the distance, only to realise that there is nothing to do there, but solve more panels. It simply feels like this beautiful island is going to waste, being a little more than a hiding place for the panels.

How's everyone feeling about this?

chasing3• 10 years ago

How's everyone feeling about this?

I'm feeling like you haven't played very far into the game. :-) And neither have I! The puzzles are definitely mostly panel-based, but the environment becomes very important to solving them.

I think The Witness is quite clever, so far. It's interesting how much diversity and playfulness can come from just these simple little grid-and-line puzzles.

danpalmer• 10 years ago

I can't agree with this enough, I've found the puzzles to be a mechanism by which I can fully appreciate the truly beautiful environment.

webkike3• 10 years ago

I agree with this. The game is at its best when the panels interact with the world in a meaningful way, but this is very rare.

on_and_off• 10 years ago

two hours or so into it so far, so I don't have an overview of the whole game.

The puzzles so far have rarely asked for more than 10 seconds to find a solution.

Navigating the island does feel like an artificial overgame at the moment. Some of the puzzles have caused changes in the 3D world but in very small ways.

I guess that things are going to get more complex soon though.

lowmagnet2• 10 years ago

Some of the puzzles hide elements, and block elements. Also, the environments themselves eventually give way to 'meta-puzzles' on a larger scale.

nemof• 10 years ago

I've played about four hours so far and I'm captivated by it.

Slowly as you explore the the island and solve puzzles they become more and more intrinsically linked to the context you find the puzzles in - soon the puzzles demand that you become aware of the environment around you and look at things in new and surprising ways.

for myself i was never really expecting a deeply interactive landscape; i was slightly worried that the puzzles were just silly little doodads like a curio you picked up and soon forgot about, but as i've moved through the game solving them i've marveled at their cleverness and how they have encourage me to think.

perhaps the island is too static, but then again, back in the day so was Myst. the movement and interactions it encourages are up here taps head.

vlunkr2• 10 years ago

After seeing some of the earlier screenshots and videos I was afraid of this. Lots of the reviews on Steam report the same thing.

mmozeiko• 10 years ago

Oh, but there are more puzzles to do, it isn't just about panels. Keep looking, those puzzles are everywhere.

henrikschroder• 10 years ago

There's the environmental puzzles, where you need to find the right perspective, the right spot, or line up the environment in a specific way, so that you can solve them.

Hint: Look for large circles in the environment, and start dragging a line.

DannoHung• 10 years ago

Ehh, give it some more time. I don't think it's perfect by any means, but it does some clever environmental things.

The game's idea of iterative puzzle design would have been close ti impossible to build without the grid-line conceit.

hibikir3• 10 years ago

The game suffers from the fact that its first hour or two can be solved without looking at the island at all, but there are MANY puzzles that aren't really about the panel: The panel is just where you enter the answer that you got from everything around it.

A couple of good, early examples (although they don't really show the game's real environmental power), are the temple in the desert, the temple in the woods, and the 'pink forest': All solvable without any information from a different part of the game, and absolutely not solvable by just staring at the panel itself: Entire series of 20+ puzzles have the EXACT SAME PANEL, just placed in a different location.

And panel solutions affect the environment. There are elevators operated by panels. a boat operated by panels. bridges built by solving panels that have more than one solution, in ways that match what you want to do physically in the game.

It's just a big pity that the beginning of the game shows so very little of that.

prawn2• 10 years ago

Would it be appropriate to share with a smart 3yo watching alongside? Is there anything likely to be nightmare-inducing?

evan_2• 10 years ago

I don't think so, but obviously you know your 3yo better than I do.

The only thing that I could even imagine coming close are some marble statues of men and women that appear throughout the island. They aren't all that creepy but an imaginative child see them that way.

It's rated E for Everyone:

https://www.esrb.org/ratings/Synopsis.aspx?Certificate=34184...

Schwolop• 10 years ago

I've been doing this with my almost 4yo, and he's enjoying it. Not really getting the puzzles, but enjoying the environment and being allowed to steer the character.

muraiki• 10 years ago

One thing to note is that some of the optional puzzles are likely to be unsolvable by colorblind and hearing impaired players: http://kotaku.com/colorblind-and-hearing-impaired-players-wo...

As someone who is colorblind, I've been happy to see many games come out with options to enable filters for one or more types of colorblindness. It's disappointing that such a feature isn't present in this game.

michaelbuddy• 10 years ago

Send him the info. Despite the success he's still an indie dev, and maybe didn't have the resources at the outset, or just didn't get to it or know about it. but maybe it could be in an update.

dr_zoidberg• 10 years ago

From the linked article:

“We definitely thought about colorblindness but ultimately there was not much we could do in terms of the individual puzzles,” the game’s lead developer, Jonathan Blow, told me today.

It's been a decision by the devs. Still, it would be nice if they updated the puzzles for those who are colorblind.

yoklov2• 10 years ago

Yeah this is pretty unfortunate.

Sadly, having played through the puzzles that involve color, it's not superficial at all. The puzzles are fundamentally about how colors work and combine. There isn't an obvious way to make a colorblind friendly version...

agentultra4• 10 years ago

I was rather struck by this game. The puzzles are indeed clever and was immediately enamoured with the combinatoric spaces and visual appeal. Perhaps it is my experience with Go as a "conversation with hands," that drew me in to The Witness as a "conversation with the designer."

I hope Jonathan feels very lucky to have made this game. It is great and I find myself envious and over-joyed that he has had the time, privilege, and skill to build it (and many thanks to the team behind it as well).

webkike3• 10 years ago

One of the things I did not like is the sometimes incredibly obfuscated association of symbols with mechanics. For example, the panels with sun symbols. [Spoilers] It didn't take me incredibly long to figure out that they needed to be grouped in twos, but it did take me longer to figure out than to solve the first ~8 introductory panels. And the worst part, how is a star in any way connected with grouping by twos????

bendykstra• 10 years ago

When a new rule is introduced, the early panels can be easily solved by trial and error. However, it's a mistake to continue until you can articulate the rule. That means experimenting with a panel even if you accidentally get the correct answer on the first try.

Edit: I'm reminded of this game from the New York Times from October: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/07/03/upshot/a-quick...

webkike3• 10 years ago

I do not mind new panels introducing concepts; what I mind is the symbols not always being clearly connected with the mechanic they introduce. For example, the black and white symbols that needed to be separated were intuitive.

eridius4• 10 years ago

Please please please do NOT PUT SPOILERS INTO THE SECOND COMMENT IN THE THREAD. That's incredibly rude. At the very least, if you're going to do something like that, rot13 it, because people like me will see the spoiler before they read the word "[Spoilers]".

pewpewlasergun• 10 years ago

We are discussing a puzzle games. Part of that will be discussing puzzles. Maybe don't read comment threads talking about things you don't want any more information about.

jslakro• 10 years ago

Nice to have an indie developer exposed by HN. Sad to see there are no other cases. Blow had its relevance due to XBOX but many indies have been out there before on PC, so it sounds unfair when you think in the whole scene

JabavuAdams7• 10 years ago

Jon Blow's probably the most famous indie developer, next to notch. Maybe more-so, among game developers. He was at the first indie game jam in 2002, I think he may have written for Game Developer magazine during the nineties, but not sure about that. I keep thinking the nineties were only a decade a away :/

chc4• 10 years ago

I'd hesitate to call Jon Blow an indie dev anymore, expect in the "not a AAA studio" sense. With the success of Braid and including in Indie Games the movies, he is probably one of the most well recognized game developers. The Witness has a massive budget, multiple developers, and high-end voice actors.

rwc• 10 years ago

Looks like Myst but without the cutting edge 1993 graphics.

no_wave• 10 years ago

The hype machine around this is strange - tons of superficially positive reviews but without a whole lot of passion behind them.

Does anyone else smell something off about the response to the game so far? Have people convinced themselves that this is a great game before they started enjoying it?

s_kilk3• 10 years ago

Have people convinced themselves that this is a great game before they started enjoying it?

Quite possibly. While it is an excellent game, the hype train has been rolling for so long that by this point it can't be seen as anything less than excellent.

See also the review cycle around the similarly hyped and long-awaited "That Dragon, Cancer".

swah• 10 years ago

I think that is normal - Jon Blow has a big online presence, lots of fans due to Braid... I upvote edw519 before I finish reading his comments all the time...

hibikir3• 10 years ago

It's just very difficult to explain what is so good about the game without spoiling the heck out of it, and since a big part of the experience is discovery, people that really like the game will hate do not want to spoil it for new players.

I play puzzle hunts, and have played a whole lot of puzzle based games over the years. I do not like Braid that much. However, I think The Witness is, gameplay wise, better than Portal, Talos Principle, Myst, 7th Guest or anything from the Professor Layton series. The puzzles get to be very hard, but they never felt unfair.

If anything, the negative reviews come from how the very beginning of the game starts too slowly, making sure you understand a little piece of the game, when, in practice, there's a whole lot more to it. The tutorial area is simple and generic, on purpose. Right afterwards, you get to an area that is just confusing, with puzzles you really shouldn't even attempt. Go anywhere else though, and the real game opens up, and it's wonderful.

saluk3• 10 years ago

I don't know what you are seeing, I'm passionate about it. There are really only one or two puzzle games of this caliber every year, if that, and for me this is the best one in many years. The superficial similarity of the puzzle design to some popular iphone games, combined with a higher price than indie games typically have, seems to be putting people off.

It's also a very simple game. There isn't a lot someone who likes it can say about it without spoiling anything. There are puzzles. They are good. The island is also a puzzle. It is fun to solve puzzles. Yeah, I can't really go on that way for very long, can I.

ericfrederich• 10 years ago

Nothing but bad reviews on the link provided. Wow.

oilywater2• 10 years ago

This game is the perfect tool for testing your problem solving skills. It puts you in a new framework and tests your cognition.

Portal, The Talos Principle, all have the same goal.

I wonder if people could become excellent problem solver by playing these games instead of honing the skills in the mathematics, physics or similar frameworks.

agentultra4• 10 years ago

You may begin to realize that you are doing maths without realizing it. Thinking mathematically is quite natural for a curious, motivated person. It's writing down these thoughts which people find difficult. It's not easy for us to be precise!

It could augment your skills in mathematics. Most people are much better than they think they are or are given credit for.

I gave my niece the game, Set, over the holidays. She was able to beat adult players after a few rounds. Similar experiences with http://dragonbox.com as well.

oilywater2• 10 years ago

I believe it is called problem solving, not math.

Mathematics is a framework for problem solving which requires problem solving skills and knowledge of mathematics.

I believe anyone using a piece of paper and writing down their thinking is doing problem solving on problems that are presented in the game. Yes, it is probably equivalent to some algorithms present in computer science but they are (if not familiar) discovering everything by themselves.

The game provides the framework for problem solving, so instead of having knowledge of math/algorithms, you build that knowledge yourself and improve your problem solving skills as you go.

The way math is commonly taught seems to be knowledge oriented - which leaves a lot of people completely stuck when it comes to problem solving.

That's why I'm interested if you could, playing these games, improve your general problem solving skills, so that only thing you have to do, when you start with a different framework, is to get the knowledge - but your thinking previously trained without it and it should work now when you're familiar with the framework.

At least that is what I would expect form a general problem solver that got one's skills by solving problems in maths, or physics. I would assume that they could solve problems in other areas if they knew the terminology, if they acquired knowledge.

autoreleasepool• 10 years ago

How far along is he with implementing his game dev language, Jai? I haven't kept up, but I was interested in his early demonstrations.

topspin• 10 years ago

He's still doing live coding sessions on Twitch. Nothing has been released yet. Despite that there is already at least one comprehensive Jai language tutorial that I've seen and also syntax highlighting rules for at least one editor.

lobster_johnson• 10 years ago

Congratulations to Jonathan Blow on finishing his game — I was afraid that he would never be done. I look forward to playing it, and I hope it sells well.

For entirely selfish reasons, I'm now really hoping this release means he now has some breathing room to spend more time on developing his programming language, Jai.

wnevets• 10 years ago

$40 is a bit too steep for me. I'll wait till a steam sale.

seanp2k2• 10 years ago

Titles like this could be amazing with VR. Can't wait until Rift + Vive finally start shipping :)

teekert2• 10 years ago

Wow, back in the day I loved Atlantis the lost tales [0], this definitely has that feel. I would have bought it already if I had more than just Linux at my disposal...

With the Steambox/machine now in production I thought the divide windows/Linux was shrinking rapidly. I'm not at all a gamer though.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYlzsZcuVkY

eridius4• 10 years ago

Any consoles? It's on PS4 too, and while I haven't checked I'd guess it's on Xbox One.

teekert2• 10 years ago

Yes, but PS4 only.

Eric_WVGG• 10 years ago

There’s been a lot of coverage about the puzzles and ingenuity of the gameplay, but equal attention should be given to the amazing artistic style of the game.

a couple of blog posts about the making of the trees: http://the-witness.net/news/2013/06/2157/ http://the-witness.net/news/2011/06/witness-trees/

I’d love to see more videogames step away from uncanny-valley and ill-advised attempts at photorealism and instead embrace unique artistic style.

LesZedCB• 10 years ago

That's been really big for Oculus games from what I can tell. It has the added benefit of being faster to render, allowing for a GTX970 (the minimum spec card for oculus) to be able to drive games at the required speed. Lucky's Tale[1] is a good example of this.

[1] http://playfulcorp.com/

archagon4• 10 years ago

(SPOILERS, obviously. Mostly surface-level.)

I absolutely love the game, but for the sake of discussion, I have to admit that I'm slightly disappointed by the puzzle-paneliness of it all. I didn't read many spoilers over the 8 years of its development, but Jonathan Blow always made a point to emphasize the epiphany-based nature of the game. I took this to mean that as you gain knowledge from the panels, you slowly begin to understand how to use them to engage in more interesting ways with the world. Instead, the opposite is true: the world simply provides different kinds of masks to solve the puzzles with. In other words, the panels are still the beating heart of the game, while the world is mostly static.

To me, this goes against what I like most in games. I find that one of the primary advantages of this interactive medium is the ability to solve puzzles by intuition. Braid was particularly good at this: instead of having to stand in front of a challenge and reason it out in your mind, you could dive right in and play around with the mechanics until your mind took on the solution all on its own. Over time, you acquired a feeling of natural mastery over these new elements. The Witness does not feel like this; more often than not, you have to logic out the puzzles in your head or on paper, and it never feels as good as using the game world to interactively solve a problem.

(Yes, I'm aware of the obelisk puzzles, but it seems they still follow more or less the same formula. But I haven't gotten very far in that direction, so we'll see.)

The game also makes me think about the problem of hidden knowledge in open-world games. Most metroidvania-style games gate the player with keys or abilities, but a few are starting to add paths that are closed solely based on the player's knowledge. One of the first games I remember doing this is Super Metroid: the wall jump and high jump allowed you to get to a lot more places, but they were nearly impossible to discover without the bird helpers. Fez did this with its Tetris language. La-Mulana did it with its obscure inscriptions. And The Witness does it with the ruleset of its various puzzles -- more completely than any other game before it. Still, I wonder if there's a better way to stash away that kind of knowledge. The puzzle panels are a bit too abstract for my tastes. I'd love to see a game where the hidden knowledge you find is entirely ability-based, but not obscure like in Super Metroid.

Again, The Witness is a masterpiece and one of the few games I'd gladly call art. It would be worth $40 just for the opportunity walk around the incredibly beautiful world. Just some food for game design thought! :)

joshschreuder2• 10 years ago

I can kind of see where you're coming from. I think it might be because the puzzles don't seem to produce much if any overall progress and there's no real indicator of the bigger picture you're trying to achieve (though in some ways you may argue this is also one of its strengths).

Look at a title like Talos Principle for example, which while not a like for like comparison has a quite clear sense of an overarching story and progression.

Interesting that you mention Super Metroid - I have some of my strongest and fondest memories with the things you mentioned, the wall jumps, blowing up the glass with the Power Bomb, etc. Things that felt surprising, not like deus ex machina, but which felt like genuine discoveries that made sense.

I think the Witness has these, but at a much smaller level. Discovering the rules for a particular puzzle gives that huge rush for me, but I haven't seen it translate to the game as a whole.

kayamon• 10 years ago

You might want to check out Toki Tori 2.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=084BUNlI7Gk

archagon4• 10 years ago

Oh yeah, how could I forget Toki Tori? I really love the concept behind that one, except I wish the game was entirely contiguous and didn't rely on a map screen. (Also, Toki Tori 1 was a fantastic straight-up puzzle game.)

kevinSuttle• 10 years ago

Love the music. Can't wait for the soundtrack to be released.

iandanforth2• 10 years ago

I was going to buy this game until I read the steam reviews. If you're considering this purchase I highly recommend reading the top-rated helpful reviews. They changed my mind, they might change yours.

TLDR for the reviews - Only buy this if you like puzzles for individual puzzle's sake, not as means to unlocking a larger story.

taloft• 10 years ago

Fascinating, but honestly you shouldn't be warning people off a game you haven't even played based on hearsay.

iandanforth2• 10 years ago

Hrm, I appreciate your point. Personally I like reading comments that challenge hype, but if second hand hearsay carries no weight for you, or you find it offensive in some way, please ignore my original comment and accept my apologies for wasting your time.

gravypod2• 10 years ago

Is this the game he wrote in his new programming language?

Narishma3• 10 years ago

No. It's written in C++.

gravypod2• 10 years ago

Has he given any hint when we will see him using his programming language in the real world?

sandworm101• 10 years ago

So it's basically Myst but without the story?

darklajid• 10 years ago

I've gotta be honest. I have no idea who Jonathan Blow is. I checked the Steam Store page and it seems .. to be not my thing.

That said, I recently found, bought and played 'Pony Island' (if you don't know what that is: Do NOT watch videos. Think '6th Sense' - you'll ruin the game). That wouldn't have caught my eye based on random videos/screenshots either and it's right now my 'best game ever'.

Can someone explain why 'The Witness' is interesting? Why would it trend here? What's the relation between HN and Jonathan or this game?

simoncion5• 10 years ago

I checked the Steam Store page and it seems .. to be not my thing. ... Can someone explain why 'The Witness' is interesting?

If it's truly not your thing, then you won't understand why it's interesting. If it is your thing, then it's very, very, very interesting.

ROT13'd probably-spoiler-free-but-maybe-contains-tiny-spoilers overview of what makes the game good follows:

Gur Jvgarff vf n chmmyr tnzr. Gur chmmyrf enatr va qvssvphygl sebz gevivny gb irel engure uneq. Vg vf fvzvyne va fcvevg gb Zlfg, ohg abg ng nyy gur fnzr nf Zlfg. Gur neg naq fbhaq vf tbetrbhf. Gur tnzr'f cnpvat vf ernyyl tbbq.

aaronsnoswell• 10 years ago

I have two questions that the steam page didn't answer; Can I play this in VR, and if not, why not? Jonathan Blow is a master artisan - I can't wait to try this game.

saluk3• 10 years ago

You kind of can with a hack, but it's not a comfortable experience. The game was not really developed with VR in mind, though the team experimented with VR support.

highCs• 10 years ago

Someone knows who the art director is?

ryan-allen• 10 years ago

It's awesome. Someone please nuke the spoilers!

nod• 10 years ago

Is this an heir to Myst?

gtkspert• 10 years ago

This looks awesome

robohamburger• 10 years ago

This game is indeed great! Push the envelope forward for puzzle games and games in general. The game feels pretty heavy with potential like there are layers I am not even seeing yet and I am 10 hours in!

Some what spoilery I made a solver for one of its puzzles: https://gist.github.com/robo-hamburger/2269ef76603263ce1061

Amusingly I ended up not really needing it but fun to code.

mempko• 10 years ago

MIST for a newer generation! I'm surprised nobody else mentioned MIST here.

programmarchy• 10 years ago

Would love to play this... on my Mac. :/ There's rumors of an iOS version in the future.

phodo• 10 years ago

Here is a Jonathan Blow interview on The Witness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OV2rYM6mRo

Jonathan Blow's new game, The Witness, is out

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