The Witness

*This is a repost from my Tumblr account*

Lines, lines and more lines... in The Witness you are going to make lines, because the game is about to solve puzzles making lines.

First we will put ourselves in context, the player appears on an island full of puzzles to solve, in no time they tell you that you have to solve them, but if you do not solve them you will not be able to advance. What are these puzzles about? You have to make a line from point A to point B, but it is not as easy as that, depending on what type of puzzle the conditions to which the path is tied are to solve it; in some you will have to go through certain points; in others you will have to separate blocks of different colors; and in others you will have to take into account the environment that surrounds it.

Talking about design, this game has more depth with respect to its puzzle solving mechanics than many other "bigger" games or with bigger budget, by this I mean that with the same mechanics they managed to make it work in different ways without changing the mechanic.

During my hours of play I felt I was playing some old arcade game, which did not matter if things made sense, we never asked when we play tetris why we had to sort the blocks; or why when completing a line it disappears, and here it happens the same, it does not matter because we appear on this island, or because it is full of puzzles, or because after so many hours the sun has not moved, and it does not matter. The only thing that matters is that you solve "the puzzle".

The Witness is an obsession, and it was for Jonathan Blow himself. After hours solving puzzles, making lines and many more hours watching the screen thinking about solving that puzzle that has locked me hours ago, you start to see puzzles and lines on the island itself (which is not that they are not), managed to feel the same paranoia to see that everywhere as when I saw the movie "number 23" and saw that number everywhere. It is at that moment that you see the island as a puzzle and begin to look at each nook to find some other line hidden in the nature of that mysterious island. Those hidden lines make the game experience much better, but if they were not, we could not understand what Blow wants to tell us "the obsession of an artist with his work".