The Witness

The Witness is a sprawling logic game made under studio Thekla by Jonathan Blow, creator of the platformer Braid. You wake up on an abandoned island with no explanation whatsoever, and the only thing guiding you forward are panels containing mazes, on which you trace a line from start to finish. It sounds trivial, yet the game builds several dozen entirely distinct rule sets on top of this single principle, none of which are ever explained in words. You recognize new rules by running into a panel that makes no sense and having to deduce how it differs from the ones before it.

The island is divided into areas, and each teaches a different logic, whether that's separating colored squares, the symmetry of two lines drawn at once, audio clues, or working with shadows. Nothing pushes the player anywhere in particular, the order is largely free, and if you get stuck somewhere you simply go elsewhere. The strongest moment arrives when you realize the puzzles aren't confined to the panels but exist in the landscape itself, since branches, clouds, and reflections can be traced with the eye into shapes that function exactly like a maze. From that moment on, the island can never be seen the same way again.

The graphics rely on flat, richly colored stylization with sharp outlines, so on PlayStation 4 the game runs smoothly and, crucially, stays perfectly legible, which is essential for this type of puzzle. Sound practically forgoes music altogether, working instead with waves, wind, and birds, which only deepens the concentration. Response was very strong, even though part of the audience bounced off the difficulty and the optional puzzles, which rank among the hardest in the genre. The scope is considerable, too; completing just the main path takes tens of hours, and fully exhausting the island takes far longer still. The Witness remains to this day the benchmark for logic games that teach without a single tutorial, and it's invariably mentioned whenever the conversation turns to guiding the player through environmental design instead of text. On PlayStation 4 it's a title best played in long sessions, since its greatest reward is that moment when you suddenly grasp a connection that had eluded you until then.