Trailers: First look at Jonathan Blow’s The Witness

While I find the current visuals to be a little mundane (especially coming from the guy who made Braid), I must say that I see a lot of potential in this game. Kotaku has a preview that sheds a little light on what the game is about, but for my faithful legions of lazy readers who can’t be bothered with links, I shall elaborate.

Pretty much, it’s a first-person puzzler about exploration and discovery. There’s a big, beautiful world just waiting to be traversed in peaceful solitude. At least that’s the impression given off by the game’s PAX showing. Blow could certainly shake things up in the next year before the title releases. But as it is, people are comparing it to Myst. Being that I’ve never played Myst, I’ll go ahead and compare it to Shadow of the Colossus but replace the colossi with puzzles. Or better yet, I’ll compare it to the sheer joy of exploring Super Mario 64‘s world when it first came out and we were thrilled to just take in the beauty of a 3D space.

I’m sure narrative will take a prominent role in The Witness but we aren’t likely to know much about that for a while. So for now, this is just a puzzler with a focus on one of the funnest things in video games–exploration. The reputation behind its creator is just icing on the cake.

Author: Cody