"The Witness" is a Flash game from 2010 in disguise.

This is not an attempt to throw shade. This is, to my mind, really impressive and exciting. Most of what video games "do" is distracting you from what they fundamentally are. What "The Witness" fundamentally is is a particular type of puzzle game, and it's a kind I really like.

When I first started playing The Witness, I imagined this alternate universe version of the same game: There's no island. There's no first person camera. There's no implied story or philosophical interruptions. The puzzles are rendered with the same minimal style, but instead of being in-universe sheets of plasticy e-paper those lines and blotches are rendered directly on screen. Instead of the island there's a menu screen with a grid of puzzles, and you click on them one by one and each selected puzzle fills the screen, and when you've solved a set of ten it unlocks the next ten. In this alternate universe, Blow released this on Kongregate, and then a few months later released a rewritten but substantially similar version on the iPhone App Store. The puzzles are the same as our world, the language of symbols it introduces is the same (one mechanic per row on the grid, then it starts combining them), maybe even some of the sound effects are the same.

This alternate universe Witness would have done moderately well, probably gotten featured at Indiecade, and five years later in 2016 no one would remember it except me. Kongregate was just glutted with these games at one time, and there is no way now I am going to convince anyone that Colorbind is an important game that we should remember.

This isn't the Witness that got released. (Although I think it's strongly possible at one point it was prototyped as this.) Instead, we get the island. But the Witness is fundamentally still that game. The island is an obfuscated menu.

Again, that is not an attempt to throw shade: The obfuscation *works*. Your perceived experience is completely different because of it. Some of the most important-feeling things in The Witness, game design wise, come from the increasingly complex ways the Flash game and the island interact; most of my time playing the Witness has been spent working out exactly what it is the obfuscated menu changes, and which of the things it adds are cosmetic and which are concrete.

I could go on for four or five posts expanding on that comment, and maybe later I will. The basics, for anyone reading these logs in lieu of playing the game (boo): Very early on, you find a locked door with a seemingly impossible puzzle, covered in annotations you cannot understand; the area you reach immediately after finding this one contains a series of panels that offer *no reward* for completing them, but the process of solving them teaches you puzzle annotations, and when you're done you realize you know how to open the door from before. The game will in many places gate your progress by blocking the entrance to one area with a puzzle whose premise is taken from a completely different area; you don't have to have finished that distant area to enter, but you do need to possess the key which is the knowledge of how that distant area works. Each puzzle you complete is connected to the next by a power cable which glows bright neon; once you get really *into* the puzzles everything but that cable abstracts away, and you find yourself running exhilarated, running from puzzle to puzzle eyes only on the cable at your feet. When you're not so into the puzzles, or you start to get tired, your eyes refocus and you realize you're surrounded by natural beauty; when I'm done with a play session I'll tend to take long breaks where I just point the camera at the scenery and sit.

But I think mainly I want to highlight one specific moment I had pretty early on in The Witness: Most of the are ways the puzzle game (the Flash game) and the exploration game (the island) interplay are ways the exploration game serves the puzzle game: The exploration game shapes the order in which you learn and solve the puzzles, the exploration game provides environmental clues for the puzzles. What's interesting to me though is when it starts to flow the other way. Early on there's a specific view that the designers want you to see; you find this building full of pottery, and for purposes of the island-exploration part of the game the designers want you to see this building from the side. If the island were all there were, if this were just Myst, the designers would have to hope that you would take the time to explore the next peninsula over and that you would just happen to stumble into the one particular corner where you have a good view of this building. However, instead, they place a line of puzzle panels in exactly the right way that as the camera slides from puzzle to puzzle, you have a perfectly framed view of the pottery building from exactly the angle the designers wanted you to see, hovering over the panel's shoulder. As a moment, it's cool and it's subtle and it's visually attractive and it's one of those moments that make you feel something legitimately new is going on in this game.