The Witness - A Great Game That You Shouldn't Play

Part One: Gameplay - 0:46

Part Two: Over "500" Puzzles - 18:07

Part Three: Why is it called The Witness? - 29:47

I've made an effort to avoid swearing in recent videos but I felt like I couldn't avoid it here, so this is a second warning in case you're watching somewhere that it might be an issue.

I get a little ranty in the third section. It's the weakest part in terms of stating actual facts but I felt compelled to include it. This was a difficult script to write. Probably more than any other so far. I'm mostly happy with it.

The title is a little click-baity. If you haven't played the game then it's still (probably) worth your time. Watch the first few minutes if you're on the fence before deciding.

Thanks! Let me know if I'm an idiot or not.

[mapler]

Fun fact: Professor Moriarty (the same one whose near hour long presentation is featured in the theater room) never learned while playing that after you click to begin a puzzle, you could let go of the mouse button while you solved the puzzle. He found this out from one of his students approximately two weeks after he had completed all known puzzles in the game.


This means that Professor Moriarty sat in front of his computer, holding down left click, listening to his own lecture for 56 minutes, in order to complete the last environmental puzzle.

[EvolvedDinosaur]

Legit for three fucking hours, I thought this game was a horror game in disguise. I was so terrified to go under the windmill. I swear to god, I heard footsteps that weren't mine around that area. I went down there ONCE, saw the octagonal puzzle, realized I didn't know what to do, and promptly ran out. Later, I found the one paper diagram near the first door in the game, and was so spooked to go back down to the mill. I was certain that I would finally see the monster of the island.
When I put in the puzzle solution, I let out an audible yelp as the video came on. Definitely wasn't what I expected to happen.
This feeling of unease stayed with me for a few more hours until I finally looked online when this beast would show up. Turns out I was just fucking stupid and the silence/serenity of the island was playing tricks on me.
I felt genuinely relieved after finding out there wasn't any monster, but a bit disappointed. I was hoping the whole island was a facade to hide some bigger secret. Turns out there was such a secret, just not what I was expecting...

[Joker]

"Communicating poorly then acting smug when misunderstood is not cleverness". This is a hard line to straddle for good puzzle games.

[shama]

The entire time I was playing the Witness I was thinking that if I ever saw another person there it would freak me out. I almost screamed when I saw the first statue person. I really like the eeriness of solitude in a big area in games.

[nddragoon]

i just realized, isn't super bunnyhop colorblind? the apple is red and the leaves are green so it's possible he literally couldn't see it

[kellergie]

I've never heard of this game, the developer, or seen this Youtuber before but this video showed up in my reccomended and it was so well put together that I watched the whole thing. And I just realized it's 3 years old lol

[ВладимирКоролёв-хм]

Title: "you shouldn't play this game"
First minute: "play the game before watching this"
...okay, I guess...

[ieuanhunt]

5:50 Super bunnyhop is also colour blind. Which probably made a lot of the environmental puzzles much more difficult

[Pegasus]

I literally found that weird secret ending from the beginning. What happened was that my bf told me about a cool puzzle game he was playing and he thought I’d like it. So the next time I went to his place I watched him play. He told me the concept with the pattern of the circle in the line. That’s when I noticed the sun as a circle and the line in the door. I told him and he was like what?! And then he did the line and we freaked out when the door opened. He was like “this is the end of the game and we haven’t even finished it!”. Nutty lol

[crashedwin]

It honestly sounds a lot to me like someone experiencing being controlled. Being given the illusion of choice, then being made to follow the path you are intended to follow. You stop trusting your environment. You stop trusting your own perspective. The only truly free choice you have is to walk away, but to do so is to accept loss, so you start to question everything. In the end you're just following somebody else's rules and playing their game, even when they arent there anymore and their rules don't apply. There is no reward. There is no feeling gratified. Just an empty feeling like you wasted your time. You can't quite regret it because parts of it were fun. You also can't celebrate it because you weren't given what you were promised. It's just... unsettling.

[blueblack]

It’s been three years since I played The Witness, and even now, rewatching this video, it makes me distrustful of circles. I can still feel the claustrophobia from finishing the game, flying free around the island, and then being shoved back in the tube where the whole ordeal started. On another note, there are also collectibles in Braid which take hours to reach, so I think it’s just something that Blow enjoys doing.

[GhostBeebo]

The only natural conclusion to this would be to make a 4 hour video on the looker, the spiritual successer to the witness, that improves upon many of its shortcomings and flaws, making it a nearly perfect game.

[Ealsante]

It's actually fascinating when Joe says all the sounds sound the same to him, and I wonder if it's because I speak a tonal language that I got it immediately. It's high-high-low-mid, and in the others, the relative pitch of the sound dictates the direction you should approach the point from (high tone means you move down to the point from above, mid means you move to the point from the sides, low means you move up to the point from below).

But yeah, it's because to me, in one of my languages, tone is absolutely crucial to deciphering meaning. If you don't come from that kind of habit, I can totally see how the sound part is a nightmare because it's all 'just chirping'.

[UnderageStrangeGames]

“I know this video is long...”

4 years later...
Witcher Part 1: >4 hours

[thatoneguy]

5:30. I had so much difficulty with this puzzle because I'm red-green colorblind. I literally did not know there was an apple until you just said it.

[SquareViking]

Seeing this after the 5+ hour long videos he puts out these days and hearing him call this one a long video is hilarious beyond explanation.

[FiksIIanzO]

It's really hard to make a subjective, argumentative video right. You're one of very few people on Youtube who gets it.
Making a person disagree with you, yet keep listening with genuine interest is a very, _very_ rare skill.

[java]

a 40 minute video with no ads in it, dude you're a madman. nice review tho

[EliTheGleason]

"I realize this video is a bit long, so if you need to take a break I'd recommend doing it now" 40 Min video

Years later:

"He guys it's me Lil Anders back again with a 3 hour God of War review"

[Zashmi]

I played this game with a small group of friends, and the town was one of our first locations we went to. We were, of course, very lost at how to complete almost all the puzzles. But I guess a lot of the parts that felt unintuitive was corrected by the fact that there were a few people paying attention to different things, we always had more than one perspective. We completed every panel puzzle in the town and it was the 2nd laser we activated, and we all found it really interesting and fun to work out the rules through trial and error rather than being taught it later in the tutorials that we had no idea existed. This could absolutely be a point of criticism, but for us it was fun and entertaining, we've all got really calculating brains, so to come up with rules based on what did and didn't flash red after we tried to complete a puzzle we had no idea how to solve was something we all enjoyed.