This article was first published in the January 2016 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Players of developer Jonathan Blow's The Witness wander alone through a beautiful, deserted island. Explore, and you'll find panels depicting mazes.
By solving these mazes -- drawing a line between the start and end points -- the player activates the panel. Some of these start machines or open up new areas; others reveal more about the story of the island. And that's pretty much it. There are no instructions, only more and more puzzles of developing complexity.
"I became interested in the process of non-verbal communication and in developing a non-linguistic understanding of a situation," explains Blow. "What's exciting about games is that they can drop you into the actual thing, so you get experiential understanding."
Blow, 44, has become an influential spokesman for, and backer of, independent and experimental gaming since the runaway success of his 2009 platformer Braid. For The Witness, Blow's team at Thekla Inc -- the San Francisco Bay Area studio founded to make the game -- had to avoid repetition through around 650 panel-puzzles. They deliberately stripped down the interface, throwing out the item juggling and experimental clicking typical of adventure games. "There's a pattern that recurs a lot in this genre: a door that needs a key," says Blow. "But the keys in this game aren't physical -- they are always in your head."
Although The Witness has grown in ambition and size since its inception, the heart is unchanged: "At the core of the game is the desire to look at this process all of us have, of trying to understand the world," he says. "And of wondering what our place is in it."
The Witness will be available for PS4 from January 26
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
