Why your reason for not wanting to play The Witness is wrong

The Witness is an amazing game, one that I handed a 10/10 score to in my review. It’s a game that has scored incredibly well pretty much across the many gaming publications you can read on the internet. Critics agree, then, that The Witness deserves your attention.

But the naysayers are already out in force. I’m not going to say you have to buy The Witness, but there are clearly a lot of people out there that don’t want to play Blow’s latest for reasons that I don’t think hold up. Here’s why your reason for not wanting to play The Witness is wrong.

Reason 1: I’m useless at maths and stuff so I’ll be rubbish at the puzzles

The Witness features lots and lots of puzzle panels where you have to draw a line from A to B, with that line meeting certain criteria. There is no maths outside of being able to picture how shapes can be rotated and slotted together – and even if you can’t picture that in your head, you could just draw it out on some paper (I did this numerous times, and even cut out shapes to play with).

The game does an excellent job at teaching you the rules without ever throwing a tutorial in your face, so if you don’t understand what a symbol means, you probably need to find the area that teaches you what it means.

Reason 2: It looks like someone doing a Sudoku on the Tube

Firstly, The Witness isn’t a series of Sudoku puzzles. Secondly, it does have similarities, in that the puzzles are rule based. Follow the rules and you’ll succeed, eventually, but the rules are many and varied, and The Witness is only like a newspaper puzzle if to solve it you have to spin the paper around, lean out the train window and close one eye. The Witness is not simply a game of puzzles, even though it is a game about puzzles.

Reason 3: You just draw lines and that’s obviously boring

You do draw lines a lot. So if you really have a problem with drawing lines, you might hate The Witness. But that’s assuming that drawing lines is boring, when in fact it’s not. Not only does the game change up the rules, but also how the puzzles are displayed. It messes with you to make the act of drawing lines, especially correct lines, hugely entertaining and rewarding. But yeah, there are lots of lines. And no guns. Or are there guns?

No, there aren’t any guns.

You can also explore a massive island that looks beautiful.

Reason 4: It doesn’t look like a video game

OK, so although puzzle games have been doing the rounds as video games for years and years, the modern gaming scene (at least on consoles) isn’t ripe with puzzlers. You could easily think, should you watch someone struggling with a puzzle for a few minutes, that The Witness is just a puzzle book presented on your PS4 or PC. The truth is that this is something that can only work as a video game. It does more with the medium than almost any other game I can think of. The interactivity and genius design make The Witness a unique and memorable experience.

And as I said above, the whole game is set on a massive, freely explorable island. That’s pretty video gamey.

Reason 5: I don’t like Braid, and this is by that man that made Braid

This is nothing like Braid. Stop comparing it to Braid. Braid is a game about a man jumping around and altering time and space and stuff. You didn’t draw a single line in Braid. And that’s pretty much your main task in The Witness: drawing really cool and clever lines.

Reason 6: It’s £30 and that’s too expensive for an ‘indie’ game

You’re right, The Witness is £30. And yes, that is on the high end of things for a game released exclusively on digital platforms. Games released this way tend to cost £10 to £20. Those games are rarely ever as good as The Witness, though, and I can’t think of any that are also packed with so much content. You’ll likely have hours of play left after taking 30+ hours to ‘finish’ it. Think of The Witness as a full-on AAA release (that could easily cost the same as anything from a big publisher) and you’re actually getting a bargain.

Reason 7: You can’t talk to anyone in The Witness

Well, I’m not going to confirm whether or not there are people in The Witness, but I will say that I talked to more real people over the course of my week playing The Witness than I normally do. Actual people, who aren’t inside video games. That’s probably better than talking to NPCs as real people are intelligent and can hold conversation.