If you woke up and found yourself in a strange island and you're desperate to find your way home, you're going to need all the help you can get, especially if there are bizarre puzzles that you must solve in order to make it around. The Witness is a new game that delivers a whimsical island for us to explore and a curious, and nearly endless, series of puzzles for us to solve.
In fact, there are over 600 puzzles in The Witness. According to creator Jonathan Blow in an interview with PlayStation Blog, only about one percent of the people that play The Witness will be able to successfully solve every puzzle.
“There’s at least one puzzle in the game right now that almost nobody — like 1% of players — will ever be able to figure out,” said Blow.
As Shack News put it in its The Witness review, "The Witness turns out to be a completionist's dream and a nightmare for impatient players." However, that doesn't necessarily have to be true. There are already several The Witness guides and walkthroughs that will aid you when the puzzles begin to feel impossible. (Check out Games Radar for their work-in-progress The Witness walkthrough)
Essentially, the puzzles in The Witness can be broken down into two styles: Logic and Visual. The first type are tiles that require the player to solve puzzles such as drawing an unbroken line to the endpoint of a maze. The first type is also the one that yields a greater amount of guides and solutions.
Visual puzzles, or what I like call the second type, require the player to interact with their surroundings or to look around in order to identify clues and elements that will help them solve a puzzle tile. You could dig around Google and YouTube to find the specific solution to the visual puzzle that has you stumped, but if you'd rather not spoil the puzzle and savor the moment you managed to crack the puzzle yourself, then here are some super useful tips to help your journey through The Witness:
With visual puzzles, it's no secret that you must pay attention to your environment. Some puzzles will require you to look up at the trees or look down at the shadows to understand the context of the puzzle. Some puzzles will involve shifting in your surroundings to find clues from different perspectives. Being a foot off the mark will cause you to miss a pattern or element that can reveal a solution. However, some clues to a puzzles might even be located at a different part of an island. If that's the case, then be sure to take note of all the clues by taking screenshots to help remind yourself.
Knowing that a clue to a puzzle may be located elsewhere, do not let a puzzle haunt you to the point where you refuse to leave the puzzle until you magically pull a solution out of your ass. It'll never happen. Instead, move on and let your brain reset with a different problem to tackle. With some luck, solving a different puzzle triggers inspiration that will help you when you return to the evil puzzle that tormented you.
With more than 600 puzzles in the entire game, don't overlook puzzles that may be hidden. Some mazes in The Witness are hiding in plain sight and only reveals itself to you when you're standing and observing at just the right perspective. For example, the starting "circle icon" and ending "rounded edge" of a maze may appear among your surroundings and can be connected to form a path when you stand in the right perspective.
More brains are better than one, so invite your smart friend, or friends, over for a The Witness session. A fresh set of eyes, especially if those eyes have made it farther through the game, could give you some really insightful hints to help you move on.
Finally, try not to beat the game. I know this sounds counter-intuitive, but hear me out: You're going to want to make sure you have solved all 600+ puzzles and achieved 100% completion before beating the game. Unfortunately, you cannot beat the game and go back to the puzzles that you may have missed. If you do insist in solving every puzzle after beating the game, then you'll have to endure the agony of re-solving all the puzzles you thought you completed.
What is the most difficult puzzle that you've encountered on The Witness? Let us know in the comment section below:
