9/4/2023 0 Comments The witness puzzle rulesAs with Braid, where he crammed a straightforward narrative about memory and regret with allusions to quantum physics and the atomic bomb, The Witness references Einstein, the Buddha, Richard Feynman, romantic poetry, tech culture, game design, and - most of all - itself. Blow has an incredible talent, in fact, for constructing imagery that is hilariously blunt yet still ambiguous. Whatever theory you have as to what the game’s about, there will be no moment of clarification. Now you understand what the symbol means. You see a symbol you don’t recognize, or a shape you don’t know how to draw, and you try things out, you make assumptions, you fail repeatedly, and then something works, the panel lights up, and you know you got it right. Puzzles in The Witness are maze-drawing panels with increasing numbers of rules, all conveying their rules nonverbally, through gameplay. (If he could just tell you, he wouldn’t have spent eight years making it into a game, I suppose.) But this operates on completely opposite rules to the puzzles. He also never, ever wants to tell you what it is. Jon Blow wants you to trust he knows what he’s doing. The only thing this scene communicates for sure is that Jon Blow wants me to know he watches Tarkovsky. If it fails to communicate, maybe the problem is us. If we assume it’s about dedication, and we find a flaw in that worldview, maybe the problem is that we didn’t assume it was about meditation. ![]() ![]() There is little continuity between the thoughtless peace of meditation or Yankovsky’s emotional collapse and the game’s intended “aha” moments.īut the ambiguity, the contextlessness of the scene’s inclusion, means you can’t be sure whether it’s contradictory. It is not a game about clearing your mind, it’s about filling your mind up. Except, Nostalghia asks you to spend nine minutes thinking about one thing zen Buddhism encourages you to think of nothing The Witness asks you to spend between fifteen and forty hours thinking about a zillion things. Perhaps the scene is meant to draw parallels between the patience it encourages in its audience and the calm, meditative mode all The Witness’ allusions to Buddhism are seemingly on about, to give yourself over to the time investment the game demands of you. I was about five hours into The Witness when I found this clip - more than twice the duration of Nostalghia - and I still didn’t know why I was solving the game’s puzzles or what they were trying to communicate. Except, Yankovsky’s Andrei has a personal investment carrying this candle, one Tarkovsky has spent the entire film setting up. Perhaps the scene is meant to draw parallels between Yankovsky’s dedication to a task that is simple yet difficult and the game’s puzzles, built, as they are, around complexity-through-simplicity. That feeling might be ameliorated if he weren’t such a constituionally obtuse motherfucker. There’s a sequence in Indie Game: The Movie where Jon Blow expresses some pain about how his game Braid was received, how he felt no one who played it ever really understood everything he was trying to say with it. Jon Blow plays the clip in full with no commentary - or, rather, the game itself is the commentary. ![]() Kyle Kallgren cited it in discussing how YouTube makes critique of certain types of art difficult, and Content ID essentially decides for us what film as a medium is even for. Tony Zhou cited it in discussing lateral tracking shots, how they emphasize environment and create emotional distance from humans in the frame, and how Tarkovsky uses this to make the sequence lonely and arduous. How do we interpret this? I haven’t watched Nostalghia, but I know that scene. (I think it’s the entirety, I left before the clip was over yeah, Jon, I get it.) I guess one thing to know about The Witness is that you can watch the famous 9-minute tracking shot from Nostalghia - where Oleg Yankovsky tries to walk a candle from one end of a drained pool to the other without extinguishing it - in its entirety.
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