I punched the air with a fervour that I had long forgotten. It was not the first time that day either. It has become commonplace on my 'journey' through The Witness. I am not quite halfway through this walk yet it has become the most fulfilling piece of gaming that I have experienced in years. Yet I am left scratching my head as to how this came to be.

The Witness is such an oddity. At its core, it is a game about drawing a line from one side of a grid to the other. The path you should take is determined by a set of arbitrary clues built around your senses. Before its release I ridiculed the notion that it could be anything other than a disaster, a tribute to one man's self indulgence.

I'm an idiot.

Now I am left to ponder what makes Jonathan Blow's latest game a masterpiece where Braid fell short. The answers to the question may be found in the bits that I cannot talk about. The puzzles in The Witness empower the player to beat the odds. Every panel you encounter is faced with the possibility that it could be your last. The last puzzle before you have to talk about it. In a move akin to admitting to your parents that even though you moved out 14 years ago, you need to borrow money to pay for baked beans. I am rambling but the moment that you have to reach out for help is the moment that the game has beaten you. Even among my closest friends we talk about the game in the vaguest of tones and the lightest of brushstrokes. Details are never discussed other than to refer to areas such as 'The Church' or 'The Courtyard'. Hints are forbidden, even though it has never been expressed directly.

Therein lies the game's biggest card. While playing the game, you are locked in isolation, cut off from the outside world. The game is a prison. This makes it completely different from every other game of the past few years. In a world awash with media, people have treated it with reverence and respect. I have not heard one utterance of how to solve a puzzle, how the language of the game translates its visual cues into solutions or how the game makes you believe you are the smartest person alive. It is probably no coincidence then that the player base are smart about how they evangelise the game. In a world where less is often more, the beauty and majesty are found by saying nothing at all.

"the game makes you believe you are the smartest person alive"

That's funny considering what his design principle was for the game 5 years ago :P. But I think he was talking about games that don't challenge the player enough.

@assinass: it's also why many can't warm to Mr Blow. A man of contradictions. Hell of a game designer though.

Isn't there a difference between a game making you feel smart as opposed to a game acknowledging that you are smart?

There's no contradiction here. The Witness isn't designed to just make you feel smart. It's designed to make you actually be smart, to force you to actually make those connections on your own through your logic and intuition. When you do something smart to solve a puzzle, you should feel smart. But the comparison Jon Blow was drawing in that talk was to games that don't actually make you do the smart thing, they just give you the smart feelings.

The Witness makes you earn the privilege to feel smart by actually being smart. That's why it has so few moments of guidance. That's why some people bounce off of it. We're not used to video games with high production values demanding this much of us.

Totally agreed. I had so many a-ha moments that felt genuine compared to any other puzzle game in the last few years.

Also while some seem to almost resent the underlying principle behind the game, even as an "artist" I tend to appreciate what is being said - that is, from everything I've heard thus far, including that one room you unlock underneath the town that has a lengthy recording talking about science and art.