So I started the Witness last night and flew through about 30 panels, before hitting a brick wall of failure. I more or less find myself just freely roaming the island and attempting puzzles as I find them before realizing that I have no clue what I'm doing. So I'm curious, is this just the way it goes? Do I need to just keep at it before figuring it out, should I stay close to the starting area for a while?

I guess I'm just confused about whether I jumped the gun a bit, or I really do just have to experiment to learn the rules. Thanks for any help!

@thenewgameplusdotcom: You don't need to stay in the starting area. There are pretty obvious sequences of tutorial puzzles to introduce a new mechanic, usually one new mechanic per area. If you're having trouble, there are some puzzles that don't have obvious new mechanics but still have some kind of trick to solve them, usually in the environment. Just keep looking for mechanic tutorials, no use in banging your head against a puzzle that you don't have the knowledge to solve.

So I think the best place to start is what seems the most natural, the area right next to those first two rows of tutorial panels that you find when you follow the path from the start. The little area with the vases on pedestals is the start point for them.

The path to that probably should have been a bit more direct from those tutorial panels with the dots and the black and white squares, honestly.

From there I basically did just bounce around the island. taking swipes at panels as they showed up until I hit a roadblock, then bouncing again and returning to the roadblock later.

A couple of the areas are fully self contained, but many of them require some level of understanding of rulesets from other areas.

The island is pretty small and easy to navigate actually, so don't be afraid of straying too far from the starting area. It's easy enough to return to.

I would say for each area there is kind of a starting puzzle. Especially with rows of panels where you have to solve one puzzle before the second one can activate. There are some random puzzles that combine multiple elements (let's say Mechanics A and C) and it is easier to tackle those if you have already solved puzzles only focused on the individual A and C mechanics.

I would say keep wandering around until you reach an area you feel like tackling. I'm not sure how many people have ran into this problem, but I will say the key to proceeding in The Witness is knowing how a puzzle was solved instead of the solution. One individual answer on a puzzle you are stuck on won't be as useful as you figuring out the answer yourself. So I would focus on an area where you can start to do that. If you don't know what to do where you are currently located, move along.

This is absolutely correct. I had to walk away from an area with puzzles that I was successfully solving but not that I didn't know WHY the solutions worked.

That happened to me a little bit. Without getting into specifics, I solved like four puzzles easily without trying. By the time I got to the fifth puzzle which was more complicated, I walked backwards, looked at all of the previous puzzles and thought "Ok. One solution by itself doesn't mean anything. What do these four individual puzzles have in common, and how can I apply that to this upcoming puzzle? Was my initial impression of how I solved those puzzles correct, or is there more going on with this area?" It was actually kind of a cool moment.

My piece of advice is simple, stay focused on the panels I am still earlier on and I got sidetracked by things that were "Not Panels" and it made me totally miss the point of the puzzles in that area because I was thinking it had something to do with the Panels, if you feel like the road your going to down is super complex, your probably barking up the wrong tree.

Solve the puzzles to leave the starting area, do the tutorials seen in the QL, do the puzzles through the red wooden Japanese gate that heads out towards the red trees on the bluffs, and then do the desert 'temple' right next to that. If you complete all those puzzles (or at least can solve enough puzzles to make it down beneath the desert 'temple'), you should have the knowledge you need about how puzzles CAN work in order to make sense of most areas on the island.

The desert temple in particular was very helpful in showing two important methods with which you can interact with the puzzles: the way the environment interacts with the puzzles, and the way that the environment can contain puzzles.

From there, I went off and did whatever I want, and as long as I was working in order through an area, I have never felt like I needed to come back once I learned a new thing somewhere else. The only time I feel like I don't have enough knowledge from several different areas is with some of the puzzles/doors that are explicitly not connected to specific areas.

This is interesting advice, but I would caution people against trying to pass this as some kind of standard starting kit to The Witness. I followed the path up to the bluffs, but after that I briefly checked out the desert, didn't figure it out, and moved on before even completing a single puzzle. I only finished the desert many hours later, with knowledge from other areas of the different ways puzzles could be solved and a big helping of just feeling like dubbing around until I understood it. If I'd tried to bang my head against the desert until I was done I would have had a bad time. I think The Witness benefits greatly from always giving yourself the freedom to walk away from a set of puzzles without feeling like a failure and without feeling like you've missed anything.

Thematically speaking, I think that's one of the most powerful things about The Witness, and it plays into one of my favorite pieces of quoted material from the game (some of you will know what I'm talking about): At a very low, panel-to-panel level, there are rarely more than a few correct paths that solve a given puzzle. But when considered in aggregate, there is no wrong (and by extension no single right) path through the island. Which end of that spectrum holds the key to what The Witness is as an experience? I (and a certain quoted individual) would argue that it's neither end--it's all about the connection between the two.

@bvilleneuve:I agree, what I recommended is not a walkthrough or the correct path. He's asking for explicit direction, though, so this is the direction I would give. Saying "Go do whatever in whatever order you want" is to ignore his original problem, which is that he did exactly that and now he feels stuck against "a brick wall of failure".

If there's one thing I have learned from reading dozens of reactions to The Witness, it's that some people absolutely love how little direction it gives (me, and maybe you), and some are baffled by (or even fucking hate) it. If someone wants direction, that's the direction I'd give them, as that is what I did and I never felt stuck, while consistently those who say that the game needs to guide them more or that they don't understand where they are supposed to find puzzles they can do are the ones who wandered to some other part of the island as soon as they left the opening area.

@kcin: You're right, now that you mention it I did only go up to the bluffs by deciding I'd start the game by searching out and following every single visual cue offered. I learned some really interesting things by doing it that way, and I think I would actually recommend that anybody starting The Witness from nothing should do that.

In fact, I'd even recommend anybody who didn't consciously notice the little guiding cues at the start of the game should go back and try to see them. There's some cool stuff. Like, for instance, the very clear divide in the right outside of the starting castle, which is almost absurdly tightly-designed to encourage you toward the left path where you'll learn that sometimes you just won't be ready to solve a puzzle yet, and to get you used to backtracking. And the way the path leads directly down a very inviting little divide in the rock, with a beautiful sense of perspective that just makes you want to go through it and see what's on the other side. And the way, after you finish the bluffs, there are several very clearly delineated paths that will all take you in a different direction. And the way that the game's visuals actually subtly divide back before the mirror puzzles, if you're the type of person who really likes the color pink and who might subconsciously want to go a little off the beaten path. And the way that we obvious path followers who finish our first linear set of logic puzzles are given a shooty laser as a reward, while people who go off the path and solve a set of perspective/perception-based puzzles are given nothing but a beautiful view of the village area.

Basically I've been having a bunch of fun close-reading The Witness's design.

@bvilleneuve: These are all great points, and all form a cohesive and sound argument against the common assertion that the game offers no real guidance. I feel like I didn't have trouble early on because the game's world design functions well enough in the early game to direct me towards the areas I "should" do first.

If you choose to believe the world is laid out with intentional order, the path, hazy though it may be, is there, until you've learned enough that you don't actually need it anymore.

@kcin: Right. The beginning of The Witness is there to teach anyone who's seeking to learn that what at first appears to be a jumble of visual and auditory information can actually, with the right openness to the signs and signals, be sorted into useful communication. Which in a way means from the very start The Witness is always teaching you that as an environmental lesson and as a logical lesson, often at the very same time. Which really underlines how thematically consistent (and amazing!) this game is.

For a long time, Half-Life 2 was my gold standard demonstration of this kind of subtly guiding design. The Witness has completely replaced it.