Trailer: The Witness

By: Derek Yu

On: February 20th, 2013

This is the first official trailer for The Witness, a first-person puzzle game by Jonathan Blow and his new team. It was shown today at a Sony press event where they unveiled the PS4, the only console that the game will launch on. The other two launch platforms for The Witness are PC and iOS.

Posted in iPad, Previews, PS4, Puzzle, Videos, Windows

http://twitter.com/MuhammadAMoniem Muhammad A.Moniem

Ooooh, the long waited game, finally have a trailer :)
http://twitter.com/Data01 Dan Tabár

wow, better looking than i expected! the Myst experience i’ve been nostalgic for
Anonymous

Nothing says ‘indie’ quite like being a timed exclusive shown off at the launch keynote of a major new console.
Learn What Words Mean

Other than maybe being designed by one person. And made with an engine coded from scratch by that person. And funded by that person. With the money made by that one person’s last game. Which was also made from scratch.

Excellent attempt at a snide comment though! Pretty impressive creative output you’ve got there.
Anonymous

Why thank you! It was the first thought that occurred to me, and without any refinement or filtration, it seems to have struck quite a sensitive nerve.
tilde

Indeed Blow is not to be considered “indie” anymore (not as he was when he crated/published braid), but yeah, the spirit is the same, and it’s ok for me.
David Sondermann

What about Mac?
Anonymous

Why did I buy this stupid Mac?
Antymattar

This looks surprisingly good.
PompiPompi

It looks beautiful.

However, all the scenes look static, nothing moves in them much. I guess most of the lighting are pre baked. And when objects with baked lighting were moving it looked wrong.

And the one place where I noticed dynamic shadows they looked really bad. There is no real technical reason to put this on Playstation 4. Playstation 3 could have easily handled this.

It still look good artistically, and it wouldn’t really bother me. It would probably only bother people that complain about things like lightings look wrong ong Path of Exile.
Atrus_

Hell yes, the worthy myst-like experience is here!
Arucard

I’m guessing the reason for PS4 is it will probably have a tablet controller like the Wii-U. They decided to (try to) bank off the motion sensitivity of the Wii, why change now? All the little puzzle things look made for that touch screen idea at least, but from the full island shot, it seems like the game might be pretty short. Aside from that, the early teaser interested me so I hope this turns out to be fun.
nikki

looking gorgeous !
I suspect the gameplay to be a bit boring though

but great looking, a true console game that is
anonymous

This is just Proteus ripoff by some hack “indie developer.” Why on Earth would they show this junk at the PS4 conference?
eigenbom

I’ve been looking forward to this for a while, but this trailer sucks and makes the game look uber boring. The visuals are great, but I hope the game design is better than it looks.

The other annoying thing is the bridge that turns around to connect up with a platform, that is obviously within jumping distance. Cmon, don’t put invisible boundaries around the place! :/
http://twitter.com/gabrielverdon Gabriel Verdon

There is actually a technical reason to put this on PS4 – the PS4 uses x86 architecture (unlike the PS3 which uses the notoriously difficult to program Cell processor). For a small studio, dealing with the complications of porting over a game developed on the PC to a system with entirely different architecture would probably be unfeasible, at least during the release window. Porting to the PS4 from PC is apparently very easy.

But if you had actually spent some time reading about it, you would probably already know that! But alas, TIGSource front page commenters.
http://twitter.com/gabrielverdon Gabriel Verdon

I get the sense that most of the interesting parts of the game happen in your head, as you get a better understanding of what the puzzles mean and how they connect together, so making a compelling trailer is probably pretty difficult.
pompi

I guess when you are someone as Blow you don’t care to make the extra effort so more than 20% of the gamers will have sufficient hardware to run his game.
http://twitter.com/gabrielverdon Gabriel Verdon

Now you’re just being stupid!
Gnurf

it looks beautiful, but the gameplay … seems like just a memory game. have they revealed more gameplay information than the trailer ?
http://twitter.com/droqen /’dɹɑkɪn/

“Memory game” seems like the wrong term; the small drawing maps appear to be highly simple puzzles but solving them has nothing to do with memory. It seems to me as though a few points in the trailer also give away that, depending on the way a puzzle is solved, a different thing will result (see the part where the reflector dish is positioned).

I have no idea what the game’s actually like, of course; I’m just making some observations & guesses.
Gnurf

Actually I deduced that it could only be memory, because the “labyrinths” look so simplistic, that only having to remember plans seen on other parts of the map could make it challenging. But knowing it’s from the Braid guy, I still hope for a surprise :)
Josh

If you read his blog for the game he explains that the puzzles work in an incremental fashion, so you start with some really easy ones (like in the trailer) and then as the game progresses the ‘rules’ neccessary to solve the puzzles become more challenging (I think in the trailer the player makes a mistake at one point even though it looks like it should be correct) but hopefully by the end of the game you won’t know why you understand how the puzzles work, but you will instinctively know. In other words I don’t think they’re memory puzzles :) I can’t wait for this!
News

theme was lost in the myst
R. Jones

It looks really clever. I like the way the puzzles are completely distinct from the adventuring, and the island’s looking quite nice.