See here for an image of the Ernst Mach self-portrait and more info about Douglass Harding’s sense of “headlessness”.Ĥ2:20 – Extra-spoilery discussion of the castle’s laser-gate, including a relevant audio log.ĥ0:15 – An environmental puzzle is a joke about looking top-down into the castle!! And an audio log referencing Buddhist mythology.ĥ7:40 – Talking about the game’s attitude towards completionist players, and Einstein’s “society of true searchers”. Even if you normally don’t mind plot spoilers, The Witness is quite different – this is something that you really want to experience firsthand.įor this first episode only, I’m taking a no-spoilers approach, examining how The Witness guides the experience of a new player during the introductory part of the game, starting in the castle garden and then into the tutorial puzzle-sequences in the agricultural area.ġ0:00 – In-depth commentary on the James Burke theater video, where The Witness reveals a key part of the motivation behind the creation of the game.ģ0:15 – Returning to the underground tunnel to discuss one of the game’s most beautiful and profound puzzles, which symbolizes the core theme of first-person-conscious-awareness versus third-person-scientific-knowledge. If you haven’t played the game but someday intend to, stick to just my first, spoiler-free episode. Spoiler warning! The Witness famously has a huge, very unique suprise that is easy to spoil.
Since the resulting videos are long and only semi-structured, I’ve included “highlights” in each video description, which take you right to the most interesting stuff I have to say. With my longplay video series, “Examining The Witness”, I aim to dig deep into the interplay of ideas that weaves through each area’s puzzle design, audio logs, art, etc, examining all the ways that The Witness communicates and reinforces its complex heirarchy of related ideas. Journalist’s articles briefly gesture towards a simple, sweeping thesis for what the entire game “means”, while most fan content has focused primarily on esoteric late-game secrets and easter eggs. I’m an avid collector of fan theories, essays, videos, etc, but a lot of other analysis stays at a fairly shallow level. While The Witness is highly critically acclaimed, it seems to me that the game is often quite poorly understood. (If you’ve read Godel, Escher, Bach, it’s a bit like that, except as an immersive explorable museum.) But it might be fair to say that at its core, The Witness is about how humans obtain/assemble knowledge about the world, and about the relationship between first-person conscious experience and the objective physical world described by scientific law.
The witness environmental puzzles free#
This is a game composed of thousands of interconnected ideas – it’s a game about sensory perception, game design, free will, meditation, the project of civilization, the art of rationality, and more. The game is widely acclaimed for those qualities, but the most unique and entrancing thing about The Witness is the way it communicates complex philosophical themes.
The witness environmental puzzles full#
It’s a 3D, first-person exploration game set on a beautiful island full of fascinating, delightful puzzles about geometry, perception, color, and symmetry. The Witness is certainly my favorite videogame, perhaps my all-time favorite piece of media.
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