Pixelhunter – Witness the Fitness

First an anecdote. I’ve recently started playing The Secret Files: Tunguska, which is admittedly a few years old now. The game is a conspiracy theory in the Broken Sword mould based around the mysterious explosion in Serbia in 1908, referred to as the Tunguska event. The player character is the daughter of a professor studying the incident, who seems to have been kidnapped (judging from the mess in his office at least). Fortunately he’s had the presence of mind to leave a clue to his whereabouts (although the state of mind he was in at the time might be questionable when you find out what the clue entails). The method: first you need to find a crown mentioned in a riddle left by your father. Now you have to replace three missing gems with random pieces of glass that you’ve gleaned from other convoluted puzzles. Now you can place that crown on a light in the museum so it can throw a beam clear across the room onto a fire escape map, highlighting a room marked with invisible ink.

Now point and click adventures are renowned for their logic defying combinations, but this seemed particularly obscure in the context of a game that at least tries to project a serious tone. How did the professor come up with such a crazy idea or manage to predict that this would work with such a jury-rigged object? What if the construction workers currently renovating the museum had taken down the sign? Wouldn’t there be an easier way to leave a clue, especially if it’s vital that it’s found (let’s face it, the protagonist of this game isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed)?

Now let’s look at an alternative approach. The Witness by Jonathan Blow, the celebrated indie developer of Braid and outspoken commentator on the artistry of games, is an adventure game in which the player explores a mysterious island in the first person and solves puzzles. This description makes it sound very close to the classic break out adventure game Myst, and indeed Blow has referenced this game as an inspiration of sorts, although the gorgeous bright and bold aesthetic couldn’t be further from the look of its progenitor. In some respects The Witness may be Blow’s meditation on the graphic adventure genre (just as Braid commented upon and subverted the platformer genre).

In an interview on the Brainy Gamer podcast back in August 2011 Blow indentified two fundamental problems he sees with the graphic adventure genre. Firstly he believes they have no core gameplay, in the sense that there’s no sense of development in terms of mechanics. He says “for the most part graphic and text adventures are a bunch of puzzles that don’t have that much to do with each other… the thing that ties them together is the fiction.” Secondly he identifies that most adventure games boil down to clicking between hotspots and items until you find the right combination.

What Blow is trying to achieve in The Witness is an adventure game with systemic puzzles that operate based on player experience rather than on a key you may or may not be carrying in your inventory (in fact there is no inventory). The puzzles in the Witness are set in panels, all of which require the player to trace a line in a specific way. “There’s no ambiguity in how to solve it… you just need to go into interact mode and draw the proper line. The great variety of the gameplay comes from knowing what line to draw.”  Whether this stripped back and very different approach to the genre turns out to be repetitive and over simplistic or a revelation remains to be seen, but it will certainly be a refreshing alternative to some of the more confounding leaps in logic as demonstrated by the Tunguska example above.