User blog:Raylan13/Interviews and resources



Here is a collection of interviews, resources, and reviews from those lucky enough to play early releases of the game:

Reviews

 * Kotaku, September 2010
 * The pace of the game seems to be that of a gradual dawning. You stroll in first-person view. You look at beautiful or intriguing things – a windmill in the distance, a figure that look like a man or a statue of one – and you approach. There appears, in so many places, puzzling things. You ponder them. You try to solve them.


 * Joystiq, August 2011
 * As I explored, the concept of "just line puzzles" expanded enormously. While blue panels with line puzzles are as deep as the puzzles go, the ways in which you solve said puzzles changes dramatically from area to area.


 * GameSpot
 * ...each area, from the dry stony ruins to well-manicured trees, has a distinct feel...the puzzles are extremely well designed, forcing you to think outside the box at times. 


 * IGN
 * You're never told what role the dots have in the puzzle, you just have to figure it out by experimentation. The Witness is full of moments like this, and makes the act of walking around and thinking as engaging as other first-persongames do by giving me a gun to shoot at enemies.


 * 1Up
 * ...many games start big and then repeat the same mechanics over the course of the game, give or take, but The Witness starts very small then continually adds new layers for the rest of the game.


 * GamesRadar
 * Now realizing that nothing in The Witness is a coincidence, I peer through the puzzle, trace the outlines of the distant pillars on the surface of the square... Leaves, shadows, sunlight… any of these could hold the key to a puzzle in The Witness.


 * Giant Bomb
 * the expectation that all of the information you need to solve a specific panel would be contained within that panel is something that The Witness plays with liberally. Suffice it to say, The Witness rewards a limber mind, and the game preys on the psyche's tendency to focus on what's in front of it, though it always puts the solution in plain sight--you just have to know what to look for.


 * Time Techland
 * All the memory retention and pattern recognition exercise gestures are a deeper truth of how we move through the world and what we choose to see and not to see, especially with regard to how parts of our lives interconnect. Jonathan Blow is making a fable about perception; one that’s going to change how you look at video games all over again.


 * Rock, Paper, Shotgun
 * This is a game about working your mind hard, becoming aware of the world around you and coming to appreciate it how it can be integrated with puzzles about sound, shadows, texture, mathematics, location, light and memory, never knowing what’s going to be relevant to the next puzzle.


 * G4
 * The Witness is one of the most challenging games to accurately describe without missing everything that it is about. This is mostly because it is a game at its purest form, about the player’s true sense of discovery, and that is rare in games these days.

Interviews

 * Gamasutra
 * Giant Bomb
 * IFC
 * GamesRadar
 * OXM
 * Rock, Paper, Shotgun
 * Eurogamer
 * Game Informer on architecture

Resources

 * Official blog