The Looker

The Witness is a first-person puzzle video game. The player, as an unnamed character, emerges from an underground bunker and explores an island with numerous structures and natural formations. The island is roughly divided into eleven regions, arranged around a mountain that represents the ultimate goal for the player. g.

their solutions may all involve symmetry). Throughout the island are yellow boxes housing turrets. These can be activated once the puzzles within the box's region have been solved. When activated, the turrets emerge to shine a light toward the top of the mountain, indicating that a section is complete.

The Witness was envisioned after Jonathan Blow released Braid. After seeing the title become a success in 2008, Blow took time off from "serious development" to prototype new game concepts, spending a few months on each. The concept that proved to be the basis for The Witness was a prototype that Blow considered to be "very ambitious and challenging". He considered it risky as it would include the development of a 3D gameplay engine, and feared that he would "fall back to square one"—referring to his lifestyle before the success of Braid—should it fail.

Despite these challenges, Blow continued to go forward with The Witness as it was also the most compelling prototypes he had crafted. Direct development work on the title began in late 2008.

The Witness received "generally favorable reviews" on all platforms, according to the review aggregator website Metacritic.

Chloi Rad of IGN awarded the game a perfect score of 10/10, calling it a masterpiece and stating that it was "[a] beautiful, powerful, and cleverly designed puzzle game with a wealth of mysteries to unravel." Brenna Hillier from VG247 praised the game's use of a first-person perspective to present what otherwise could have been a simple series of puzzle boards, and was impressed by the steep learning curve that the puzzles presented, "impossible, incomprehensible puzzles melt into simple exercises after you’ve visited nearby locations". Aaron Riccio of Slant Magazine found that there was a "jarring shift" once the player reached the puzzles inside the mountain, with puzzles that relied more on obfuscation in a more clinical environment, contrasting with the rest of the island.

The Witness is widely regarded as one of the best games of the 2010s. The game appeared on 'Best of the decade' features from IGN, Polygon, NME, CNET, and National Post. Edge considered the game the 22nd-best game of all time in 2017, and IGN ranked it the 59th-best in 2022.

The Witness inspired the parody video game The Looker by Subcreation Studio, released in 2022.