Being very heavily story oriented seems to be a thing that a lot of games feel like they need to do. “We’ve sort of built this picture of what a video game is,” he says, “It involves certain things, and lately those things are stuff like congratulating you, and giving you a pat on the back or some kind of reward or some kind of story moment or something every time you do something, right? Or, you know, not giving you anything too hard, explicitly tutorialising things. It happens in your mind when you figure the things out.”īlow’s ideas on how his game is best played reflect his design philosophy, one that makes The Witness different from other video games and explains why he didn’t expect it to have such a broad appeal. “I’m like, ‘You’re not even playing the game right,’” he says, “‘You don’t understand what they’re about because people are poking you through the things and just giving you answers, so of course it’s not a good experience.’” He’s even less sympathetic to people who opt to watch somebody else play online: “You know, if you watch it being played on Twitch you don’t get the magic of the game at all, really, because the thing that makes the game good doesn’t happen on the screen. Though he insists he doesn’t want to stop people from playing how they want, he’s dismissive of those who seek help on forums and then complain that the puzzles are poorly designed. Those keen to extract a narrative can make their own interpretations, but for others, working out all of the different rules by which to solve the hundreds of puzzles will be satisfaction enough.Īnyone with £30 to spare can now find all this out for themselves, but Blow is still wary of spoilers. When Thekla released trailers for The Witness last year, some people imagined that those boring maze panels were secondary to something more mechanically or thematically complex – but actually drawing lines from point to point really is the only way to interact with anything on the beautiful, lifeless, Myst-inspired island on which the game is set. It’s gonna be totally secret until the game comes out.’ But then everybody thinks the game is about a bunch of boring maze panels or something, right?” “In fact I so much didn’t want them spoiled that I made what are potentially bad business decisions,” he says, “In the sense of, like, ‘I don’t wanna talk about the stuff that makes the game super interesting. Of course, some of that misunderstanding comes from a relatively unusual level of restraint in the PR for the game, because of certain “big secrets” Blow didn’t want spoiled. “I don’t wish to complain about the way it was reviewed,” he says, “I mean, we got really good reviews, so why would I? It’s just weird when people are saying all these things about the game authoritatively and you’re like, ‘I know a lot of you guys don’t even know what the game’s about yet.’” He’s choosing to take it as a good sign, however, that, even though The Witness is deliberately obtuse for the first few hours, it is apparently interesting from the start – especially because only about a third of those reviewing it on PS4 even got to what he calls the “nominal ending”. “I of course think it’s a very involved and sophisticated game with a lot of interesting things in it,” he says, “I didn’t expect that to be as universally seen as it is, especially early on.” He was also surprised by the near-unanimous positive response to The Witness, a demanding and enigmatic puzzle game, set on an uninhabited island filled with mazes. There often seems to be a gap between Blow’s expectations of his audience and reality. “I’ve seen things on Twitter where people started lecturing about how indies need to have more responsibility and work-life balance, and I’m like, ‘What?’” It wasn’t really a bottle of pee and he hadn’t really been working too hard to get to the toilet. “If anything, indie developers have the opposite problem of not getting things done, actually,” he says, “They just goof off too much.” So when, four days before the game’s release, he tweeted a photo of a bottle of straw-coloured liquid with a tube through the lid captioned ‘Here is another thing I helped make, to help finish The Witness’, he was shocked at how many people didn’t get the joke. While Blow acknowledges that indie development is difficult, he doesn’t think that translates to the same kind of taxing work you can expect at some AAA studios where tales of endless “crunch” periods are common and depressing.
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