The island of The Witness is a serene place, with peaceful streams and lush forests. You view the world from a first-person perspective, and you start out the game in some sort of underground room. Immediately you're confronted by a simple maze puzzle on a brightly lit panel. You have to guide a line through a basic path, and solving it opens up a door to the rest of the island. There are many more panels scattered throughout the island. You're given no instructions whatsoever, and there are no on-screen indicators to guide you. Instead, the panels serve as your primary form of interaction, and as you solve them, you learn more about how things work and how you can manipulate your surroundings. Eventually the panels can be used to operate machinery, for instance, letting you open shutters in a room or move a ramp so you can reach a high ledge.

"Doing good puzzles is the absolute primary thing."

For Blow, who previously developed the time-bending platformer hit Braid, those puzzles are the core of the experience. "Doing good puzzles is the absolute primary thing," he says, "and we build the world around that." While I didn't get a chance to experience this during my hour with the game, Blow says that the environment itself will provide many of the hints you need to solve those puzzles. The color of a plant or the layout of a building could well be the key to completing one of the panels. "In the tutorial the environment is incidental," Blow explains. "But as you go further and further out into the world, the environment starts to matter more. So by the time you get to the end of the game you're looking at everything around you."

This also means that The Witness takes place in a very dense world. The island isn't necessarily big — I watched Blow sprint from one end to the other in around a minute — but it is filled with important details. At one point I walked over a small bridge and Blow mentioned how he had been meaning to change it, and that he constantly notices things that need to be adjusted and tweaked to improve the experience.