On a recent Sunday, I took an elevator to the 11th floor of a high-rise in the Flatiron District to help video-game designer Jonathan Blow open a door. It was a big, sturdy thing made of wood and wrought iron—the kind you might find in a Scottish castle. Except it was missing a keyhole. “How do you think we get in?” Blow asked me, even though he already knew. There was a small digital panel with an inlaid “S” shape just visible to the right of the door. I pointed to it, trying to look unfazed. Blow clicked his mouse on the panel and, holding down the left button, began to trace the shape on the screen. The panel lit up, and the door clicked open.

Blow, a slim 42-year-old with a shaved head and glasses, has often spoken about the need for video games to leave the world of cheap thrills behind and grapple with more complex ideas. “It’s kind of like if every movie were a porn movie, most people wouldn’t see movies,” he told me. “The majority of games are basically porn—the onus is on us to make more things that are worth a reasonable person’s time.”

Blow’s landmark game, 2008’s Braid, was an example of that alternative—a game of puzzles, inflected with time travel, that took inspiration from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and contained references to J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. It was also a rarity as an independently produced game: Blow made and published Braid himself, investing $200,000 of his money into its development. The game was an enormous success, making Blow a multimillionaire and allowing him to spend five years on his imminent follow-up: The Witness.

The Witness is set on a deserted island. It’s a single-player experience. There are no other characters, no scripted story line, and no boss to defeat. You simply wander around and solve puzzles of varying difficulty. It’s easy, at first: tracing simple shapes on panels or solving mazes, kind of like your first-grade math homework. But it gets harder. Puzzles begin to borrow from one another. There are elements of spatial reasoning and lateral thinking. In one puzzle, players are asked to visualize the position of a single apple hanging from the branches of a tree while standing in front of the tree, then to its left and right. There’s little need for trial and error: if you look carefully, each puzzle can be solved using knowledge gained from previous puzzles.

Blow says the majority of contemporary puzzle games don’t really challenge players, instead presenting them with “empty puzzles.” “A lot of games today are only interested in making players feel smart, rather than have players actually be smart. A game that is just trying to make you feel smart all the time runs the danger of being like a Potemkin village: you may feel like you've had this sequence of cool experiences, but when you look at them more closely, you find that most of them are empty. I feel like ‘try to make players feel smart’ is a shallow motivation and I hold some kind of mild contempt for it. Rather than making some relatively surface experience where people feel smart—the implication being that they’re not actually that smart, we’re just helping them feel that way—game designers should believe that people are intrinsically smart and give them a chance to exercise those muscles and become better at it.”