I’m stranded on an island, and everywhere I look, I see its creator—a 43-year-old man named Jonathan Blow.

To clarify, he’s not hanging around this island, and there's no Jimmy Buffett-like resort plastered with his branding. Also, this place is a virtual island, which I’m walking through by way of a gamepad hooked up to a PC. It makes up the entirety of a video game called The Witness.

In some ways, I see Blow damn-near literally. This sunny, tree-filled place has been populated with sculptures. They’re largely vague and unexplained, with no plaques or tour guides to clarify their purpose. Abstract as they are, they look pained and personal—and at least one of them looks like Blow himself.























But most of the island isn't this specific or clear. The place is full of noise, but mostly natural or ambient stuff like wind blowing over the ocean, rustling branches, or the whirring of underground machines. It's full of memorable, grandiose constructions, particularly its intricately crafted buildings and giant natural formations. Nothing sentient is alive here, and smaller human touches are rare—so much so that stumbling upon a place setting for tea or a tiny, man-made model of a house looks freakish. The longer I'm on the island, the more I feel like this attention to detail also reflects Blow.

Quite frankly, all the high-horse adjectives I have attached to the island—arresting, thoughtful, occasionally revelatory—might as well describe the 43-year-old game developer. The one word I wouldn't dream of attaching to The Witness, however, is "fun."

When Blow and I met in person at a San Francisco coffee shop in September, near both his home in the city and the office for his development company Thekla, I’d been exploring his island for a few weeks—and, really, I’d been thinking about his island for years. You may not know Jonathan Blow by name or face (or island), but the video game designer left an indelible mark on the industry in 2008 with the launch of his first self-produced game: Braid.

Braid was, for all intents and purposes, the video game world’s Pet Sounds—an out-of-nowhere combination of accessible, familiar elements, trippy gameplay twists, and surprising heart that changed how people make, talk about, and consume the medium. In some ways, the August 2008 game was just a “Mario who can rewind time” take on platforming, but it proved to be so much more. Braid landed in the hands of far more gamers than any other so-called “experimental” or “indie” game before it, thanks to both critical acclaim and its prominent placement in Xbox Live Arcade's first Summer of Arcade promotion. (Remember, digital game downloads were still nascent to the console mainstream in 2008; Apple's App Store had only launched one month prior.)

As a result, The Witness isn’t just the hotly anticipated follow-up to one of console gaming's first indie hits. It’s also the island on which Jonathan Blow has resided ever since 2008. This on-and-off-but-mostly-on project—which pop-music fans could easily compare to Pet Sounds’ notorious follow-up, SMiLE—carries with it a similar tale filled with things like ambition, delay, and outright weirdness.

I suspected this place was autobiographical well before Blow told me so. The sculptures look like shadows of his memory. And then there are the buildings, the mysteries, the personal objects scattered around an otherwise empty, lonely place. If this man is his island, then Blow is one of the coldest, most solemn, and most calculated men in the gaming industry.

Also, he, like The Witness, is a puzzle. A really, really difficult puzzle.

"It's OK for people to get stuck"

I've been sent a copy of The Witness—which Blow assures me is "nearly complete," save some work on placeholder sounds and 3D models, along with a few more final touches on ending scenes—as part of a PR push that finally includes a confirmed release date. The Witness will launch on Windows PC and PlayStation 4 on January 26, 2016.

But the reason might also be because I’m among those games writers who’ve been paying attention to The Witness ever since it started poking its head out publicly, all the way back in August 2010. That's when Blow used an unmarked PAX Prime table to give the game its public debut without even advertising its name. I kicked myself for a while after walking by that unremarkable PAX table, but I got another shot the very next year. That's when Blow invited me to sit on a couch in an unfurnished loft apartment in downtown Seattle to play the game, unguided, for a little over an hour (Ars' Kyle Orland got a similar unguided demo experience with the game at the Game Developers Conference in 2012).

Chris Hecker

Sam Machkovech

Sam Machkovech



This was pretty unusual. Most super early game PR demos have a handler around, partly to make sure nobody steals, say, an entire game's source code, and partly to take notes on how people handle the game. Did the player ever get stuck? Did anything glitch or go wrong? Did they have any questions? Instead, I mostly played The Witness by myself. The only guidance I got was when the guy who lived at the loft, a friend of Blow's named Jeff Roberts (best known for co-founding the RAD Game Tools middleware company), eventually popped in with a second person to grab a drink from the fridge.

During his few minutes in the room, Roberts looked over and advised me to walk to a specific spot in the game. That's when his companion, outspoken game designer Chris Hecker, hit him so hard that I turned around to look. "Don't fucking spoil the whole thing!" Hecker yelled. Then the duo left.

At that point, the game's island had begun to take shape for me as a player. The Witness' gameplay has remained pretty consistent since that 2011 preview, and it has been profiled over the years in various ways, so it's not a spoiler to say that the game is about a mysterious island covered in puzzles. Blow himself has used both his website and public appearances to speak about the game's puzzle design as well—perhaps to offset fears that "island full of puzzles" doesn't mean yet another Myst.

Blow's game focuses on a series of electronic panels. When players see a podium-mounted screen in the game, they can tap a button to stop walking in first-person and instead manipulate what they see on the screen, which is always some form of a line puzzle. Find the starting point; guide an unbreakable line to a finishing point.

By the time my 2011 session was punctuated by an audible punch to someone's shoulder, I'd played long enough to realize such an elevator-pitch description betrays the game's content. For one, the puzzles got tricky pretty quickly, and not in a way I'd seen in a video game before. Were the game really just about puzzles that existed on separate, individual line grids, it wouldn't need this whole mysterious-island treatment; it's not a spoiler either to say that the island itself factors into how the puzzles play out. For example, Witness players eventually stumble upon a puzzle with six starting points and six ending points; following that, they'll find puzzles with strange icons. Without prior experience and the island's details, you'll never solve those.

During my early demo, I'd just gotten used to this system of puzzling—really, excited by it—and then got totally distracted by that accidental hint. What was that about? What was in that specific spot of the island? Upon Blow's return to the loft, after I'd finished maybe 50 puzzle screens, I asked him about his friend's slip-up. "It is important, I will say that," Blow said, then he quickly changed the subject. He'd already taken the controller out of my hands and had entered a debug mode to fly nimbly around the island, as if he'd upgraded himself from slow walking to a magical airship. He peeked everywhere I'd been, seeing what I'd figured out and what I'd left unfinished—in particular, a grueling sequence in a dark bunker where the puzzle screens were all soaked in different colors of light.

Blow confirmed that he was curious about how far I'd gotten, but not in any sort of focus-test way. "The game knows what it is," Blow said. "I think it’s OK for people to get stuck. The structure of the game is designed to accommodate getting stuck."

This line of thought uncorked a pretty lengthy monologue on Blow's part about puzzle design. It was the first time I'd realized how obsessive he is about the practice, and it proved to be a real statement of intent for what The Witness has to offer. "To be crassly manipulated purely for entertainment value, to be treated like this stupid game consumer, is about as far from what I want [in a game] as you can get. I get pissed off when a game treats me that way. To act that way as a designer similarly involves not having much respect for the player as an intelligent person.

"Some game designers will talk about making the player feel smart and having that be the important thing," Blow continued. "'We want everyone to feel smart, so we design things that aren’t actually very hard. We have them do what we wanted them to do.' I do not like that. Instead, I give people the opportunity to be smart for real. I don’t care if they feel smart. What matters is if they are. That leads to a very different game."

Listing image by Sam Machkovech