As a game journalist, I'm used to playing early builds of games with a PR representative or even the developer himself hovering just over my shoulder, ready to answer questions as I play or give advice when I get stuck. So I was a bit surprised when Braid creator Jonathan Blow started a demonstration of his upcoming PC puzzle-exploration game The Witness by suggesting that he leave the room and just let me explore on my own.

For the next 20 minutes or so I wandered a bit aimlessly through a beautiful, light-infused island that evoked the feeling of a silent Zen garden. The few sparsely decorated buildings that dotted the landscape featured shining blue monitors each with a maze-like etching for me to guess-and-check a path through. The game gave an intense feeling of loneliness and disorientation that was a stark change from the in-your-face instruction and narrative of a game like Braid.

Fixing adventure gaming's flaws

When Blow came back in the room, he said he created The Witness with an eye for fixing what he saw as "the flaws of classical puzzle adventure games." The biggest of these, Blow said, is overly subtle puzzle design that makes it unclear if certain situations even are puzzles in the first place. "Sometimes you're stuck somewhere and you're like, 'I can't get through this door but I don't know if I'm supposed to get through this door or if it's locked and I'm supposed to go somewhere else," Blow said. "You don't know if you're supposed to be there yet, or if you don't have the inventory items."

That won't happen in The Witness, which doesn't even have a physical inventory system. Instead, Blow said, the player's knowledge of how to solve different types of puzzles acts as a sort of mentally stored key to unlocking new portions of the island. "If I get to an area, I should probably be able to solve it," Blow said. "If you can't, you probably just haven't seen the concept."

Blow said he was inspired by the general mood and setting of games like Myst, but that he was purposely trying to avoid that game's frustrating sense of "I'm pulling this lever and I have no idea what it does! ... In this game, I try to be very clear." Taking me on a quick tour of the rest of the game's lush island setting, Blow showed me how the simple guess-and-check mazes from the beginning of the game evolve and change as the game progresses, introducing subtly different goals and solutions as you go.

One maze might introduce sets of colored hexagons to collect or avoid as you make your way to the goal. Others replicate the path you draw with symmetrical walls that block your path, or require you to notice that you can't cross shadows cast by the environment or your own avatar. In creating these puzzles, Blow said the overriding idea was that careful observation and logical thinking will always be the only tools the player needs to get through.

"You know if you wander somewhere in the game and you see a puzzle with weird symbols on it, you might just be, 'I don't know what those mean, but I know I have to go figure out what those mean.'," he said. "I don't want the hard part to be finding what the hell this thing does. Plenty of games do that, it's not interesting. The hard part is more like I see some new idea and I don't quite understand it yet, but I'm wrangling with the idea. The idea is to keep this stream of non-verbal ideas coming."

Telling a personal story

If Blow's Braid was criticized for practically forcing its complicated meta-narrative on the player, The Witness might have the opposite problem, letting you wander its open environments without much guidance. The first hint that there's more going on than meets the eye comes through a pre-recorded voice squawking through a lonely speaker box, with an unseen narrator giving an extremely self-aware speech about his role in the game.

"I'll keep the first thing I have to say simple," the unseen voice says. "My purpose here is to help you. We're conditioned by movies and video games to regard a statement like that as third act betrayal fuel, so if you have to be suspicious for a little while, OK... You have time. you're not in any danger. No more than I am anyway. Even if you don't want to trust me, know that my faith in you is unbreakable."

In delivering the story through pre-recorded messages, Blow said he wanted to take lessons from games like System Shock and BioShock, but skew the concept so it worked with The Witness' aura of mellow introspection. "In some sense, as someone who's played a lot of games, I'm conditioned by all the audio logs in all these other games that are always about the alien invasion, or the virus mutated everybody, or 'Oh I'm barely surviving, aghhh!'" he said.

For The Witness, though, Blow said that he's trying to create a story that's about "serious things. Not totally an entertainment story, but not pretentiously so or anything." He compared it to a novel that's "about something that the author cared about," unlike the majority of games he sees on the market.

"Most games are not trying to be about anything serious, they're just entertainment games," he said. "I'm not trying to bash that in any way, that's just not what I'm doing. If a game tries to be like a movie, it tries to be like an action movie, not Fried Green Tomatoes, but both of those are movies."

But Blow says creating a story that was so personal was tougher than he expected, leading to a few initial attempts that "came out kind of patronizing, as you can imagine," he said. The key to making the writing process work, Blow said, was just opening up in a way that was "very personal and honest and straightforward." He compared the process to going on a first date, where you can come off as artificial if you try too hard to present what you think your partner wants.

"The writing of this character actually was an exercise in being as honest with the player as possible, which is not something I feel like a lot of games have done," he said. "When you try to do that kind of thing, it's easy to try to do it in a very guarded way. 'Here's what I think is important to make a game about, but I'm not going to let you too close to my actual thought process. I'm just going to display the better parts of my thought processes. We have a professional thing to show you.' Maybe as we get older we just learn more how to be ourselves and still be engaging and good. I don't know if I would have been able to do it [when I was younger]."