The Witness is a puzzle game that first hit stores in January 2016 on PC and PlayStation 4 before coming to a handful of other systems. There were high expectations of the game in the lead-up to its release, as the game was the first release from designer Jonathan Blow since the modern classic Braid.
Thankfully, The Witness didn't disappoint, impressing fans and critics with its meticulously designed world and ingenious puzzles that had a surprising amount of variety despite being entirely line puzzles. Along with being one of the best puzzles games of the last decade, The Witness is also one of the toughest. Players are given no guidance whatsoever in the game and must learn the rules of each set of puzzles by finding increasingly difficult solutions.
10 The Mountain's Entry Puzzle
Once the player has activated enough lasers to open the box atop the mountain, they will be greeted with, believe it or not, another puzzle. The puzzle initially appears to be simple, as players just need to separate the white and black blocks, something that they've likely done countless times already.
However, the legs of the statues are blocking multiple paths. So, players not only need to separate the white and black blocks, but they also need to find the perfect angle to stand at, which is easier said than done. Suffice to say, the puzzle is the perfect introduction to the tricky endgame portion.
9 The Castle's Sound Puzzle
The castle's sound puzzle is an odd one, as some players will solve it in just a couple of minutes, while others will be completely baffled by it, desperately looking for visual clues. As the name suggests, this puzzle doesn't use any visual clues at all; it is solved by listening to the character's footsteps.
This may not sound too taxing, but it is challenging for two main reasons. Firstly, the castle is a tantalizing area, so many players will visit it early on, and this will be the first sound puzzle that they encounter, so listening for audio cues won't be instinctive. Secondly, The Witness predominantly only has ambient sounds, so some unfortunate players will be listening to music or a podcast while playing, making the puzzle virtually impossible.
8 The Bunker's Elevator Puzzle
The bunker is one of the game's many ingeniously designed areas. The puzzles initially appear to be a simple case of separating blocks into colors, but a curveball is soon thrown when it becomes clear that different lighting changes the color of the blocks.
The bunker has an elevator which, like virtually everything in The Witness, is a puzzle itself. Every floor in the bunker has its own color, which changes the colors of the blocks on the elevator panel. Unfortunately, the fourth wire is broken, so it won't take the player anywhere. To continue moving up, players need to work out how to skip the broken floor by figuring out how the inaccessible green floor would change the colors of the blocks.
7 The Player's First Environmental Puzzle
As mentioned before, The Witness' island is ingeniously and meticulously designed. So much so that many players will, at some point, utter the phrase commonly attached to the game of "it's all puzzles." This tagline predominantly comes from the environmental puzzles, which are puzzles that aren't solved on the regular grids, but by finding patterns in the environment.
Like everything in The Witness, however, the game never tells players about environmental puzzles. Moreover, they're not required to beat the game, so many people will complete an entire playthrough without ever noticing one. Consequently, although there are many tricky environmental puzzles to find, the leap of faith and pattern recognition required by players to solve their first one is among the game's toughest challenges.
6 The Quadruple Floor Puzzle
The quadruple floor puzzle is one of the final puzzles in the main game and is a fitting challenge. Players first need to solve four of the toughest Tetris block challenges in the main game, which is a difficult enough challenge on its own.
The game soon throws a spanner in the works, though, as once all four puzzles have been solved, the entire floor will turn into a symmetrical grid that the players must solve using what they learned from the previous four puzzles.
5 The Boat Puzzle
At some point during the game, players will come across a small boat with a map. This boat is very handy as it lets players travel to most of the game's key locations while also helping them visualize where everything is.
A fair few of the game's environmental puzzles involve the boat in some way, though one stands above the rest as particularly difficult. Players need to set the boat on a specific route, leave the boat before the door closes, then hurry to the location pictured above to use the side of the boat to complete the line.
4 The Challenge's Maze Puzzles
The Challenge is a hidden series of puzzles that can be found after activating every laser. The puzzles are randomly generated, feature a wide range of puzzle types, and must be completed within a set time. To put it bluntly, players need to have mastered every type of puzzle in The Witness in hopes of beating The Challenge.
Near the start of The Challenge, players must solve a fairly simple maze puzzle. There's more to this puzzle than there initially seems, though, as it acts as a map for a later maze. Throughout this maze are two puzzles that require players to draw a line from start to finish, while boxes with triangles inside must be drawn past by the exact number of triangles within.
Given unlimited time, the puzzles wouldn't be too tricky. But it's one of the game's toughest tasks as players first need to memorize the map to traverse the maze and find the puzzles before solving both randomly generated puzzles with enough time to spare to complete the rest of The Challenge.
3 The Monastery's Twig Puzzle
The monastery is one of the game's shorter areas in terms of the number of puzzles present, though the twig puzzle is enough of a stumbling block that it will take some players the longest to complete.
The twig puzzle is similar to the previous puzzles leading up to it, where players are given a blank grid and must find the correct place to stand, so that tree branches line up perfectly with it, revealing the solution. The issue with the twig puzzle, however, is that even when finding the perfect place to stand, the braches don't reveal a complete solution - this is because a twig has snapped off and is lying on the ground.
Along with the broken twig stumping most players, the puzzle is still tough to solve even when finding it, as it's not clear what angle the twig was originally facing.
2 The Eclipse Puzzle
Jonathan Blow's Braid infamously had a puzzle where players had to wait nearly two literal hours in order to solve it. Many players were expecting a similar puzzle in The Witness, and they weren't wrong. The eclipse puzzle requires players to listen to an hour-long lecture, while a full moon will start at one side of the screen and act as the puzzle's starting point before slowly moving to the end of the puzzle to finish it off as an eclipse.
Thankfully, like Braid's star puzzle, the eclipse puzzle isn't required to beat the game.
1 The Shipwreck Door Puzzle
Surprisingly, a puzzle that takes an hour to complete isn't The Witness' most infamous task. The Shipwreck door puzzle takes the crown as The Witness' most grueling test, predominantly because it has not one, not two, but THREE hidden mechanics.
To solve the Shipwreck door puzzle, players must recognize that it is a symmetry puzzle, despite the second line not showing - they must also recognize that the ambient sounds of water dripping and the ship creaking correspond to the path the line must traverse - and finally they must recognize that the red light illuminating the door is affecting the colors of the dots. Even when recognizing these three rules, the puzzle is still brutally difficult to solve.
Suffice to say, anyone who completes the shipwreck puzzle without any help deserves a hand-written congratulations and perhaps an apology from Jonathan Blow.
The Witness is available now for PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nvidia Shield, macOS, and iOS.