The witness castle puzzles12/22/2023 ![]() You solve puzzles by figuring out their syntax, which becomes even more important when you are presented with strings of puzzles that are riffing off the same rule. The recurring problem for me with The Witness was how poorly it sometimes seemed to explain why a correct puzzle solution was correct. And this rolling question of accessibility may become the heart of your experience with The Witness. If you don’t have the type of mind that readily remembers graphs or charts, you may have to take a picture or screenshot of each completed panel and scroll through them on a second screen to have the solutions available for reference. It’s an adaptation necessitated by the game suddenly becoming less accessible than it was before. Sometimes you have to complete the puzzles in chains, and if you fail a panel, it will snap closed (as will all the preceding panels), and you’ll have to start all over again. Usually the solved puzzles remain lit and become a reference for trying to solve the next panel. Often the panels are laid out side by side, so when you finish one panel, the next panel lights up, until you reach the end of the row. Your line may never cross over itself, and that’s what makes the puzzles tricky. ![]() For instance, in one set the rule is that you must pass your line through every hexagon that appears within the maze before reaching its end. The goal is to figure out what the rules are for each set of puzzles. By following the wire you discover the next set of puzzles. Generally speaking when you finish a panel or set of panels an attached power line will start to glow. You have to touch the screen at a designated start point and then trace a line until you reach the end of the maze. No answers are forthcoming until you manage to solve enough puzzles, however, and I’m certainly not going to be able to figure out the mystery of the island unless I turn to craftier puzzle solvers on YouTube for some help. Surely there’s some science-fiction-esque explanation to what it is, where it comes from, and why you are there. You’re given every reason to want to understand what the hell is going on on this island. There are stacks of black hexagons that hum like generators, a device that looks like some sort of trans-dimensional portal, and most predominantly the touch-screen puzzle panels behind which your access to the island is locked. Woven into this island of purple-flowered bogs, crumbling miniature castles, and lush mountain caves are pieces of high technology. You’re barred from further investigation by locked, metal gates. You can see the tops of the elevator cars and wooden scaffolds, and in a few places you can descend a staircase and take a glimpse at whatever was being built down there. I could spend hours walking around, looking to compose the perfect screenshot.Ī waterfall cascading from a column of rock looks so pretty and sounds so real I could see it as a museum exhibit, projected on the wall of a huge, white room with a wood bench to sit and admire the spectacle.Īlso spread across the island are pits and elevator shafts that look down into a basement level that’s still under construction. It rests next to a swamp filled with trees that stand atop nests of exposed root systems. There’s a quarry cut from white rock near a beached oil tanker that’s broken into three pieces, covered in decades of rust. On one side of the island is a desert beach, next to an area that looks like it was pulled from the American Southwest. A forest with pixie-pink trees sits in the center of the island, and runs into a fall forest of bright orange leaves and a spring forest dominated by deep, dark greens. The eccentricity of the island in The Witness is also defined less by architecture and more by the arrangement and variety of biomes. You walk through a tunnel, step through some doors, and are deposited upon an island. There’s not a wisp of backstory in The Witness, however. The Witness is a deliberate homage to the 1993 puzzle game Myst, in which you picked up a magic book and found yourself marooned on an island that is defined by its eccentric architecture.
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