Narrative choices in The Witness and in my game

Kyle Halpern

The story elements of the Witness are lacking if only because The Witness itself only has 1 story element. The fact that none of the world you are playing in is real. We can see this because when you beat the game it shows the player taking off plugs and looking around the room searching for the door in real life to leave the house he has been tested or experimented on. The problem lies however with the Witnesses story telling. The world around you has statues of people that almost look like they were frozen. However these people mean nothing to the story as well as all of the abandoned towns and environments that mean nothing to any plot concerning the town that one might initially have expected their to be. I think a solution to this would have been to remove the statues of people since they just mislead the player and tons help with any of the puzzles. I also think that I would have been more helpful if the movie theater at the bottom of the windmill played some clips that were metaphors for the players world not being real as appose to just general philosophy.

In my game world the player is crashing toward the sun. In order to teach players a story I believe the best way might be to show the sun getting closer or maybe the environment becoming more and more red as well as maybe parts of the room starting to light on fire. We could also have story elements by having people running around the room scared, or even having a captain explain the situation and what the player has to do in order to stop the collision. We could also reinforce the idea of fixing the ship by the a teleporter comming on line that would take you to the next floor.

Visual communication in the Witness

The Witness uses lots of framing and and use of color and visuals throughout its levels to often give the player hints about what the puzzle is and how it works.



In the example above, we can see a screen puzzle that we need to solve. The question about this puzzle is which ending does the starting line go into. While, the puzzle itself will leave us with no clue we can however look into the background where we will see pink trees except for one tree that is green and has a lone apple on its branch. If we follow the line to the apple that same branch is the same branch on the puzzle that is the correct answer to the puzzle.



In another example we can see the Witness making use of symbols in order to give the player the answer to this puzzle. While the puzzle once again gives no clear answer of how to solve it and however you draw one side the other side is drawn. While this might be initially confusing after you look into the background you can see that this panel is see through. We can also see rocks and their reflections that line up with a way to trace the rocks on the puzzle in a mirrored way. We can see the rocks acting as symbols for the answer to the puzzle as well as a nice island decoration.