Jonathan Blow has solved the puzzle of his feelings about Microsoft, and that means Xbox One owners are getting his latest release.
The Witness is coming to Xbox One for $40 September 13. This adventure puts players on a secluded, abandoned island where they must solve puzzles while traversing through beautiful environments. It is notoriously difficult, and you can read about what that might mean for you in our review. Overcoming The Witness will require you to believe in yourself, and Xbox One owners are now lucky enough to partake in that. Blow, the project lead on The Witness, agreed to make the game a limited console exclusive on PlayStation 4 after Sony made an effort to work with him and share the details on the PS4 long before the system was out.
[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":2036661,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"games,","session":"A"}']Blow came to fame in 2008 when he released his time-traveling platformer Braid on Xbox 360 Xbox Live Arcade platform. After porting that game to a number of other platforms, the celebrated designer spent several years making The Witness with a team of collaborators at his Thekla studio.
The Witness debuted in January on PlayStation 4 and PC. Both players and critics lauded it for its impressive style as well as its clever design. Every challenge in The Witness is a basic maze-like line puzzle, but the game adds rules and complications that make devising a solution more difficult and rewarding.
By bringing The Witness to Xbox One, Blow is leaving some issues with Microsoft in the past. The developer has spoken repeatedly about his issue with how the Xbox company treated indie developers.
https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/411589410304425985
His issues primarily involved requiring indie studios to sign a platform-exclusive clause and requiring small teams to pay hefty certification costs for every update where platforms like Steam don’t charge anything. Those are policies that Microsoft has either softened on (platform exclusivity) or done away with (certification costs).