One of the first games announced for the PlayStation 4 should hit the system next year.
The Witness, an exploration puzzler, is coming out January 26 for PlayStation 4 and PC. It’s a beautiful-looking first-person adventure that has you solving different kinds of connect-the-dot puzzles, but it probably goes a lot deeper than that. In a post on the PlayStation blog — Sony is helping to promote it — developer Jonathan Blow emphasized that the final form of The Witness ended up far larger than his team initially expected.
“There’s a lot here,” wrote Blow. “When we started making this game, I figured it would have between 8 and 12 hours of playtime. As it happens, the game we’ve finally built is around 10 times as big as that: If you are a completionist who wants to wring every last drop out of the game, you might expect to play for 80 hours, or possibly 100. For people who don’t want to go quite that far, the game’s still got plenty for you.”
The developer also dropped a new trailer:
The game represents the first new release from Blow (and his company Thekla) since 2008’s Braid. That time-manipulating platformer was one of the first big indie hits on the last generation of consoles when it debuted on the Xbox 360’s Xbox Live Arcade. It is often cited as the precursor to the current age of thoughtful and alternative games made by independent development teams.
So Blow has spent the better part of the last decade working on The Witness. And it’s easy to look at what he’s shown so far and assume that it’s crazy to take so long making a game about line puzzles. But I played an early version of The Witness at the PlayStation 4 launch event way back in 2013. And it was already obvious at that point that the world was so much more connected. Put simply: It feels like the island that you’re exploring is one massive puzzle that you unlock parts of by completing smaller challenges.
But that’s just my guess, and I’m looking forward to finding out if I am right.