Redditer YannFromFrance offers a complex hypothesis about the game's four voice actors, suggesting that each voice is a different person who created a part of the island through their own philosophies. What about the statues of people? What about the various USB sticks you find lying around with quotes by famous philosophers, scientists and artists? What about the underground movie theater in which James Burke waxes philosophical or game developer Brian Moriarty recites his 58-minute GDC presentation about a Easter eggs, numerology, cryptology, music and Shakespear? Getting stuck on a puzzle, then seeing fragmented manifestations from that puzzle in everything, isn't dissimilar to having OCD where it's like trying to shake one's troubles with a brain that refuses to do so.Īnd yet, this only takes into account a tiny portion of The Witness' more conventional narrative beats. Indeed, the hidden FMV ending contains similar imagery in the "real world", further blending the line between one's focus on panel puzzles and their reality around them. They've even inspired a comical Tumblr entitled The Witness Puzzles in Real Life. These perspective-hunting secrets are so pervasive that you'll probably start seeing their imagery everywhere outside of the game. This analogy holds true as the player begins solving line puzzles, only to later discover hidden lines in the environments. The Witness is a game that feels like obsessive compulsive disorder." An anxiety riddled, circular, frustrating game. "Obsessive compulsive disorder is a condition of specific rules and repetition. This was a game that seemed manufactured to appeal to my haywire sense of action and relief. Touching, checking, repeating, symmetry, tracing lines, separation, pairs, evenness. This is when I realised why The Witness wouldn't let me go. "I was watching someone with obsessive compulsive disorder. Here's an excerpt of their interpretation: What's going on here? Redditer plainclothesman suggests that the man has obsessive compulsive disorder and that the island is a manifestation of his thought process. He locks and unlocks a door several times before crawling outside and taking a nap. He smacks a spoon against various surfaces for no apparent reason before discarding the utensil. He takes a bite of a cracker, tosses it aside, then starts eating a new one. The man exhibits an array of strange behaviour. He unplugs wires connecting his veins to a laptop, while a bottle of urine lies connected to a catheter near the foot of the sofa. The game's secret denouement concludes with a live-action film portrayed from a first-person perspective in which a man (possibly Jonathan Blow himself) awakens from a couch in a game development studio wherein The Witness is being made. So on a surface level, the hidden ending of The Witness suggests that the island setting is really a virtual space that one inhabits. Here's the part where I get into major spoilers, so if you haven't reached the secret ending of The Witness you may want to turn back now. No matter how many puzzles they solve, secrets they scour, and information they gather online, the true meaning of The Witness is forever outside of our grasp in a way that makes it as easy to hate as it is to love. I'm in good company, however, as it turns out that nobody knows what The Witness is about. Then, upon watching the ending, I quickly felt like the dumbest as I had no earthly idea what the game I'd just spent a couple dozen of hours on was about. For a split second, I felt like the smartest man on the planet. Last week I reached the ending of Jonathan Blow's latest opus, The Witness, without the aid of any outside help.
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