--- title: Time Plays: The Witness | TIME description: Time Plays: The Witness canonical: https://time.com/video/ZnPgrZe6/ og:title: Time Plays: The Witness og:description: Time Plays: The Witness og:url: https://time.com/video/ZnPgrZe6/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/ZnPgrZe6/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Time Plays: The Witness twitter:description: Time Plays: The Witness twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/ZnPgrZe6/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # Time Plays: The Witness > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: August 2026. ## TIME Subscription: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition TIME is a general-interest news organization founded in 1923, reporting on the people, ideas and issues shaping the world. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Time Plays: The Witness [Watch (HLS stream): Time Plays: The Witness](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/ZnPgrZe6.m3u8) (6:10)  _Published 2016-01-25. Time Plays: The Witness_ --- Jul 27, 2023 7:29 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Time-Plays-Firewatch](/video/JcS49AAu/) ### Time-Plays-Firewatch [Star Wars Time Plays](/video/tzrzeW0F/) ### Star Wars Time Plays [TIME Raw: Witness from Inside Bataclan Theatre](/video/VWhEGTXF/) ### TIME Raw: Witness from Inside Bataclan Theatre --- ## Transcript Hello, this is Matt Peckham with Time Magazine, and I'm playing a game by creator Jonathan Blow, called The Witness. Jonathan Blow is the creator of a game in 2008 called Braid. A side- scroller that was much more than a side- scroller that helped sort of launch the indie games movement. The witness he's been working on for the past seven or eight years. It's a puzzle game. It has no narrative introduction in the traditional sense. It doesn't know tutorials. It doesn't hold you hand. It's just full of, and you'll see, this is the first one, these very mysterious computer panel puzzles. And I can actuate a cursor here, so I can move this cursor around on the screen. I can place it here and then move it to the end of this point and if I do so I've solved that panel puzzle, start call it a puzzle, and it opens the door. If I go over here, ever so slighty more complicated in that there's a turn. And then I open that door. I merge up here into, for lack of a better description, a starter area, an idyllic garden of sorts that has more complex panels. These initial ones take the form of simple maze. You solve the maze and you enable a power cable which then enables another panel. Not really too much more complex here, but. Then that cable enables this panel and then if I solve, as you can see the puzzles are getting More complex can't really fail them because there are so few ways to fail at this early stage. But then you'll see here that I'm pulling clamps off of a panel that I'm going to need to access to open the barrier this force barrier to get out onto the broader island You are on an island. You're not sure what the island is, who you are, or what you're even doing. But, let's see here. We wanna go like this. I've played this many times, but each time just because of the way the visuals are arranged, you still have to think about what you're doing. Bring, so that's two solved. Let's go solve the third one over here. And what's happening here, maybe it's obvious, is that you're learning the grammar of the game. The game is teaching you it's grammar without telling you anything, without explaining anything. In at least in a traditional verbal sense or with text or with somebody saying now go over and do this and do that so it is a very much the word would be [ UNKNOWN ] the learning process that we experience in games and how we know anything really how information And is convey. So now I'm out on the island here. I want to show you I'm just going to let you glimpse at. The puzzles are hidden in plain sight and that I have no idea how to solve this puzzle base on what I just learn from those puzzles, but if I did know I could solve it right now can access that location. Whatever's in there. So this is the Witness. A fairly large island, open ended. There are doors. There are locks. There are tucked away secrets. There are over 600 puzzles. There are hundreds more, I don't know how to describe them. Sort of character driven, line driven A cyphers, codes that you can find in the environment. It's all very mysterious. I have some ideas about what Jonathan is maybe trying to say here. I don't know that I'm right but it's obviously much more than just a possible game. And these are far more than brain teasers. I'm just gonna give you a little peak here, get some of the stuff that you can go explore. It's very mist like. If you remember Missed from 1993. But, it is also Jonathan's attempt to think past the design limitations of a game like Missed. I should add before we go here that you're not just solving puzzles to unlock some kind of a very clear story In the scenes that you were in Myst, where there was a very straightforward sort of science fiction, science fantasy story there, and that sort of thing. That's not what Jonathan [ UNKNOWN ] doing here. There is some sort of a, I think he has some points he's trying to make, some ideas that He's trying to illustrate that tie very directly into the nature of game design. And what we know and what we think we know. But I don't want to say too much more beyond that, or really anything more beyond that. Because it would spoil too much. And I think this is one of those games where the journey and the destination are at least equally important. But there is, you are definitely doing more than just solving puzzles. There are just some phenomenally interesting things tucked away on this island. The game is difficult, but only I would say it's difficult in almost a superfluous sense. Once you start to figure out what the puzzles are maybe trying to tell you, I would argue that the difficulty level, it's there but it falls away. It falls away in the same sense that when you understand something, when a really good teacher figure out how to educate you as opposed Those to instruct to you that you understand the concept so well and you're so empowered it almost becomes sort of second hand moving forward. So I'm gonna leave you there, that's my highfalutin take on the Witness and have a look at our review online. And where I speak a little bit more about it and I highly recommend this for anybody, even casual players, because it is well- worth the trip. ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Time Plays: The Witness","description":"Time Plays: The Witness","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/ZnPgrZe6/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2016-01-25T20:04:50.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/ZnPgrZe6.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/video/ZnPgrZe6/","duration":"PT6M10S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/video/ZnPgrZe6/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}} ```