GAME TECH: Witness forces you to question where to draw a line

Ronan Jennings discusses Witness, Song of the Deep and Ghostbusters

WHERE do you draw the line? That’s a question many gamers ask themselves. When you stop watching real football because the match is slower than Fifa? When you start scouting your office for respawn points? When you hit the gym to level up?

The Witness is an incredible game, one that often makes you feel like a bona fide genius. But it does so by asking that question, both figuratively and literally — where do you draw the line?

The lines in question are fundamental to the puzzles in The Witness, and those puzzles will bring you moments of revelation and frustration in equal measure. Many times you will find yourself completely bewildered by this experience, staring at yet another ‘impossible’ brainteaser, only for that moment of awakening to come, when you realise you’ve finally figured it out.

They should have called the game Eureka! In fact, most of you will have a fortune at your feet by the time you finish, the penny will have dropped so many times. There are plenty of puzzle games on the market, but what makes The Witness so compelling is how those puzzles are connected.

Playing from the first-person, you begin on an island with no instructions or guidance. How you explore the beautiful island is up to you, but chunks of the land are devoted to specific puzzle-chains, where the line-drawing conundrums have similar solutions to one another but escalate in difficulty until that section is finished. The general goal of each puzzle is to ‘draw’ a line from one point of a ‘maze’ to another, but the conditions of that exercise vary tremendously from section to section.

In almost every case, the ‘rules’ of each puzzle must be discovered organically, by natural revelation, and this is what makes The Witness an amazing experience.

Some small detail or clue will inform your discovery, something that seems incredibly obvious once you have figured it out, yet impenetrable beforehand. Very few games make you feel clever like The Witness does.

It’s a difficult experience to summarise without spoiling the experience, but Jonathan Blow’s previous game, Braid, was also a masterpiece in this regard. If you can imagine strolling through a beautiful wood, sometimes stopping to play Sudoku and Snake, where each game of Snake unlocks an even greater mystery, then The Witness is the game for you.

Just make sure to take a break when your brain starts to convulse. You have to draw the line somewhere.

LEADING IRISH

Fishermen, of course, are more accustomed to casting their lines, but that’s not what makes Song of the Deep so interesting. Firstly, this newly announced title is from the excellent Insomniac Games, who created Ratchet and Clank.

That alone makes it worthy of attention. However, also of interest is that the lead character is an Irish girl, called Merryn, who builds a submarine to explore the ocean in search of her missing father.

There haven’t been many Irish leads in gaming, and all but one of those have been male. (Who could forget Sean Devlin from The Saboteur, or ‘Irish’ from Red Dead Redemption?)

Song of the Deep is notable for another, much more significant reason, however. This will be the first game to be published by Gamestop. Until now, the giant retailer has stuck to selling games, so this marks a radical new direction for the business.

Publishing is a risky investment at the best of times, however, so it seems unlikely Gamestop will graduate to AAA titles.

WHO THEY GONNA CALL?

Publishing is so risky, in fact, that video games often follow the lead of Hollywood in regurgitating old franchises.

In this case, Slimer himself would be proud of the regurgitation involved — there will be a new Ghostbusters game in 2016, to coincide with the Ghostbusters film that is arriving in July.

The news comes from a statement made by Sony’s Mark Caplan. The publisher of the game is said to be Activision, which has previously assigned both Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Platinum Games.

However, with Platinum working hard on the latter franchise, it remains to be seen who is working on the Ghostbusters title. The original creators may simply lend their names to the script, but if any franchise deserves ghost writers, it’s this one.