New Game Watch: The Witness

Something amorphous and consummate
existed before Heaven and Earth.
Solitude! Vast!
Standing alone, unaltering.
Going everywhere, yet unthreatened.
It can be considered the Mother of the World.
I don't know its name, so I designate it, 'Tao'.
Compelled to consider it, name it, 'the Great'.

You may remember my review of Jonathan Blow's masterful Braid, a time-manipulating side-scroller that proves the fact that video games can be legitimate art. Plus, it's an absolute blast to play through.

Well, the poem typed above recently appeared on a Web site linked from the Braid blog. The page only contains those words and a white background. Clicking on the poem leads to another sparse page, telling us that Blow's next game, The Witness, will be "an exploration-puzzle game on an uninhabited island." Following that, the site tells us that the new game is "to be released on multiple platforms — whatever makes sense in late 2011, when the game will hopefully be finished. Further information will be posted here as it is ready."

Cryptic, to say the least. A quick Google search reveals (at the Citizendium) that the poem is taken from an early chapter the lost work of Lao Tse, a contemporary of Confucius and an authority on Taoism.

Your guess is as good as mine. All I know is, 2011 is way too long to wait.