An Update on 'The Witness'

I haven't kept up with Jonathan Blow's progress on his new game The Witness much lately, but a quick look at the game's official site shows a great deal going on in the game's development.

For those of you who don't know, Blow developed one of my favorite games in recent memory, Braid, a charming side-scroller that combines ingenious time-based puzzles, a "painterly" art style, beautiful music and a very deep story.

A while back, Blow posted on the Braid blog a link to the Web site for his new game, titled The Witness. The site featured only a passage from the work of Lao Tse. A click on the passage revealed a simple white page with a bit of text telling the reader that The Witness would be "an exploration-puzzle game on an uninhabited island," "to be released on multiple platforms — whatever makes sense in late 2011, when the game will hopefully be finished."

The new site's first page is similar to the former one, featuring another passage, this time from the Buddhist work "The Dhammapada."

Cryptic stuff aside, the crux of the recent update is definitely the development blog for The Witness. In some of the recent posts, we learn some small but interesting tidbits about the game. For instance, Blow tells us that much of the game will take place outdoors. He also mentions in one of his posts that he wants to keep the graphics (specifically lighting) simple, a decision I applaud.

The most interesting part of the blog, however, is the concept art. This is really the first visual look we've seen of The Witness. From the art and captions, we can glean that we'll start the game in a house, which is located in a compound surrounded by a defensive force field. There's also a windmill by a lake somewhere in the game, as well as a sculptor's studio, a tower, a hedge maze, a planetarium and a dock.

Like my last post on The Witness, I can safely say again that we don't have much to go by yet. Still, this is a game worth following. Blow proved with Braid that cryptic is his chosen language, so I don't see why we should expect anything different when learning about his new game.

Sadly, it looks like we won't be able to play The Witness until late 2011. It's one of my most anticipated games in a long time, and I have no doubt Blow will deliver a fine product once the release date comes around.

Check out the official blog, and if you haven't played Braid yet, do so. It's available for the Xbox Live Arcade, Playstation Network, PC and Mac.