The Witness

In The Witness, the main action hardly changes: you draw a line from a grid's start to its end. What changes is what you need to understand beforehand. Some panels ask you to separate symbols; others connect the solution to a shadow, reflection or sound. The island becomes a set of observational conditions where surroundings can communicate as much as the diagram itself.

Rules do not arrive as instructions. A sequence of simple examples lets you form a hypothesis, test it and notice an exception to your own explanation. You must distinguish a genuine rule from a coincidence that helped on the previous panel. A solution therefore brings knowledge useful elsewhere.

Jonathan Blow connected this approach to an interest in communication without words. Removing inventory and familiar adventure-game actions frees attention for small differences between problems. The open island lets you change areas when your thinking stalls. Returning to an old panel after a discovery reveals the main form of progress: your understanding changes more than the character's abilities.