the-witness posts

Well over a year ago, Braid creator Jonathan Blow revealed the title for his next indie game, The Witness. Last March he posted up some pseudo-screenshots from the indie adventure-puzzle title set on an uninhabited island. As it turns out, the game made its first public appearance at PAX Prime 2010 this past weekend with no advanced warning.

An early build of the game was placed around some other indie titles with no signage or goofy promo hype and open to anyone who wanted to play it. Blow states on his blog site, "I wanted people to be able to play the game for as long as they want, not feeling pressured to stop playing because of a huge line of antsy people waiting behind them." The experiment seems to have worked as Blow states, "People tended to play for a long time, and they liked what they played." Kotaku has posted up some impressions of The Witness which is due for release in late 2011.

Jonathon Blow's acclaimed indie puzzle game Braid generated a ton of attention for the developer. Now he and a small team are working on his next project, titled The Witness. Over the weekend he launched a blog site about the game and decided to post a few concept artwork pieces from the game, followed by some early screenshots

The concept artwork comes from an artist named Eric Urquhart. Some of the art depicts a rather fantasy-looking village which the captions say is surrounded by a force field. There's also a blog post about the lighting details for the game's engine that shows off some screenshots such as the one above (although he doesn't really want them to be called screenshots yet since the elements are still place holders). There's no word about gameplay in The Witness yet but it reminds us a lot of The Prisoner at this point, which is a good thing.

See that bit of text above this post? That's Braid developer Jonathan Blow's idea of a teaser for The Witness, his next major game project. The web site for the game is already up which says that the title is an "exploration-puzzle game on an uninhabited island".

According to Blow, in a statement on his blog site, " . . . the game is very visual, and once we have developed those visuals to the point where they are representative, I'll start posting them there." Don't look for them anytime soon, though. The Witness web site states that the game isn't due for release until late 2011.


Download Braid Demo (119 MB)