Do you see this? This is what madness looks like. Thank you, The Witness, for driving me truly insane.
Pictured above is my notebook, covered with shapes I cut out last night while trying to solve a particularly gruesome late-game puzzle in Jonathan Blow’s new game, which came out last month for PC and PS4. The Witness, as you may know, tasks you with solving a series of increasingly difficult line puzzles whose rules change and evolve as you play. I won’t spoil this one, but it was... hard.
What’s incredible about The Witness, I think, isn’t just that it asked me to cut out shapes to solve its challenges. What’s incredible about The Witness is that it’s actually convinced me that cutting out shapes is a worthwhile use of my time. Powering my way through Blow’s puzzles has become a nightly habit over the past few weeks, and somehow, it never stops feeling rewarding.
You can reach the author of this post at jason@kotaku.com or on Twitter at @jasonschreier.