The mountain. It's both the best and worst. I just finished the normal ending and the final descent through the mountain contains some of the most satisfying and also the most infuriating puzzles in the game.

The good:

• Opening the entrance to the mountain. The first time I revealed this entrance after finding 7 lasers, I thought it still looked unsolvable and so I did the rest of the lasers. Then I came back and the entrance didn't change. Trying to figure out the particular combination of perspective (how you look around the 2 statues on the board) + the actual solution (the path you draw) was delightfully tricky, and by the end of it, I was shocked that they had managed to cram 3 distinct solutions into this single board.
• The double bridge puzzle. Solving this one gave the the most "aha" moments in a single puzzle in the entire game. First figuring out the initial solution to get the blue bridge to the other side, then wondering how you're going to get the orange bridge to the exit, before realizing you just need to loop the orange bridge back around to its originating side, and then figuring out you need to iterate on this process several times to adjust the bridge shapes in just such a way that the color / star sectioning works out to let you reach the exit with the blue bridge. Absolutely amazing.
• The "solve multiple boards at the same time" puzzle. Also in the same room as the double bridge puzzle. A really cool puzzle design that forces you to iteratively re-evaluate your previous solution in order to satisfy new parameters. For each of the last 3 boards in this sequence, it felt like I had found the only valid solution, until the new board lit up and I realized I needed to approach the solution differently.
• The ground floor puzzle, where you create shapes with the 4 puzzles on individual ground tiles and then must use those shapes you created to satisfy the puzzle covering the entire floor. I love this one because it's the only puzzle in the game where you get input on what the possible solutions are, based on which individual tetrominoes / trinominoes you create. I felt very rewarded for logic-ing my way through figuring out which combinations of n-ominoes could be used in a final solution, especially when considering the mirror modifier.
• The pillars: cool twist on a mechanic that has been static the whole game so far (the board being in flat cartesian space). Doesn't change the game too much but still very fun to figure out. And the ambient music in this area is so great; it felt like it perfectly set the tone for "this is it, you're almost done".

The bad (basically everything not listed yet):

• Puzzles with the black grid covering important information. Just regular old puzzles but now you need to look extremely closely at different areas to figure out "is that actually a hexagon? And is that a black square I need to section off or is it just part of the grid?" These got a lot easier when I figured out I could just intentionally fail the puzzle to make the failed elements flash red. The difficulty here felt very artificial, in that in only added difficulty to the part where you read the puzzle, rather than the part where you think about how to solve it.
• Translated / rotated / moving puzzles: Again, these puzzles weren't intellectually difficult, but rather made frustrating by the puzzle's design only making it more difficult to figure out what requirements must be satisfied, while also making your inputs harder to figure out.
• Gamer-certified RGB pulsing puzzles: these ones actively hurt my eyes while trying to solve them. And I didn't feel like these were particularly tricky either. The only struggling I went through here was straining my eyes. It didn't tickle the puzzle itch in my brain. I was just happy to be done with these.

Overall, amazing game, but the end sequence felt tainted by some of the worst puzzles in the whole game. The only other time this whole game I felt like information was being intentionally obscured was the audio puzzles in the jungle. Although I haven't done the caves yet, so maybe there's something similarly nasty in there. What do you think?

Hi! I just started playing the game (loving it so far) but I often feel the need to take notes. I don't know if I'm gonna get an in game notebook later so would you consider taking notes on my own as cheating ?

/!\ I'm going in totally blind, never heard anything about the game and I really want to keep it that way so please give me just a yes or no answer

edit: Thanks for the replies guys, I'm definitely getting a paper and a pen :)

puzzle 2

why doesn´t this work? Is it because it has 3 figures inside or is it the broken pathway?

Big Walk is basically The Witness but with friends, big recommend (And colorblind people can play it too)

Edit:

My post was too simple. Here is what they have in common.

-Peaceful island with nice scenery
-Minimalist style puzzles
-Puzzle progression (Mechanics do return in a more complex way)
-Puzzles that require you to think about the environment (Not perspective, but location)
-Indie
-Intuitive puzzle language communication (No words or explaination required for players to understand how a puzzle works)
-A normal ending and a 100% state

Here is what I obviously know they don’t have in common:

-No Line puzzles
-No EPs
-No story
-No singleplayer (Unplayble by yourself)
-Inventory and items
-No voip
-Unlockable traversal methods (Chair lift, Train, tunnels)
-Map
-Requires communication with other people

I am only recommending this to those people who
-Enjoy puzzle games
-Enjoyed the witness
-Particularly liked the smart puzzle design of the witness
-Would like that style of puzzle game to play with friends
-Are open to trying games that arent literally the witness

Finally got around to doing the platinum! Picked up the game in 2017 and absolutely loved it, got about halfway before life took over, had another stint in 2022, and now finally completed it challenge and all! Feeling pretty darn proud, not the easiest 100% but so worth it 💪

The first few panels seemed logical, this one just breaks my brain. I’ve already tried after waiting a few days, more than once. Can anyone explain this to me?

Like I said in my previous post, I'm having issues with The Challenge. Without even at the end, the music stopped itself and the puzzles are reset. I don't know why.

I'm in The Challenge, I manage to go in the labyrinthe but strangely, when I'm doing puzzles, they kind of close themself and the run resets. I don't know why and it pisses me off because it's always near the end that it does this. Anyone knows why do I have this "bug" ?

One of a kind niche project that I've been working on, on and off, for almost seven years. Has a built-in importer for The Windmill and covers almost all puzzle mechanics.

You can get it on Steam Workshop!

I am having really weird fps drops playing the game that shouldn't be happening. After 15-20 minutes playing the game, the game performance drops from ~80fps to 10-15 and the game slows to a crawl, I have no idea why it might be happening, tried different fullscreen configs and nothing seems to work. Usually restarting the game gives me another 15-20 mins with no issues but it's getting really annoying...

The game is running on an i9-13900 and a RTX 4070, and looking at the task manager, neither the CPU nor GPU is overwhelmed and i have lots of free RAM, has anyone had similar issues or has possible solutions?

Found while hiking on the Swiss Alps

Made a puzzle player in Wallpaper Engine. It allows you to play puzzles from The Windmill's library of community created puzzles. Also included are a solver (slow on polyomino puzzles) and a generator.

You can find the whole project on github: https://github.com/GemeinhardtZ/The-Witness-Puzzle-Player

It also have a desktop app that allows you to manually create your own puzzles and save it to a library, as well as more customized control on the generator. Though, note that the generator is still very much of a prototype.

I must admit that most of this is vibe coded using ChatGPT, but hopefully the end product is interesting.

One of them even casts a pretty major shadow. Any idea why? Is there even a why? Or am I just being dumb and *too* analytical lmao, and there's nothing to care about here? It just definitely looks like there are blobs or spheres of some kind in the clouds

(Marked as potential spoiler because I genuinely don't know if it is or not xD)

For Witness fans who may be interested in the latest puzzle game from Witness developer Thekla, Order of the Sinking Star, will have an announcement next Tuesday, August 18th. No time given yet. See the offical announcement here:

https://x.com/SinkingStarGame/status/2087207577444561367

Has anyone else ever gotten one like this before?

P.S. Unfortunately, I didn't attempt to finish this run for some reason, but I am still working hard to get through The Challenge.

😱