What The Witness?
A downloadable game for Windows
What The Witness? is a fan game of The Witness (2016) that features custom puzzle mechanics. Most mechanics/puzzle sets are created and shared by game fans, and we collected them in this game. The game is also open-sourced on Github.
The Witness (2016) is a logic puzzle game by Jonathan Blow et al. from Thekla, Inc. featuring line drawing puzzles on grids with various rules.
Spoiler Warning: What The Witness? assumes that you have played the original game and understand well how original game mechanics work. You are not required to 100% complete the original game. It would be enough if you know how all the symbols work in the original game.
In this collection, many fan puzzles were designed and created by various fans during the WitCup contest, a fan-organized competition on solving new The Witness puzzles under limited time. While the 4th and 5th WitCups are already programmed by Artless, other WitCup puzzles were only archived by images and we thought it would be good if we can revive them using a game engine. This is a major reason to start the project. We are also collecting more fans' levels on the way (if they are easy to implement).
Puzzle set credits (see in-game credits for full detail):
- wc1: from the 1st WitCup (by Gentova)
- wc2: from the 2nd WitCup (by Gentova and Zhvsjia)
- wc3: from the 3rd WitCup (by Miaoji et al.)
- wc4: from the 4th WitCup (by Artless), see also https://artless.itch.io/meant-to-be-a-witness-clone
- wc5: from the 5th WitCup (by Artless and Alith), see also https://artless.itch.io/meant-to-be-a-witness-clone-2-not-witness
- wc6: from the 6th WitCup (by Zhvsjia)
- wc7: from the 7th WitCup (by Alith)
- wc10: from the 10th WitCup (A by Artless, B by Leaving Leaves, C by Zhvsjia, D by 牙刷架, E by 普通的解谜人, F by sevenkplus, & G by Fluittene)
- rpg: from the Witness RPG Mod (by Sigma144), see also https://github.com/sigma144/witness-randomizer
Game editor: directly borrowed from https://github.com/instr3/WitnessVisualizer. Limited functionality and no documentation. Use under caution (game might break).
Source code: now available at https://github.com/Alith-Game-Studio/WhatTheWitness.
Notice of update V1.0 from any beta version: Some of your puzzle's solution lines will be misplaced after you update to V1.0. It is expected since we reimplemented the graph format. You can redo these puzzles to resolve this issue. Your progress is not influenced.
Download
Development log
- Bug Fix Update: v1.05915Sep 07, 2022
- Bug Fix Update: v1.05Apr 25, 2022
- Major Update V1.04: 100 new puzzles from WitCup 10Apr 25, 2022
- Minor Bug Fix V1.03Oct 17, 2021
- Update V1.02Aug 31, 2021
- [Important] Crucial Bug Fix Update: v1.01Aug 23, 2021
- Major Update (V1.0)Aug 22, 2021
Comments
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Just in case someone else has this game only display a blank window with sound (bug from Nvidia clashing with Godot if I understood well), this trick solved it for me (Windows 7): type "cmd" in the game's address bar in the explorer, then in the console type "Player.exe --video-driver GLES2"
Hi.
This may not be the right place to write this, but I have reported a problem and would like you to check it out.
https://github.com/Alith-Game-Studio/WhatTheWitness/issues/2
Thanks.
I should check my GitHub notice more often due to a lot of reasons but apparently I did not. I have replied in Github. Thanks for the message.
Thanks! I have added one other question, could you please check again?
How do I play the final challenge "What The Witness"?
It is working in progress. We have some algorithmic issues that have to resolve
Okay. Would have been nice if we could have shortcuts to other new symbols.
Any chances of releasing an HTML5 version?
I took it down since the challenge set is implemented with a c library (currently) not compatible with html5 export. I will try to resolve the issue by rebuilding Godot against the library and hopefully get a fully functional html5 release.
Are there Mac and Linux versions available? Or should I compile from source myself instead?
I have never compiled it on mac and I know there will be many issues to resolve. I will build one when I get a mac.
Figured I might provide some insight, as I have built the game on Mac from source. Haven’t noticed any particular bugs, even on the upcoming Ventura release. The only thing that I noticed was weird was the display scaling when turning on HiDPI; however, this is more of a Godot problem than this specific game’s problem. I found that doubling the window’s size for macOS fixes this particular issue, using the feature override system.
Why are there many impossible medium difficulty problems randomly generated
This is intended. If you have played the challenge in the original game, this should be pretty straightforward and easy to understand.
If you have not yet played the original game: Impossible puzzles are only generated in the "select 1 in 3" parts where there are 3 horizontally aligned puzzles with similar elements, but only one of them is solvable and you need to find which one is solvable and solve it to proceed.
No. It appears on a puzzle similar to the maze walking in the original game, which requires find two solutions to passing two points in this fanmade game, but only one is solvable, and the other one is proven by the solver to be impossible to solve.
Code:Antibody #822861516
Both cases are solvable. The problem comes from the solver you are using. Some publicly available solvers might wrongly conclude that a puzzle is unsolvable.
Are you going to make a Discord server for this fan-game? I'd have some levels I'd like to share.
They're very terribly easyYou can join the witcup server https://discord.gg/b3BFe38s
Can you update the link? The link seems to be expired.
https://discord.gg/bent9Pvu
Hey can you post an indefinite invite, I'd love to join and help create puzzles!
I just learned how to create an unexpired one. Here is it: https://discord.gg/ptbcTrb8gq
I think you should add a thing that add the capacity of the line in the "Cosmic Express" level parts.
Love all the references. This does a good job of building off the original but it does an awful job at introducing elements from it. You should ask people to play the original first. If they have, they'll have a blast.
Thanks for the feedback. The spoiler warning screen was added in the V1.02 update
Will this compile on a linux?
A Linux build is possible but I do not plan to maintain a Linux version (you can directly compile it from the source code if you have Godot)
I dont understand the rules. Why is there no explanation whatsoever?
It is supposed to teach you through levels instead of text, like in the original game.
I dont know the original and although I'm good with logic, the game failed to teach me by itself ;)
Where can I find the original?
https://store.steampowered.com/app/210970/The_Witness/
Here you go :)
I'm posting a Let's Play video. Very well done and I enjoyed the game!
The only thing that confused me was the Tetris judging rules for ghosts.Thank you for playing. We hope you can participate in future witcup events.
😄
Thanks for reporting! It is a bug as the regions are not correctly calculated after we updated the puzzle validator. It affects all ghost puzzles.
It has been fixed in version 1.01, please download the updated version above. Thanks again for the bug report.
I think it's fixed. Thanks for the quick action.
I can't play my level, the game is too massive
Also, any chance of keyboard controls?
Currently no, since irregular boards are hard to draw with keyboards
Would you mind marking the download as being an executable for Windows? It won't work in the itch app without that.
Good point. I think I have fixed it.