![]() ![]() He adds, ‘I understand that The Looker isn’t exactly striking while the iron is hottest, but I think that is part of the reason players like it so much: it’s not just an opportunistic goof on the hottest trend, but a high-bandwidth parody that engages deeply enough with the source material that it calls up its memory instantly.’ The Looker. ‘ The Witness has certainly stuck in my head for quite some time it has paid back more than enough to cover its rent.’ He said he learned the tools and techniques for this by studying The Witness and Blow’s previous game, Braid (2008). He explained that one of the main challenges of making The Looker was mimicking this approach, communicating nonverbally with the player through game mechanics while doing so clearly enough to tell a joke. The Witness’ design is very unified in that it conveys its rules without teaching you and expresses its ideas without telling you.’ The Witness. What spoke to me the most was its exploration of ideas and design in a way that could only be done in a game. ![]() ‘It is clear that nothing in the game is there by accident. ‘I am a big fan of The Witness and its design,’ Lovell told me over email. And it’s funnier as a result, because it knows the exact things to make fun of, and how to subvert your expectations in clever and surprising ways. His parody is too steeped in the same puzzle design for its mocking to be anything other than affectionate. It just wants to deflate its bloated sense of self-importance.īradley Lovell, the one-person creator of The Looker, clearly both loves and respects The Witness. The Looker knows that The Witness is a great game. Images: Bradley Lovellįor all its pointed taking of the piss, The Looker isn’t blind to what makes The Witness so good. Its subsequent puzzles – and the jokes they contain – work because they draw upon the same ideas The Witness explored, of how to teach the player your rules, how to subvert them, and how these principles reveal new ways of looking at that world. The Looker gets its cheap gags about ‘you’re just drawing a line lol’ out of the way early. As you interact with the early panels and discover that it’s possible to pass their challenges by simply drawing a line from start to finish outside the confines of the maze, you suspect it is likely to be little more than a one-trick pony – a single, yet admittedly quite funny, joke.īut further exploration uncovers something far more interesting. It, too, is set on an island decorated with a familiar-looking stone courtyard, castle walls and hedge maze, and dotted throughout is a series of panels leading you to an eerily deserted environment. The Looker, released in June 2022, is first and foremost a parody of The Witness. For all these reasons, it’s incredibly easy to mock. In a sense, it reveals lead designer Jonathan Blow reflecting on his own iterative creative process. These panels, the island across which they are painstakingly placed, the audio logs you find, and the hidden videos you unlock, form a thoughtful yet contradictory meditation on the scientific method. The Witness (2016) is a meticulously crafted puzzle game where you solve puzzle panels by drawing a line through a maze according to an escalating collection of rules. ![]()
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