"I work very differently from a lot of designers," says Blow. "A lot of people when they sit down to design a puzzle game, they try to think up some smart things that are hard to figure out, stuff where people will be like ‘Gotcha!' and figure it out and feel smart themselves. That's step one. Then step two, they think of how to teach those mechanics to players."
Blow cites Valve as one of the best developers at this style of design, although he notes with a sigh that they "haven't designed a game in a long time." But Blow himself doesn't believe in designing this way, because he thinks it can lead to overly conservative, hand-holding gameplay.
"The Witness is the anti-Nintendo," Blow says with a smile. "Nintendo has to have a little fairy follow you around and tell you everything all the time. Those kind of games drive me nuts. This is going the other way. It's more like the original Legend of Zelda, which didn't tell you anything. But at some point — a lot of companies do this, they start making a game, and they put it through focus testing, and any time someone gets stuck you consider it bad and change the game. That leads to extremely conservative, mechanical games."
Blow is certain that players will get stuck in The Witness. He's just not afraid of it; this is why he's designed it as an open-world game.
"If a game's really linear, and you have something really hard in the middle and someone gets stuck, you sort of just screwed them," he says. "And different people get stuck on different things, so it's not like if I'm a good designer I'll design something that no one gets stuck on. If you're going to design something that no one gets stuck on, it has to not really be a puzzle."
Instead, Blow has embraced non-linear design. When a player gets stuck in any particular area, they have the freedom to run to a different area, a different set of puzzles, and try to solve those instead.
"I like open-world games," Blow says. "It's the coolest thing in the world to see something in the game that's really far away and just go there. That used to not be technologically possible except by cheating, but now it's possible."
And sure enough, you can go pretty much anywhere you can see in The Witness from the very start of the game. Want to run off to the windmill near the center of the island? Feel free. See a shipwreck off the coast that you'd like to explore? It's all yours. Blow has built in a generously speedy run button that will allow players to cross from one end of the island to the other in just a few minutes. It's far from the biggest landmass ever seen in an open-world game, but to Blow size isn't the point; density is.
"I don't like developers competing over how big their world is," he says. "A bigger world leads to a lot of downtime or boring time as a player, because you've got to go somewhere. Or you get something like Skyrim that has fast travel, but then it's not really a world anymore."
Instead, Blow has built a more reasonably-sized world in The Witness, but one that has puzzles to solve at every turn and many recognizable landmarks, such as a giant castle or a set of desert ruins. Different areas are set apart from each other both by distinct looks and colors — a green swamp, a vibrant red forest, etc. — and by puzzles that follow a certain thread of logic from beginning to end.
For his part, Blow says he designs puzzles to be "first and foremost a representation of an idea, non-verbally." Rather than just being a tricky thing for a player to solve, he wants each puzzle to say something to the player. He does this by actually writing out a sentence for each puzzle.
"When I sit down to start designing a puzzle, the first thing I ask is what the sentence describing it would say," Blow explains. "It might be like ‘OK, you can separate black spots from white spots. And they can be in groups. And it can matter what direction you wind around.' Each of those is a specific statement. Those statements get more subtle and sophisticated as the game goes on, so that by the end, if you were to try to say what you were doing when with one of the more complicated puzzles in the game, it would probably be like two paragraphs long."
