Braid and The Witness a short comparison in World Building.

Braid (Jonathan Blow, 2008) is all about the idea of forgiveness and how people can be quite unforgiving. People often say that they wish they could go back in time and change things and Braid quite literally allows the player to go back and correct their mistakes by changing the flow of time. This game and its puzzles are all focussed on the ability to change time either to correct a mistake or use this ability to progress further in the game. While this can be fun, it is also quite restricting for idea creation for puzzles for the creator and runs the risk of becoming repetitive.
The Witness (Jonathan Blow, 2016) is a much slower paced game with a lot more puzzles that vary in complexity. Much like Braid these puzzles get more complex as the player progresses, yet the mechanics behind solving them are relatively simple: the player must find and trace the outline of shapes in order to solve puzzles. Much like Braid this is a very simple mechanic and not complex for the player to grasp and allows for the generation of many puzzles and variance in complexity.
The Witness came from the idea of games like Arx Fatalis (Raphael Colantonio, 2002) and the line tracing mechanic and to make simple, yet challenging and fun game. The gesturing mechanic for the Witness produced some problems for the creator like how does the player trace lines freely on the screen in order to complete the puzzle? How this was solved was limiting the puzzle to strict shapes on screen so a gamepad or mouse would be able trace the required lines perfectly.
In The Witness the puzzles seem a lot more varied, pleasing to complete and non-restrictive purely for being in a 3D world which allows for more variety in puzzle creation than the 2D world of Braid. In Braid the creator was restricted to a side scrolling 2D plane and was very limited by the space available to him where as in The Witness, the entire world he had created was his to play with.
Jonathan had the idea for the Witness during the creation of Braid and he wanted both the linear puzzle solving and hidden secrets to be just as important as each other. To utilise this he took these secrets and hid them in the environment of The Witness, something he was less able to do as effectively in Braid. What he wanted to convey was the environment would tell how to the solve the puzzle you were working on, for example: climbing to the top of a mountain and looking down from the top shows the player a pattern so they can complete a puzzle.
I feel that Jonathan has learnt a lot from Braid and applied it to The Witness; by expanding his world into a 3D environment, he has opened up a plethora of opportunities for great puzzle creation and created a beautiful world in which to play.

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