It’s been a long time coming but Thelka Inc.’s The Witness, developed by Jonathan Blow of Braid fame, is finally available on iOS retailing for $9.99.

Marketed as a game with 500 puzzles and which “treats your time as precious”, The Witness essentially places you on an island rife with mystery. How you got there and who you are is a mystery but by solving the puzzles on the island, you may just find the key to returning home.

The Witness first launched in January 2016 and was critically acclaimed for its smart implementation of perspective and logical puzzles along with a beautiful aesthetic and soundtrack. Whether you’re playing it on iOS and PC, the game offers an incredibly meaty experience that should satisfy any fan of adventure or puzzle games.

The Witness is also available on Android for $13.50 for those interested. How well the game has been optimized for iOS remains to be seen but it only takes up 2.32 GB of space.

Acclaimed first person puzzler The Witness, from Braid creator Jonathan Blow and Thekla Inc, has been available for PC, Xbox One and PS4 since 2016. In fact, it recently released for macOS and Android in 2017. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like it will be heading to the Nintendo Switch any time soon.

When asked on Twitter about the possibility of a port for the Switch, Blow simply said that, “We are not working on such a port at this time.” While he didn’t outright squash plans for The Witness to come to Nintendo’s hybrid console, it doesn’t seem like it’s something that’s on the cards.

If you haven’t played The Witness, then you can read our official review of the game here. The game was critically acclaimed for its wordless narrative, innovative puzzles that relied on observation and perspective, and the gorgeous art style.

Would you like to see it on Switch in the future? Let us know in the comments.

The PlayStation 4 Pro may not be a hardware beast, but it definitely seems to be delivering some serious oomph and eye candy. A lot of this is because of some shortcuts and handy tricks that Sony have incorporated and embedded into the architecture of the new system itself, such as the much vaunted checkerboard rendering technique, which lets the system upscale graphics to 4K resolutions very effectively, without much in the way of a hit to resources.

Or at least, that’s been the understanding so far- as it turns out, that may not be entirely true. Posting on his blog, Jonathan Blow, the developer of The Witness, the acclaimed puzzle game that launched on PS4 and PC earlier this year, and which will be upgraded for Pro as well, explained that checkerboarding isn’t as ‘free’ as one might thing- there are still trade offs to be made.

“I think it depends on the particular game and engine,” he said. “Different rendering pipelines are structured differently; for some pipelines, the cost of adding checkerboard rendering would be very low, because they are already computing a lot of the information that checkerboard rendering needs. For other pipelines the cost might be higher. In our case we’re just not sure of the total cost yet, but we think it is probably high enough that we may prefer to do a straight upscale. But we’re not completely sure.

“(It is true that, as Sony has announced, the PS4 Pro provides hardware support for checkerboard rendering that makes it faster than it would otherwise be. I think in some places I have seen the rumor that checkerboard is completely free, but I would consider that an exaggeration: the cost is going to vary per game. Unfortunately due to NDAs I can’t provide details; I can’t say anything more about Sony technologies than what they have announced. It is definitely true that if you had a game running on the original PS4, and the developer wants to do the most straightforward thing to make the game look better on the Pro, that developer could enable checkerboard rendering and the game will look better and run faster; so it’s “free” in that sense. But if you are going to get picky about how you are spending the GPU memory and bandwidth of the new machine, then there are tradeoffs here, like with anything.)”

So it sounds like there are a lot of trade offs to be made- and that there are a lot of alternative ways that that extra power could be used and utilized by developers in their games. It should be interesting to see how the PlayStation 4 Pro is utilized by game makers in the days to come.

Jonathan Blow’s gorgeous The Witness is basically the perfect puzzle game– and judging by just how pretty it looks, and how it has so many perspective based puzzles, it also seems like it would be a game perfect for VR. Sadly, the developers don’t seem to be too keen on VR support for the title, citing multiple problems that would arise if they were to do so.

“VR is actually quite problematic for The Witness (outside of the broader issues that current seated or room-scale VR is just bad for navigating any huge open-world environment in first person) in that some of the alignment-puzzles (I won’t go into spoilers) can be “cheated” by crouching down, or tilting your head etc,” said The Witness programmer Andrew Smith in a Reddit AMA.

Smith did concede, however, that The Witness’ artstyle would lend itself wonderfully well to VR.

“On the upside, The Witness’ geometry-heavy art style works really well in VR where a lot of traditional methods, like normalmaps, lose their magic.”

Continuing on about why VR would not add anything to VR, Smith said, “The Witness can be played in VR, but its far from optimal because it was very much designed to be a traditional non-VR experience.” According to Smith, the best VR games are those that are built from the ground up for the format- not ones that had VR tacked on to them post facto. Think the difference between Avatar and just about every other 3D movie ever made.

Smith also discussed the issue of movement in VR, which would create a problem for a game like The Witness, which is after all a game with boundless free movement over an entire island.

“Any kind of free navigation in VR is a hard problem. If you move around with a gamepad, but can move your head freely, what happens when you move your character up to an in-game wall and then lean forwards to stick your head through it? Should we disconnect the camera from the head tracking before it passes through the wall? Or do we move the collision boundaries in so you can’t get close enough to any object to do that? Both are pretty bad options.

“Stuff like this is why most current games are designed around seated or room-scale, where the real bounds are known. It’ll be interesting to see what people come up with as solutions to this stuff.”

It does sound like game design will need to be fundamentally rethought when it comes to VR- and also that for the time being, existing games are best off without post processing conversion to VR- or VR would suffer the same fate that 3D did.

Jonathan Blow’s The Witness has sold more in its first week than Braid did within its first year and the creator has revealed that for PS4 and PC sales have added up to more than 100,000 units thus far.

In a recent blog post, Blow did outline the current game’s success, revealing how it hasn’t quite covered all costs yet. “The game is doing great. That doesn’t mean we have broken even on our development cost yet. Because our development budget was so high, $5 million in revenue is not enough to recover it yet (because we split that revenue with the storefronts, we have to subtract VAT in Europe, etc).

“However, it is looking like, as time goes on, we should break even and make a comfortable safety margin on top of that, which will allow us to make more nice games in the future — unless some kind of world economic disaster happens.”

Thoughts on the same? Let us know in the comments.

Thekla Inc.’s The Witness is a pretty big success for the studio. According to creator Jonathan Blow, the game has already sold more in its first week than Braid1 – Blow’s first game – sold in its first year.

Speaking on Twitter, Blow stated that, “It’s hard to talk about numbers without breaking NDAs, but The Witness is on track to sell more in a week than Braid sold in its first year, and Braid was a hit indie game! (I’ll let you know if this officially happens!) Which is not to be too money-oriented, it’s just great that we’ll be able to make the next game at a comparable budget level (maybe bigger, we’ll see!)”

The Witness has been praised with much critical acclaim, especially for its art style and puzzle treatment. The game is currently available on PC and PS4; it’s expected to hit iOS and even Xbox One (if leaked listings are to be believed).

Jonathan Blow’s incredible puzzle game, The Witness, just came out. It’s a gorgeous and hugely ambitious game, one that has been years in the making, and undoubtedly cost a pretty penny to make. That cost was probably the reason that the game costs $40- a cost which is completely justified, but for many still hard to swallow.

Unfortunately, it seems a lot of those people are trying to have their cake and eat it too, since Jonathan Blow is reporting on Twitter that The Witness is a victim of some major piracy. “It seems The Witness is the #1 game on a certain popular torrent site,” he said, before warning fans that this could have repercussions on future games that he makes. “Unfortunately this will not help us afford to make another game! 🙁

“I’m glad that a lot more people will be experiencing the game! But I also want to be able to make another comparable game next! Just sayin’.”

Game piracy is, unfortunately, a major issue, even now, when so many strides against it have been made. To anybody thinking of pirating Blow’s latest, I say this- it is a great game, and far more deserving of its cost than most major games released today. Please consider spending money on it.

The Witness is out now on the PlayStation 4 and PC.

Jonathan Blow’s The Witness is a gorgeous, beautiful game, a work of art that is a marvel of passive, interactive storytelling, and one which respects the player and their ability to think for themselves. It also, it seems, makes a lot of players sick.

The game’s first person movement, coupled with apparently its quick movement and camera speed, has been making a lot of players motion sick; in the absence of any options to increase the game’s FOV, players have been left without recourse of any kind, meaning if you are affected by the motion sickness and also want to play the game further, well, you cannot.

The developer is working on fixing those issues. On Twitter, Jonathan Blow confirmed that the team is working on ironing out the issues causing motion sickness, but that it may take a while. So, if you’re one of the people affected? Hang in there. A fix is coming.

Jonathan Blow’s The Witness is nearly upon us and the Braid creator finally revealed through the game’s website how much players can be expected to pay.

The Witness will retail for $39.99/€36.99/£29.99 when it releases. Pre-orders have already gone up on Steam, the Humble Store and the official website for PC. As for PS4 pre-orders, well, according to the studio, “apparently developers have to set those up months in advance and we didn’t know that!”

Blow also noted that those who pre-order The Witness get “the warm fuzzy feeling that you have preordered the game. (And that’s all). So it’s exactly the same as buying the game at launch, except earlier.”

The Witness releases on January 26th for PS4 and PC. It will be releasing on iOS in the coming months and it’s recently been rated for the Xbox One. What are your thoughts on the game and will you pick it up? Let us know in the comments.

Jonathan Blow’s The Witness has been rated for the Xbox One by the Entertainment Software Rating Board, which pretty much means it will be coming to the Xbox One soon.

This doesn’t mean it’ll be out alongside the PC and PS4 versions though as the development studio Thekla Inc. stated that it would be out on other platforms later. For now, if you want to experience the first person puzzler, you’ll need to pick it up on January 28th for either PC or PS4.

The Witness is the next big adventure from the creator of Braid and will take place on an island full of puzzles. Depending on how you play, the game can last for either 20 hours or 100 hours, indicating the amount of additional content available. How will it fare when it releases? Stay tuned for more information on the same in the coming weeks and let us know whether you’ll be picking up The Witness.