Despite officially taking the wraps off his new game, Jonathan Blow is still playing coy with real info. What we do have, however, is a title – The Witness – and a whole lot of philosophical mumbo jumbo.
As of today, we still know more about what Braid creator Jonathan Blow’s new game, The Witness, is not than what it is. As revealed by previously posted job listings, we can infer that Blow does not want The Witness to be a game with “Girls With Big Tits; Barbarians Wielding Axes, Covered in Blood; Aliens; Space Ships; Gangsters Getting Shot in the Face; Orcs; Giant Robots; and, of course, Postapocalyptic Wastelands.”
Now that Blow has officially revealed the game and launched a teaser site of sorts, we know a little bit more. For one, there’s the title. Then a remark that the game is “An exploration-puzzle game on an uninhabited island” and is due to be released on multiple platforms possibly in late 2011, which is when Blow is hoping the game will be finished. Yeah, it’s gonna be awhile.
The site just has a title and some text, nothing else to see, really. Blow says “the game is very visual, and once we have developed those visuals to the point where they are representative, I’ll start posting them there.” So keep waiting.
Anything else to go on? Well, the site launches with a mysterious philosophical quote that’s a passage from the Daodejing, a classical Chinese text attributed to a fellow (or fellows) called Laozi. What does the Daodejing have to do with this game? The passage quoted describes a “something” that existed before everything else, a “something” that encompasses “solitude” and is “vast.” Sounds kinda like it could apply to the island setting of the game, to take the first interpretation that comes to my mind.
