The Witness is a game where you explore a mysterious island and solve puzzles. Thematically, it’s a game about epiphany, that leap your mind makes when you instantly go from confusion to understanding.

The Witness takes place in an open world, so that you can go wherever you want.

For a puzzle game, this is nice, because it means the developers can include real puzzles that challenge and surprise you. In a linear game, if you get stuck on a puzzle, you are usually just stuck unless you look up the answer; this is why many linear games shy away from puzzles with non-obvious solutions. In The Witness, we can make puzzles as difficult or as subtle as we want, because if you are stuck in an area, you can simply go somewhere else.

Some puzzles in The Witness are hard, but some are easy. However, even the easy puzzles are interesting, because every puzzle has a little bit of communication wrapped inside it. So when you work through a bunch of puzzles in the game, you have also experienced a flow of ideas, presented to you at a high density.

The Witness deliberately riffs on several traditional elements of game design, and one of those elements is the classic audio log, where you are wandering along and you find a recording that was placed there by someone before. The Witness has recordings like this, but let’s just say they are done in a highly non-traditional way. When you first encounter them you won’t find much in the way of answers, but, if you keep looking, you will eventually be able to piece together what’s going on.

These are the folks whose fine voicework you will hear in these recordings:

• Ashley Johnson, who you may know as Ellie from The Last of Us, or from her roles in Tales from the Borderlands and Infamous First Light. She also plays the smartest person on the hit TV show Blindspot.
• Phil LaMarr, who I best know as Marvin from Pulp Fiction, but who you may know as Vamp in Metal Gear Solid 2 and 4, or as Ratbag from Shadow of Mordor. He also played Hermes in Futurama and Ollie Williams in Family Guy!
• Matthew Waterson, who played very English person Sir Lucan in The Order: 1886, an has recently acted in Fallout 4 and Halo 5.
• Terra Deva, an oft-performing musician, including recent hit single “At Night” with the swiss group Shakedown (though she doesn’t play music in The Witness because we don’t have music in The Witness! She is acting!) and veteran of… The Mickey Mouse Club!!!! (Among many other places!)

We recorded these sessions at Warner Bros. Studios. Our voice director was Liam O’Brien, who has also done quite a bit of acting in games himself. Pierce O’Toole acted as the great force of organization throughout the process and many things would have gone worse were it not for him!

Having said all this, I will warn you that the story in The Witness, such as it is, is fairly subtle and happens mostly implicitly. You really have to explore and read between the lines to know what’s going on. So do not expect a traditional game story like The Last of Us or The Order! All that said, we are very happy to have these actors lending their talents to our game, and I look forward to release when you’ll see what we’ve been up to.