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.

We’ve gotten lots of requests to bring The Witness to Xbox One. People tweet at me about this all the time! So we are happy to say that this is happening soon: The Witness will be downloadable on Xbox One starting September 13, 2016.

The Witness is a pretty unconventional game. You wander through an open world, so you can explore whatever catches your eye. Throughout the island you’ll find many puzzles, all with different themes. But these puzzles aren’t just arbitrary and meaningless; they communicate ideas. As you play the game, you’ll find yourself absorbing a nonverbal language, and you’ll know what to do even if you can’t quite explain what you know.

In the process of releasing The Witness, we’ve learned a lot about the way people play it. Some people blaze through puzzles and finish the game in 25-30 hours; some people take their time really investigating details, and spend over 100 hours exploring, finding new things the whole time. To my surprise, The Witness is a really good game to play with a friend, even though I didn’t design it that way; we’ve received a lot of notes from people who had a great time playing with their wives/husbands/girlfriends/boyfriends.

This is a game containing a lot of surprises. I recommend going into it without spoilers. If you get stuck, or something seems difficult, you can turn around and go somewhere else, and come back to the hard problem later. Elsewhere on the island you might find clues to the thing you’re stuck on, and you may have a very enjoyable experience when you make the right connections. On the other hand, if you look for answers in online videos and online forums, you’re likely to have an empty experience — you’ll know the answer, but you will have skipped over the good part of the experience. The most enjoyable part of this game is what happens in your mind when connections come together.