Upcoming PC and PS4 game The Witness, which is said to be inspired by one of the best-selling PC games of all time - Myst - has had some new content revealed. Rather than a trailer, the new footage is actually a “long screenshot,” basically a lengthy panoramic shot along the coastline.
The Witness is set for release on 26 January. Like Myst, the game is a first-person exploration puzzler set on a mysterious island. The final game will have about 650 puzzles to work through, although the player doesn’t need to complete them all to finish the game, and there will be about 80 to 100 hours of total gameplay available. The game will apparently contain one particular puzzle that the developer claims less than 1 percent of players will be able to solve.
The game is the creation of Jonathan Blow, the man behind the brilliant time-manipulating, puzzle-platformer Braid. Blow said on his blog that while The Witness’ launch date will be for digital distribution, there may be a physical boxed version available at a later date.
"We need all the time we can get up until the release date in order to get all the finishing touches into the game; but because of the lead-time involved in physical manufacturing and distribution, we would have to freeze the game right about now in order to have it on store shelves for the release date," Blow writes. "Or we could delay the digital release date in order to wait for the physical. But I don't see a good reason to do either of those things."
Blow first started work on The Witness back in 2009, and originally gave Christmas 2011 as a release date. He said the seven years of development was due to the game becoming so much bigger than he initially anticipated.
Blow said the team is using this final month of development to finish voiceovers, add language support and make some tweaks to the gameplay. With first-person puzzlers such as The Talos Principle proving extremely popular, it looks as if the genre is experiencing a resurgence of late.
https://www.techspot.com/news/63251-myst-inspired-game-witness-gets-new-long-screenshot.html
