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Jonathan Blow’s The Witness has a puzzle ‘almost nobody’ will ever solve

The Witness looks pretty stunning, and it'll be tough as well.
Image Credit: Jonathan Blow

If you have a lot of free time on your hands, you might just ace The Witness, the upcoming PlayStation 4 and PC first-person puzzler from Braid creator Jonathan Blow — but you’ll be in a very small minority if you do.

Speaking to the PlayStation Blog, Blow explained that The Witness — the game he’s been working on since 2008 — has one particular puzzle that “almost nobody” will ever figure out. That sounds like a challenge to the gaming community — especially the many completionists out there — and it’ll be interesting to find out just how tough The Witness really is when it releases January 26.

Blow said that he didn’t cut any puzzles from the game to make it more accessible, but that didn’t stop him from removing a lot of content, mostly due to quality control.

“Usually, if I cut things, it’s just because I don’t think they’re very good,” he said. “I’ve cut hundreds of things from the game. Usually, I cut them early — I start experimenting with something and decide I don’t like it. But there’s at least one puzzle in the game right now that almost nobody — like 1 percent of players — will ever be able to figure out.”


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Players can expect to spend around 100 hours in The Witness if they want to fully complete it, according to Blow. How many will make it that far remains to be seen.