The game has you control an unnamed, unseen Player Character stranded on an island filled with beautiful vegetation and buildings but completely devoid of human life. Scattered across the island are audio recordings offering the esoteric backstory of this place and numerous puzzles that must be solved in order to progress further into various sections of the world. The player must ultimately activate seven of eleven total beacons in order to gain access to the island's mountain and discover just what this place is and what happened here.
The Witness began development shortly after the release of Braid; in all, seven years were spent making the game, resulting in a near-four year Schedule Slip for its release date. The game itself is a Call-Back to adventure games such as Myst, albeit through Blow's particular lens.
In 2022, the Deconstruction Game The Looker was released, being an Affectionate Parody of The Witness.
Not to be confused with the 1983 Interactive Fiction game from Infocom with the same name.
Tropes featured in The Witness include:
- Absurdly Long Wait: If you want 100% completion (ie. solve every single puzzle in the game) you'd better be prepared for a ridiculously long wait. One of the puzzles requires watching a video of an eclipse that's over 50 minutes long. (The camera must be pointing at the video the entire time or else the puzzle cannot be completed. Meaning the player cannot do anything else in the game while waiting.) Speedrunning of this game has a 99.8% category which requires solving every puzzle in the game except this one (because the speedrunner literally cannot do anything during this puzzle than wait for over 50 minutes. In fact, there's a 100% speedrun
that has the speedrunner get up from their chair, leave their house, order fast food, come back, and eat it, all in the duration of this puzzle.) - Alien Geometries: The resort unlocked in by the Easter Egg puzzle in the starting area. The walk from the entrance to the first scenic overlook is along a flat, level floor, but the overlook is about fifty feet above the entrance, and the structure is invisible from outside it. After this first overlook, there is an entrance to the mountain's caves, despite the mountain being in the opposite direction. Part of this cave features Wrap Around physics, as looking to the left or right will allow you to see The Challenge from different sides. Other scenic outlooks wrap around the entire island despite the very little distance traveled by the player, and this is before entering the Void Between the Worlds.
- All the Worlds Are a Stage:
- The town serves as one of these, requiring knowledge of all the mechanics introduced over the rest of the island to gain access to its beacon. Of course, unless the player is going for 100% Completion they can skip the town entirely as only seven beacons must be lit.
- The inside of the mountain also qualifies, with a healthy bit of Interface Screw thrown in for good measure.
- Antepiece: Most areas begin with a short set of puzzles, which are so simple that can be solved without understanding the area's rules yet, but usually show the player how future puzzles in that area will work. What's more, the game's starting area is composed of basic maze puzzles which serve as the basis for every following puzzle in the game, and right after leaving the starting area, there are two set of puzzles that teach about squares and dots respectively, which are involved in lots of puzzles in the laser areas.
- Anti-Frustration Features:
- There are two sets of puzzles in the Castle, though only one of them needs to be completed in order to open its beacon.
- Many puzzles require you to stand at the exact right spot to solve them. On some of them, if you stand close enough to the right spot, the game will pull your character to the right spot when you start the puzzle. In some cases, it's to give you a hint to how to solve the puzzle. In one case, it's to save you from wasting an hour waiting for an object to move to the right spot in case you happen to be off alignment even slightly.
- If you're stepping off a moving platform that would leave you stuck with no way to step on again, the platform will automatically move back to you. Examples are the corner platform in the swamp or the elevator in the greenhouse bunker.
- Archaic Weapon for an Advanced Age: One of the stone statues in the Keep has an earpiece and is gripping a sword with his left hand, instead of a taser or a gun.
- Artistic License – Biology: Out of all the rooms inside the greenhouse, the one with green light is probably the most prominent: it provides the main difficulty for the elevator puzzle, it's harder to reach compared to the other rooms, it contains an audio log and an environmental puzzle, and it's the only one which can be seen from the outside. It's ironic that the green room was chosen to be this way, considering it's also the most unrealistic, since green light is not a good choice for a greenhouse. Chlorophyll absorbs light throughout the visible spectrum, but mostly in the blue and red regions and very little in the green region (in fact, of all the many pigments that plants use to absorb light, none of them absorb much green light).note Plants look green because they reflect green rather than use it.
- Author Tract:
- The lengthy audio excerpt from NASA astronaut and aeronautical engineer Russell Schweickart's No Frames, No Boundaries, with how interconnected we can become with our surroundings, comes off as this. Bonus points for the audio recorder containing this message appearing on the top of the mountain, after you've probably explored everything else.
- The projection room, where solving one puzzle six different ways shows videos elaborating on the theme of the game, including James Burke contemplating "the key to change is the key of the world" (from the "Yesterday, Tomorrow and You" episode of Connections); and of American guru Gangaji, who implores her followers to stop looking for what they want, "not cynically, but innocently and openly."
- The lengthy audio excerpt from NASA astronaut and aeronautical engineer Russell Schweickart's No Frames, No Boundaries
- Beautiful Void: Lots of buildings and mechanisms abound, with nary a person in sight.
- Brutal Bonus Level: The Underground Maze, unlocked by activating all eleven lasers, turning on a hidden switch at the top of the mountain, and then solving an otherwise-deactivated panel inside the mountain. It contains easily the hardest puzzles in the entire game and includes The Challenge, a particularly nasty set of panels activated by a record player that plays classical music. In addition to all of them being randomized and extremely difficult, you have to finish the entire series before the music stops; let the music finish or pause the game and you have to start the entire series over again.
Your sanity wishes you the best of luck. - Bubblegloop Swamp: A swampy area is found in the easternmost part of the island.
- Call-Back: One puzzle is solved with the help of a set of slow moving clouds, in a nod to a similar maneuver made by Blow in his previous game, Braid.
- Central Theme: Many of the audio logs revolve around zen and introspection, with the lack of music, eerie atmosphere and simplistic looking puzzles allowing focus on what's going on directly. Even the developers of the island experience some of it while working on the simulation. The island itself is supposed to be this personified for whomever is within.
- Damn You, Muscle Memory!: The puzzles in The Challenge change each time you have to restart it. Pausing the game will count as a fail.
- Death Mountain: In the southeast lies a mountain, which you ultimately must scale to find out what happened.
- Developer's Foresight:
- In the treehouse, bridges made from puzzle panels can be rearranged by solving the panels in different ways. If a bridge would need to pass through another on its way to its new position, the other bridge temporarily retracts itself to let the first pass.
- If you change the boat's destination to go back the way you came, it normally turns around in place before proceeding. If you do this while passing through the shipwreck, where space is tight, the boat drives backwards until it's in open water before turning around.
- Diegetic Interface: While you automatically center in on some of the panels, others can be activated and interacted with from different perspectives. Some late-game puzzles will require you to solve them from awkward angles.
- Disconnected Side Area:
- The mangrove with the treehouse has its land access initially locked. You must reach it by boat, then unlock a Door to Before once there.
- A good portion of the tunnels under the windmill are initially inaccessible. They must be entered from the system of caves underneath the island, which can be only accessed after crossing the facility under the mountain.
- Drone of Dread: As there is no score, the environments will give off subtle ambient cues — and some of the plot-heavy areas fall squarely into this trope.
- Easter Egg:
- The sand castle from the cover of Braid is found in the sand pits of a glass blowing workshop.
- Several tableaux appear throughout the game and require the player to stand in a specific position in order to see them.
- Edge Gravity: The player is entirely incapable of falling off of anything. Then again, they can't jump, either.
- Elaborate Underground Base: The high-tech complex inside the mountain.
- Empathic Environment: The items in the central lake will change and develop when certain tasks are completed, like turning on a laser or opening one of the vault doors. The boat's map reveals that the lake is exactly the same shape as the island; it is itself a map of the island.
- Empty Room Psych: Solving the apple tree puzzles simply leads to a random table littered with drawings of human anatomy; there is no beacon, or indeed anything of use, in sight. For what it's worth, the logic of these puzzles is reused for one specific puzzle in the Town.
- Fauxlosophic Narration: The game is littered with audio recorders that read out quotations from the likes of theoretical physicist Albert Einstein, NASA astronaut Russell Schweickart, spiritual teacher Gangaji and astronomer Arthur Eddington; the quotes provide a very esoteric story for the game itself.
- Forest of Perpetual Autumn: The game has an autumn-themed area in its Patchwork Map.
- Gainax Ending: The standard ending includes a flyover of the island wherein the entire thing resets and the player is returned to the starting point, as an excerpt of the Diamond Sutra is read.note
- Genre Throwback: Blow made this to be like an old Adventure Game with all the "bad bits" — such as creating too many distractions in the field of view, and being Unwinnable by Design — taken out.
- Ghost Ship: There's a derelict ship stationed in the northeast section of the island, accesible through a back door in the keep which leads a path across the cliffs. The game doesn't explain how it ended up in that state. It's somewhat empty, as it doesn't have any laser-related puzzles, containing only a few optional things such as an audio log, a discarded panel with a triangle puzzle and several environmental puzzles. However, what makes it creepy, apart from the feeling of abandonement, is the strange noises that can be heard in the cabin. They are merely dripping water and the ship creaking, and they're involved in one particular sound puzzle that's also found there, but the fact that no other part of the game features such sounds is quite disturbing.
- Golden Ending: Completing the game normally returns the player to the start of the game with a 0 Puzzles Solved progress status. The true ending is revealed by unlocking a hidden exit concealed in the starting area. This ending also allows players to piece together the game's plot.
- Guide Dang It!:
- The mechanic of the orange triangle symbolnote can be hard to ascertain as puzzles with those are at first only found in oft-obscure locations across the map, where they're too simple to infer the mechanic from. This becomes a problem later on, as knowledge of the mechanic is essentially required to solve the puzzle that unlocks the Underground Maze as well as several puzzles within it.
- Similarly, the rules for the ⅄ symbol, as well as the hollow polyomino shapes, can be confusing at first, as they interact with other symbols sharing the same region in some way.note
- The game generally does a good job of giving you sufficient clues to the solution of any given puzzle, but there are definite exceptions. The puzzles in the jungle, for example, appear to have no visible cue, and that's because they don't; they're the only puzzles in the game (with the exception of one in the Keep and the infamous Red Door puzzle) that rely on an AUDIO cue, specifically the chirping of birds in the background.
- The aforementioned Red Ship Door puzzle, which Blow himself hinted to be the single most difficult puzzle in the game. One of the main reasons is that the information you need to even understand what it is about are to be found into two different areas of the game. One of these is however inaccessible at the start of the game, while the other is rather small and well hidden and it's easy to miss it while exploring the way bigger and prominent landmarks of the game (like the ship itself).
- Hacking Mini Game: What the game essentially consists of. Everything from doors and elevators to windmills and lasers are "hacked" and activated by solving the attached puzzle panels.
- Hard Light: The gate blocking the way out of the starting area is made of this. As are the bridges inside the mountain.
- Hedge Maze: The keep on the north side of the island features two different ways of activating the laser. One of them involves navigating through such mazes and inputting a specific path into the panel.
- Hidden in Plain Sight: The environmental puzzles.
- Homage: Blow said that this is one to Myst and first-person 3D adventure games in general. Much of the imagery also brings to mind many classic Surrealist paintings.
- Ice-Cream Koan: Somewhat discussed in one of the audio recordings about Zen koans, which describe them as a sort of Logic Bomb wherein the point is for your mind to not dwell on the words too deeply.
- Interface Screw:
- Objects such as trees and rocks can block panels depending on what angle they are looked at, preventing one from drawing lines through the obstructing objects and forcing the player to find the proper angle to observe the panel from.
- The endgame area features increasingly broken puzzle panels whose grid rotates or moves, panels that flash rainbow colors and make it hard to discern the true color of symbols, and a set of panels which you control simultaneously and must solve all at once.
- Interface Spoiler: After a while you figure out that if a mechanism moves verrrry slowly, it means there's an environmental puzzle nearby that can only be solved while the mechanism is in motion (which would be difficult to solve if the mechanism was moving at a more normal speed).
- Island of Mystery: The game takes place in an island with both ancient ruins and abandoned technology, which features strange phenomena, such as the obelisks that are activated by drawing specific shapes around the island, as well as a high-tech complex inside the mountain.
- Jigsaw Puzzle Plot: In a very literal sense. Not only does one have to solve puzzles in order to uncover the plot, but the plot itself is a carefully hidden puzzle, buried in a hidden section of the mountain, found in the form of audio recorders that provide their own clues as to what happened.
- Jungle Japes: A jungle can be found in the southeast at the foot of the mountain.
- The Law of Conservation of Detail: Blow made a point of noting in the run-up to The Witness' release that adventure games of the past didn't use this trope well: they would either render too many things in the game environment, confusing players on what objects to interact with; or, if text based, have a text parser so rudimentary that it couldn't be programmed with all of the nuanced phrases a player may randomly come up with. In The Witness, anything that can be interacted with is generally easy to spot (even if it's not easy to solve).
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
- The prize for completing a hidden, difficult-to-achieve reward is a lecture that talks about why hidden, difficult-to-achieve rewards shouldn't be the coolest part of a game. Naturally, the hidden achievement was one of the most talked about part of the game from players, because it was so cool (and the lecture was actually well-researched, too.)
- One of the game's earliest secrets, a hidden area outside the walls of the opening area, includes an audio recording of a quote about 'the society of true searchers'.
- An audio recording on top of the mountain, from which the entire gameworld can be seen, has an audio recording about the mental influence of seeing the Earth from space.
- In-universe, the projection room contains a special puzzle with countless possible paths, only six of which (found in the vaults) unlock videos. The easiest projection room video to unlock begins with a dramatic orchestra note and an explosion, followed by the words, "Well, that's no better a solution than any of the others, is it?"
- Lighthouse Point: Interestingly, even though the game takes place in an island full of buildings, there's no lighthouse to be found. However, a peninsula in the southernmost section of the island features a ruined structure that is widely speculated to be a former lighthouse, considering its location (in a secluded peninsula which happens to be very close to the town).
- The Lost Woods: Forests make up the greater portion of the island, but the Jungle in particular epitomizes this. It's very easy to get lost in, and part of the difficulty of its line of puzzles is finding each set of puzzle panels in the first place.
- Lotus-Eater Machine: The island itself.
- Metapuzzle:
- While most puzzles in the game are self contained to an area, or are entirely environmental, there are a few environmental puzzles that require manipulating line puzzles to complete. Examples include adjusting a mirror to turn cloud to a different color in order to solve one of the environmental puzzles.
- One set of puzzles requires you to draw a path in order to create a path in the world to access more puzzles.
- Mind Screw: Many of the environmental puzzles come across as this, considering that you have to draw them on the sides of buildings, cracks in large objects, and even, in at least one case, the sun and that unlike most of the puzzles, which have a patient build-up, the game gives little indication that they even exist.note
- Moon Logic Puzzle: Usually averted. Even if a puzzle doesn't seem to make sense, there is a logical explanation for its mechanics. However, there's one particular puzzle in the jungle (specifically, the last puzzle in the first set) that's so excruciatingly hard and makes so little sense, that even the most hardcore fans who otherwise tell people not to use walkthroughs will make an exception with this puzzle, and often refer to it as "the one single puzzle I had to brute force". There have been
many debates, after figuring out the solution, about exactly why is right. The puzzle requires to input a five-note audionote into a panel that only has room for four notes (to complicate things further, there's another audio that is meant to be a distraction but does have four notes). The most commonly accepted explanation is that the puzzle asks you to think of the audio as one continuous sound, and sort of "plot" the local max and min pitches on the panel, although that goes against every single other puzzle in the area, whose rule is that the line has to match the notes precisely. - No Fair Cheating: If you pause at any point during The Challenge, the entire sequence resets and you have to start all over. The PS4 port has a sort of loophole by putting the console in rest mode, which suspends the game state and does not count as a pause. This was later patched in an update, mostly to the dismay of trophy hunters.note
- Noisy Nature: When walking around the jungle, you'll hear lots of bird sounds like chirps. Subverted in that, as you'll soon realize, they're actually artificial sounds created by speakers placed around the area.
- Not-Actually-Cosmetic Award: Completing the Challenge nets the player the final hexagonal puzzle for the projection room, which unlocks a 58-minute lecture on batteries, Shakespeare, rewards, and the concept of awe. Over a video of a solar eclipse. Which is part of an environmental puzzle. (As it happens, this lecture is Jonathan Blow's favourite of all time.) And you thought the cloud in Braid was bad... (To be fair, the puzzle in Braid required about two hours compared to the lecture in this game, and there was nothing in Braid to keep you occupied while waiting.
- Ontological Mystery: The player starts at the end of a dark metal tube shelter underground, opening doors to climb up onto a castle's patio. The normal ending returns the player to the same spot, undoing all of the work they have done. The hidden Golden Ending as well as hidden in-game audio reveal this area to be the starting point of an elaborate virtual reality simulation.
- Patchwork Map: There are an awful lot of different biomes close together on such a small island. It's possible to stand in one biome and see three others at any given time.
- Phrase Catcher: The tutorial panels for the white and black squares tend to invariably receive from Letsplayers a lot of jokes about the mechanic consisting of separating white and black items.
- Ruins for Ruins' Sake: The desert at the northwest part of the island has lots of ruins which don't seem to serve any apparent purpose.
- Scenery Porn: The island has a very beautiful, stylized look to it. As soon as you open the gate in the tutorial area, you're able to climb up on the second level of the starting point and look out at all of it.
- Sequence Breaking: Due to being able to activate a puzzle panel from any distance and the fact that the puzzles in the main game are not randomized, it is possible to complete the swamp area in under a minute. It is also possible to directly complete the last puzzle in the autumn forest without doing anything else (if you know the solution beforehand!), and the keep with only three puzzles instead of five. Needless to say, these skips are used heavily in speedruns.
- Set Piece Puzzle: The landscape is incorporated into many of the island's puzzles. And in plenty of instances, the landscape is the puzzle.
- Shifting Sand Land: The northwest portion of the island contains a desert and sandy cliffs, complete with a temple.
- Shout-Out: An old game by CBS Electronics called "Mountain King" featured a timed challenge, all while two classical music tracks sounded: "Anitra's Dance" and "In the Hall of the Mountain King", both from Edvard Grieg. Players who have made to the end of this game will find it similar to another timed challenge which also plays those two same tracks...
- Songs in the Key of Panic: A weird example, but "In the Hall of the Mountain King" is the last song to play during the Challenge. If the ending kicks in and you're not almost finished, it's your cue to give up and just start heading back to the record player.
- Techno Wreckage: All those wires and discarded panels scattered around the island definitely give this vibe, which only gets increased when you enter inside the mountain.
- The Tetris Effect: One of the themes this game has is about seeing patterns in a game all over the world. The solution for multiple puzzles involves getting hints from the game world outside them, such as from the shape of a tree or from chirping birds. Certain puzzles involve painting lines on the game world itself, like drawing a line using a river as a path. And, to really hammer this theme home, the secret ending involves a full motion video of a person walking around a home office, paying focused attention to any instance of something resembling one of The Witness's puzzles.
- Timed Mission: At least one door is timed and requires you to solve nearby puzzles in a specific fashion in order to get to it in time. There's also The Challenge, a sequence of randomized puzzles you have to complete before Grieg's "Anitra's Dance" and "Hall of the Mountain King" finish playing.
- Tree Top Town: The northeast portion, by the shipwreck, includes one, accessible only by boat.
- Trial-and-Error Gameplay: A few (optional) puzzles have hidden elements that light up only when you miss them.
- Try Everything:
- A few puzzles have few enough possible path combinations that it's entirely possible, albeit time-consuming, to brute-force them. Many sets of panels attempt to prevent this by shutting off the current panel on failure, making you have to return to the previous panel and re-solve it (your previous solution remains visible, though).
- Generally, the first few tutorial puzzles for each new symbol expect the player to brute-force them, then look back after three or four puzzles and spot the pattern that allows them to deduce the rule for that symbol.
- Tutorial Failure: The game tends not to explain game mechanics and instead use antepieces, by placing a series of simple puzzles at the beginning of each area that explain the basic mechanic relevant to the area, so that more complex puzzles can come after the player is already accustomed to the mechanic. However, there are several cases where some of these basic mechanics are not well explained, as many players seem to struggle in the same specific points due to not understanding what they’re supposed to do.
- The mechanic behind colored squares is that squares of different colors can’t be grouped together, lines must be drawn so that each section has only squares of a single color. However, the tutorial for squares features clearly defined sets of squares, and all solutions merely involve drawing a line at the intersection of those sets. Many players leave the starting area believing that the mechanic requires separating the sets, which later poses a problem when trying to open the doors for the quarry and the greenhouses. The puzzles there can’t be solved by just separating the sets, so the sets must be broken - which may leave a player stumbling for a while until the realization that it’s something allowed.
- The mechanic behind tetrominos is that lines must be drawn so that the different sections have the same shape as the tetromino. Players will soon understand that, when there are several tetrominos, the drawn sections can stack together, instead of having each tetromino enclosed in its own section separated from all others. However, something harder to understand is that the tetromino doesn’t have to be placed in the same shape that is forcing, as long as it’s inside the same drawn section as said shape. Coming to that realization is a big jump of logic; some players will soon make that jump, while many others will struggle a lot and get stuck for a while at the first puzzle that requires it. This is the only example here where the game actually tries to explain the conflicting mechanic, but even then, it’s only through one puzzle out of the fourteen that comprise the tutorial for tetrominos, so it doesn’t really work well.
- The mechanic behind stars is that each start must be grouped with one, and only one, figure of the same color as the star. This is the actual rule; however, 95% of the time, puzzles will merely require to group stars in pairs, so that the two stars satisfy each other. Since it takes a while for the game to move past that, by that time, it’s very easy for the player to have deeply ingrained the notion that rule is merely “group stars in pairs”. When the time of understanding the real rule comes, coming to the realization is another big jump of logic; again, some players will soon make that jump, while many others will struggle a lot and get stuck for a while. The most infuriating part is that this particular example seems to have been designed deliberately, as there’s a simple puzzle that could easily bridge said jump of logic, but the game places it right after the first puzzle that requires that jump, when it’s no longer needed.
- Underground Level: The caves underneath the island that are accessed through a passage at the bottom of the mountain.
- Unintentionally Unwinnable: The game generally makes a good effort to avoid having Permanently Missable Content, or letting players get stuck in areas. However, the swamp may be the exception: it's a tricky area to navigate, with several sections involving platforms that move when an associated panel is activated. The problem comes when said platforms can be triggered to move without the player standing on them (which is actually required for some of the environmental puzzles), and the control panel unable to be used to move the platform back. Sometimes, you may be able to cimcurvent this by taking a ride on the boat or using one of the unlockable shortcuts to get to the now unreachable location. If that's not the case, you're going to have a really bad time finding a spot which gives you the perspective to activate a panel from a long distance that doesn't even allow you to see what you're doing (and that's if you can remember what the solution was). This is a particularly painful example.
- Waiting Puzzle: A few optional puzzles require you to wait on a moving platform of some sort while other elements of the puzzle move in and out of view. One requires you to complete the Challenge (or obtain the reward through other means), and wait through the entire reward.
- Wham Line: "What?" The line appears on two audio logs. The first time it ends an audiolog about boats found in the treehouse area, and is the only one up to that point that'll do that. Until then, players are just expected to think the audiologs are just random banter, so the "What?" line comes off as a hook for something else going on. Later on in the Expert section of the mountain, one of the first audiologs you can find is the same one from before, but it continues to run well after the quotation is read, and is where the plot of the game starts to be revealed.
- Wham Shot:
- Arguably the game's final puzzle happens just before the end of the Golden Ending - a puzzle that turns on a light in a darkened room. The room is revealed to be impressively photorealistic - because it's actually represented by an FMV you control by walking backward and forward. Lying on the couch is a motionless figure with a sheet over it, hooked up to an IV and lying near a computer monitor. To find out who the figure is, simply walk to the end of the path...
- Before that, there's the first big Reveal on top of the Mountain, with a puzzle panel that doesn't do anything and a river that looks exactly like it below.... The river can be interacted with and solved just like the panel. Although inquisitive players will likely discover that Reveal by themselves much earlier.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: Subverted. The people who inhabited the Island beforehand are never brought up over the course of the game — unless you get into the hidden areas of the mountain where it is revealed that the Island is a human-engineered Lotus-Eater Machine, designed to flood the senses with metaphysical thoughts to find the true purpose of existence. The previous inhabitants were the programmers who built the island. But we still don't exactly learn what happened to them either, though the walls of the monastery hint that they all fell victim to the Island in some way.
- Where It All Began: The Golden Ending is accessed by solving an environmental puzzle using the gate from the starting area. Of course, one of the first things the player does is turn the gate off, making solving it impossible; to turn it on again, they have to activate all of the lasers and complete most of the puzzles in the End to access the Caverns and find the gate's reactivation pattern. This journey clues the player in on the existence of environmental puzzles, which they'll need to find the ending, and, through audio logs, gives them backstory context they'll need to appreciate it.[[note]]Of course, if the player just so happens to have figured out environmental puzzles within the first few minutes of the game, they can access the Golden Ending right away.
- Windmill Scenery: There's a windmill near the town in the center of the island. It's an important place to visit, since its basement features an underground theatre, as well as a shortcut to the cave system beneath the island. However, apart from a few environmental puzzles involving the sails, the fact that it's a windmill is not relevant and it could pretty much have been any other type of building.
- Your Mind Makes It Real: The hidden ending, as well as the hidden audio logs, reveal the true purpose of the Island (as well as the game's plot): an elaborate virtual reality simulation in which metaphysical thoughts are amplified. Once inside, it can become increasingly difficult to distinguish if the Island is real life or a simulation. The audio logs suggest that the first "proper" test of the Island will include someone coming back to reality only when they want to; the hidden ending reveals the player actually returning to reality, unable to interact with objects in a way outside of the Island's parameters.
- You Wake Up in a Room: You start in a metal tube which leads up onto a patio, via a small cave.
