The Witness's Famous Voices And Regular Prices
Ellie out The Last of Us!
Jonathan Blow's time-twisting platformer Braid was a powerful force in the latest resurgence of indie games, helping propel them into the relative mainstream. Since 2008, J. Blo and his studio have been working on The Witness [official site], and the colourful puzzler will finally arrive on January 26th. Consider this me reminding you of that, while also relaying word that it'll cost £30 and its voice cast includes some folks that might make you say "Hey! I liked that voice they did! e.g. Ellie from The Last of Us off that there PlayStation, and Hermes out Futurama." You talk funny.
The game's site is overloaded right now so here, I'll just point you to a PlayStation Blog post about the voice-havers. Some of those I know are pleasant voices.
As for the price, £29.99/$39.99/€36.99 is confident for a game not released by a major publisher and with no murder (well, as far as I know). That's quite nice. I'd be very interested to see the market develop to support 'full-price' games from smaller studios, in all the lavish detail that bigger budgets and longer development timescales can enable. Comparing current screenshots and videos against our preview from 2011, The Witness's puzzle island is still clearly the same place but gosh, it's so refined.
It's a whole lot bigger and all. Back in September, J. Blo said:
"When we started making this game, I figured it would have between 8 and 12 hours of playtime. As it happens, the game we've finally built is around 10 times as big as that: if you are a completionist who wants to wring every last drop out of the game, you might expect to play for 80 hours, or possibly 100. For people who don’t want to go quite that far, the game’s still got plenty for you."
The Witness will arrive for Windows on January 26th. It's on Steam and has a DRM-free option on the Humble Store. Here's how it looked a few months ago:
