First Speedrun of The Witness Takes Six Hours

Jonathan Blow, developer of the acclaimed game Braid, completed a speed-run of his nearly finished second game The Witness. His time clocked in at six hours, twenty minutes, and thirty six seconds. Of course, the game is still in-the-works and Blow realized that he forgot a part of the game after the fact, so that time is just an estimate and can change as work progresses. However, it can safely be claimed that this new project is a lot bigger, longer, and sprawling than Braid. The Witness, as tweeted by Blow, is around 10x the scope of Braid. Blow can finish his first game in around thirty-eight minutes.

https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/564260644812103682

https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/564261619492876288

In January, Blow announced on The Witness blog that the game had reached the Puzzle Completion milestone, meaning that the puzzles in the game right then would be the puzzles in the game upon release. A few might be cut from the 677 puzzles, but apparently no more will be added. This, of course, doesn’t mean the game is done, but Blow says that “it *does* mean that the nature of the work changes and becomes simpler.”

Blow had also recently talked to Engadget about how he had put all the proceeds from 2008’s Braid into The Witness. He’s now working on borrowed money to complete his new project. He has been working on the game since 2009 and it has almost tripled in size since then, ballooning from eight hours to twenty-five to forty hours- for the average gamer, that is. The Witness is a puzzle-exploration game set upon an abandoned island. The game does not yet have a set release date, but it will be releasing on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One simultaneous and then follow up with a release for iOS and other systems.

Blow has also tweeted that he plans to speedrun his new game every few weeks, so the record of six and a half hours may change in the future.