Xbox One players can finally explore The Witness on September 13th

Rejoice Xbox One players! Jonathan Blow and Thekla’s unique first person puzzler is finally headed to the Xbox One beginning on September 13th.  We had sorta mixed feelings regarding the PS4 and PC game, but it’s most certainly worth considering if you’re looking for a mind-bending puzzle solving adventure.  Like the other versions, The Witness for the Xbox One will set players back around $40.

Read on for the official announcement which was originally published on the Xbox Wire.

The Witness is a game about exploring and solving puzzles. It took us a long time to make ? about 7 years!  We spent a great deal of time and effort arranging every detail of the island you explore, so that everything matters, often in ways that will surprise you.

We?ve gotten lots of requests to bring The Witness to Xbox One. People tweet at me about this all the time! So we are happy to say that this is happening soon: The Witness will be downloadable on Xbox One starting September 13, 2016.

The Witness is a pretty unconventional game. You wander through an open world, so you can explore whatever catches your eye. Throughout the island you?ll find many puzzles, all with different themes. But these puzzles aren?t just arbitrary and meaningless; they communicate ideas. As you play the game, you?ll find yourself absorbing a nonverbal language, and you?ll know what to do even if you can?t quite explain what you know.

In the process of releasing The Witness, we?ve learned a lot about the way people play it. Some people blaze through puzzles and finish the game in 25-30 hours; some people take their time really investigating details, and spend over 100 hours exploring, finding new things the whole time. To my surprise, The Witness is a really good game to play with a friend, even though I didn?t design it that way; we?ve received a lot of notes from people who had a great time playing with their wives/husbands/girlfriends/boyfriends.

This is a game containing a lot of surprises. I recommend going into it without spoilers. If you get stuck, or something seems difficult, you can turn around and go somewhere else, and come back to the hard problem later. Elsewhere on the island you might find clues to the thing you?re stuck on, and you may have a very enjoyable experience when you make the right connections. On the other hand, if you look for answers in online videos and online forums, you?re likely to have an empty experience ? you?ll know the answer, but you will have skipped over the good part of the experience. The most enjoyable part of this game is what happens in your mind when connections come together.

With that small bit of advice, I?ll say goodbye for now, as we go do the last couple weeks? worth of fine-tuning the game. See you on September 13th!