Holy shit, this fan-made Witness puzzle is totally solvable

I think…

Once The Witness has its hooks in you, it really has its hooks in you. Chances are, there’s no turning back. There is only playing, dreaming, and day-dreaming. Everything is a Witness puzzle waiting to happen, as I realized when I drove past Domino’s.

Me? I’m having conversations about it with no fewer than seven different people every day. Around here, Chris, Jordan, Ben, Patrick, and Zack have all fallen under the game’s spell. It’s fascinating to hear them recount their progress and revelations.

We aren’t the only ones unknowingly losing hours in chunks. As we recounted last week, The Witness has a pretty active community. One of those engrossed in the game is Read Only Memories lead programmer Ted DiNola. He came up with his own Witness puzzle, and it’s a doozy:

Look at that behemoth! An eight-by-eight grid, every single box with some sort of constraint. At first glance, it looks like a parody — a haphazard smattering of symbols that says “haha, this game can be really goddamn hard sometimes!”

But, that’s not the case. This is totally solvable. Anyone looking to best it will need to have put some serious time into The Witness, though. Completing this requires knowledge of almost every set of rules in the game, and a mindset that’s unflinching in the face of a good challenge.

Here’s the solution, by the way (linked instead of embedded, so as to not spoil it). Getting some real solid fan puzzles seems like it’s going to be an unforeseen secondary benefit of The Witness. That’ll be perfectly fine with me.

I may be too into this game… [reddit]