Jonathan Blow's The Witness: The great XBLA game that got away

The Witness is the next game from Braid creator Jonathan Blow. It was originally due to release on Xbox 360 and PS3 besides PC and iOS, but Blow pulled the console versions earlier this year - not long after Christian Donlan completed the below hands-on preview for OXM. We've decided it's worth your attention regardless. Enjoy.

How do you follow up a game like Braid? The answer, if you're Jonathan Blow, is to make a game that appears to be Braid's complete opposite.

That's the first impression you'll get from The Witness, anyway. This is still a thoughtful and stylish puzzle game, but gone are the 2D landscapes and bumbling enemies, and gone is the time-bending platforming as you scramble to collect a series of seemingly inaccessible trinkets. Instead, you're left by yourself in a huge 3D world, and encouraged to explore a balmy island at your own pace.

The island's a beautiful place, even though Blow and his small development team have yet to start layering in the environmental details. There are already rocks and trees to navigate, houses to explore, and pieces of mysterious machinery to coax to life. It's interactive, too. Dotted all over the landscape are computer monitors, each containing a maze puzzle. Complete each puzzle and you activate another monitor. Complete enough, and you'll start opening the island's locked doors and bringing its dormant technology back online.

The puzzles build elegantly upon one another. The game's first offering simply asks you to draw a straight line from point A to point B. Next, how about connecting both points across a maze with a few dead ends thrown in? After that, how about drawing that line through a maze with dead ends and little marks on the path that your line must intersect? Steadily, one rule piles on top of the last, and within an hour of playing, you'll find yourself navigating mazes where you have to separate black squares from white squares, or where each line you draw has its own opposite, moving through a slightly different section of maze on the other side of the screen - and you have to get them both to their goals.

It sounds frustrating, but The Witness is an excellent tutor, each puzzle bringing just enough new ideas to keep you interested while ensuring you don't lose track of what you're being asked to do. Meanwhile, as you're picking your way through all these mazes, the island is starting to open up to you, letting you into previously inaccessible areas, or firing lasers across the sky towards the game's ultimate goal: a master door, studded with five locks, which seems to lead down into the earth.

And are you really alone? As you cover new areas of the island, you'll discover little Dictaphones scattered about, each one with an audiolog that left by the man who brought you to this strange place. The more you explore, the more you'll understand - and the more material your imagination will have to work with as you try to interpret what's going on.

Imagination and interpretation? Perhaps The Witness isn't that different from Braid after all.