The Witness, one of the most complicated puzzle games for the PC and PS4, had an outcome in sales that amazed creators after 38,841 copies sold this past weekend.
The Witness features the player on an island with a wide expansion of cliffs, meadows, orchards, swamps, a log depot, a windmill and a church, with most of them beyond the point of repair.
The “myst-like” game features a collection of about 700 puzzles set on an unknown tropical island.
The Witness is additionally navigated in first person in an entirely three-dimensional world. The game has the player solve two-dimensional mazes found on in-game panels. These puzzles are completed through drawn paths from a circular start-point to a rounded end-point.
Creator Jonathan Blow tweeted over the weekend about the overall performance of his game. The Witness did remarkably better than his previous landmark debut title, Braid.
“It’s hard to talk about numbers without breaking NDAs, but The Witness is on track to sell more in a week than Braid sold in its first year,” Blow tweeted on Saturday. “And Braid was a hit indie game.”
These numbers include purchases of the game on both Steam and PSN. The game’s first weekend of release is considered to be a major success, despite Blow’s recent complaints about the piracy of the game.
“It seems The Witness is the #1 game on a certain popular torrent site,” Blow said in a tweet. “Unfortunately this will not help us afford to make another game”
With its vast array of abandoned themes and “ghost-town” presence, The Witness is a silent beauty ready to be explored and will keep players in frustration or awe for extended hours.