I knew this was a good game when I drew a mustache on that one family’s portrait in the farmhouse, and in response, my friend erased it. This action created a tug of war, which resulted in me adding and him erasing the mustache repeatedly throughout the course of the level.

That was until finally, I trapped him in the middle of a co-op platforming puzzle and made him watch as I slowly walked back to the portrait to draw the mustache on before returning to finish the co-op puzzle, causing the level to end and emerging from the mustache war victorious as he wallowed in a pool of agonizing defeat.

I also got to beat his ass at connect four and fucking kill him at the end of the game.

I wish I hadn't been The Witness to Jonathan Blow being a COVID truther. Or pro-Blue Lives Matter. Or anti-'cancel culture'. Or an advocate of political horseshoe theory. Or his belief that women aren't genetically suited to tech jobs.

In most cases I can forgive and forget the machinations of a creator's mind and create some mental separation between art and artist. However, The Witness is so inextricable from Blow's self-aggrandizing bullshit that it's impossible here. The notion that the search for truth is an everlasting but uncompletable journey is noble in theory and when not spouted by a QAnon nutter. This isn't even me imposing some sort of negativity onto Blow and his work with seven years of retrospect; Blow ousted himself as a misogynist loon in late 2017, only a few months after The Witness released on iOS. Should we even be surprised at this though? As Leigh Alexander put it, "he's that guy who made the Mario about women running away from him right"?

Blow's masturbatory belief in his own superiority, as a man, as a white man, as a right-wing white man, as a right-wing white male programmer taints his messaging to the point of it becoming an insurmountable task to read certain moments of The Witness as anything but Blow blowing himself. Good on him for making puzzles inaccessible to the deaf and hard of hearing, how great for Blow that he wasted at minimum an hour of many people's lives as they traced that fucking moon across a screen. Wow, after playing The Witness I see patterns in everything just like the creator, bra-fucking-vo. And it's a shame because the puzzles are fine and most of the game is serviceable. Everything surrounding it coalesces though and you realise it, well, blows.

At least its better than that game Soulja Boy laughed at.