HOW TO USE THIS GUIDE
Just like there's more than one way to solve some puzzles in The Witness, there's more than one way to use this guide.
We begin with a series of hints designed to gently nudge you toward solutions. If you're looking for a complete walkthrough with solutions, those appear next, at a safe distance for those who wish to avoid spoilers. Because they often require you to solve the area's puzzles first, we end with a guide to finding collectibles. Whatever your choice, you can jump directly to each section using the table of contents below.
Just up the path from the blue and green puzzles in the castle area, you'll find an orchard filled with pink trees. Together, they constitute a path of their own, connected by wires and puzzles.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Hints
- Walkthrough and solutions Collectibles
Hints
These puzzles follow the same basic maze structure of their predecessors, but they terminate in different ways — if, that is, they terminate at all. How do you begin to make heads or tails of them? Ask yourself what their design is trying to tell you.
What do they look like? Does that have any significance here?
What is the purpose of the trees? How might that purpose help you solve puzzles that look as these do?
Remember: The Witness delights in establishing a pattern and then twisting and turning that pattern. Twist and turn with it.
Be sure to check out our beginner's guide for more general tips for the discerning island survivalist.
SPOILERS AND SOLUTIONS BELOW
PUZZLES
In Polygon's beginner's guide, our very first tip advises you to learn the language of The Witness. This sequence of puzzles is a perfect example of why that's so important.
Imagine the developers creating these puzzles. They weren't giving you a verbal clue. There's no traditional language to read. They hid these puzzles among trees. They drew them to look like tree trunks and branches. And they put a single apple in a single tree next to every puzzle board. They had to believe that you would make the leap between the abstract puzzles and the in-world trees and fruit. That's the key.
But they didn't stop there. As happens again and again, you'll find that, just as you've gotten comfortable with speaking the language, The Witness starts using a different dialect.
The penultimate puzzle in the gallery requires that you walk to the back of the tree and look at the branches from that perspective to find its solution.
The final puzzle in the gallery teaches an unassailably important ability that will rear its ugly head all around the island. If you see part of a solution, but it seems incomplete, consider the possibility that it might be broken — literally, broken in the world, like the broken branch on that puzzle. This is especially true if whatever you're using to solve the puzzle is made of wood.
It might be in the next puzzle. Or you might not see another puzzle that uses this logic for a dozen hours. But it will come. Be prepared.
collectibles
The Orchard isn't exactly packed with audio logs, but if you solve the orchard's puzzles, you'll reach an area filled with drawings, designed to tell you about the world and its (previous) inhabitants. In your early hours, this is as close to storytelling as The Witness does. What, precisely, it's trying to tell you by showing a series of sketches of the human heart with veins like roots is up to interpretation.