The Witness arrives on Xbox One next month (update)

Maddeningly tricky puzzle game The Witness is coming to Xbox One on Sept. 13, lead designer Jonathan Blow announced. In a statement to IGN, he confirmed that a port of the former PlayStation 4 exclusive was on its way to Microsoft’s hardware.

When it hits Xbox One, The Witness will look much the same as it did on PS4 and Windows PC, where it launched this past January. There won’t be any exclusive content for Xbox One owners, Blow said.

Changes will come to the iOS version, however, which developer Thekla Inc. is also currently working on. That port will use the same first-person puzzle-solving gameplay of the console and PC game, albeit with tap-based controls and diminished graphics to suit the less powerful tech.

The Witness was highly regarded in its initial debut earlier this year, when players found themselves wracking their brains to solve the game's trickiest puzzles. It also received attention when its creator explaining why the game would launch as a timed exclusive for Sony’s console back in February 2013 — before the PS4 had even launched.

An Xbox One release seemed imminent, however, when a rating for a port of The Witness appeared on the ESRB. Blow said that there were "no plans" for a version on that console at the time.

Update: Jonathan Blow told Polygon that Thekla began discussing an Xbox One version of The Witness back in February, but the amount of work to be done on the game after launch kept the port under wraps until now.

"The limiting factor was just our ability to do the work — because we are a small team, we couldn't do a simultaneous launch on a bunch of platforms," he told us. "So the reason it's coming out now is, that's how long it took us to do it."