The Witness

31 Dec 1983

Apple II Atari 8-bit Commodore Plus/4 Amiga Amstrad CPC DOS Amstrad PCW Atari ST/STE TRS-80 Color Computer Commodore C64/128/MAX Commodore 16 Mac TRS-80

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9.6 rating

172 want

58 played

9 playing

4 reviews

Developer

Infocom

Publisher

Infocom

Time to beat

Main story

Main story + extras

100% completion

Based on 1 answers

Summary

The Witness was the seventh game released by interactive fiction pioneers Infocom. The player character is a detective who has been summoned to the Cabeza Plana, California office of Mr. Linder, a millionaire. Linder fears that his life is in danger... and indeed, as he sits in his office with the player, he is murdered before the player's eyes. The player then must solve the murder.

	Audio	Subtitles	Interface
English			✓

10 2

Best game ever

19 Nov 2021

8 0

It's hard to properly rate this, because on one hand I highly respect what the game is but on the other hand it's fairly outdated due to its simplicity. The mystery is interesting and the game plays like a book that you can interact with, which I thought was a really fascinating concept. The system gives you the story and you tell it where to go and what to do within the room you are in, but you do have to be fairly specific when interacting with the environment and items so it can make things confusing when you don't quite know the exact prompts. It is super cool going back to see what some of the first narrative games were like back in the day, and this seemed to be one of the highest rated of its time. However, I can't help but wish they had at least a small amount of visual/audible storytelling or even music in the background to liven things up, even though I understand the merit and draw to a strictly dialogue based interactive book.

13 Mar 2024