Speedrunner FearfulFerret has set a new world record for completing 100% of The Witness in three hours, 16 minutes, and 21 seconds.
As reported by EuroGamer, he even left his apartment “to drive to a restaurant, pick up a fish sandwich, and drive back – all while on the clock.”
How was this possible? The game has a puzzle which takes a 56 minute wait to solve – while the player watches a 58 minute film based on a GDC talk by game developer Brian Moriarty (Loom, Wishbringer) an eclipse moves slowly over the screen. In order to solve the puzzle, the player must line up both edges of the eclipse to trace the line.
This is standard for developer Jonathan Blow, as he employed a similar trick in the game Braid, where players, in order to snag a hidden star, had to wait approximately two hours.
The Witness is difficult to speedrun with 100% completion due to randomized time challenges towards the end of the game. The 3D puzzle game involves exploring an open-world island where players must solve puzzles based on visual and aural clues scattered throughout the island and within the puzzles themselves; it features a total of about 650 puzzles.
The Witness was developed and published by Thekla, Inc for PC and PS4, with an upcoming iOS release sometime in 2016.