After more than a year of anticipation, The Witness is finally out on iOS

The Witness is a modern puzzle game masterpiece, cut from the same cloth as exploration-puzzlers like Myst. You’re alone on an island, with the only interaction with the world around you through a series of puzzles. Solving these puzzles is the key to unlocking the mysteries of the world around you.

Every puzzle in The Witness takes the form of a superficially simple maze. Draw a line between one spot to another – easy, straightforward, clear. It gets difficult fast. Each group of puzzles adds its own rules, its own language. The gameplay is in solving the trick behind each puzzle, learning the gameplay mechanic it is teaching you, and bringing it with you to ever more difficult puzzles.

Solving puzzles is key to exploring the island. Groups of puzzles unlock new areas, these areas containing even more puzzles. Over time, it becomes apparent that these puzzles, the act of solving them, and the exploration of the island itself, weave together into an intricate narrative – the details of which I won’t be spoiling here. Suffice it to say, if the intelligence of the puzzles and the beauty of the island aren’t enough to make you want to play, solving The Witness’ mysteries probably will be.

Narrative and exploration aside, In any good puzzle game, the biggest reward you can possibly get is the satisfaction that comes with solving the puzzle – the “ah hah!” moment, where everything falls into place, and you finally understand what the puzzle is all about. The Witness is full of this feeling. Every series of puzzles in The Witness incorporates a unique challenge. Some of these challenges are quite clever, and require a great deal of thought to solve. And solving them feels great, because outsmarting the game feels great.

The Witness is a rare gem. It won’t appeal to everyone, but if you’re a fan of puzzles and exploration games, you owe it to yourself to give this one a try.

• Buy The Witness on the App Store

Hello, my name is Kevin MacLeod, and it is my pleasure to welcome you to the Gamevice Blog.

Our Mission

The Gamevice Blog has one goal: to provide great content for mobile gamers who want to play console-quality mobile games with a console-quality mobile controller.

We will specifically be covering games with support for Gamevice controllers. We’ll be posting preview articles of upcoming Gamevice-compatible games. We’ll be covering news about recent game releases, letting you know as soon as a new Gamevice game hits the stores. We’ll be posting guides for certain games, covering details about how controllers improve these games, and discussing strategies. We’ll be running interviews with game developers and designers. And we’ll be giving you behind-the-scenes looks at upcoming Gamevice products.

So why make a blog? Great mobile gaming sites already exist – we read them every day, in fact. Beyond that, you can see mobile games covered on every generalized gaming site – mobile is far from the niche it once was. So what will we be contributing this ecosystem?

The primary difference between us and everyone else: focus. Focus on games with support for Gamevice. Focus on an audience of gamers with controllers, who want to hear specifically – and exclusively – about games which support these controllers.

I’ve been covering mobile gaming for many years, and I’ve learned something important: when mobile gamers buy a controller like the Gamevice, they become almost exclusively interested in games that work with their controller. They’ll play the occasional casual touch game, sure. But when it comes to premium, console-class experiences, the touchscreen doesn’t cut it anymore. Once you go Gamevice, you can’t go back to sliding your fingers around virtual joysticks and mashing virtual buttons.

We created a great controller for playing console-class games on mobile devices. We created a great app to track those games. It is time we create a great venue talk about those games.

About the Author

This seems like a good time for me to introduce myself. My name is Kevin MacLeod – formerly of the mobile gaming site AfterPad. I’ve been an iOS gamer from the begining – since before the launch of the App Store, in fact.

From the moment the first iOS controller was released, I’ve been fascinated by the world of controller-compatible mobile gaming. I built a website dedicated to controller-comptaible iOS gaming. Since the release of the first Gamevice, I’ve been convinced that Gamevice is the company best-positioned to take mobile gaming to the next level.

I’m not alone here. Everyone I’ve met at Gamevice has shared my passions for creating great products, gaming, design, and the mobile gaming ecosystem in general. You’ll be reading about the rest of the team on this blog shortly, as well as some of the upcoming products and services they’ve been working on.

Since joining Gamevice a few months ago, I’ve been primarily focused on improving the Gamevice app catalog. But from the very start, both myself and the rest of the folks at Gamevice have been interested in making this website. And I’ve spend a good deal of time thinking about the right way to make this site happen.

Plans for the Blog

I don’t want there to ever be a conflict of interest on this blog, so I want to put our biases on the table in advance. First, this is an enthusiast site, not a review site. We’re going to talk about good games here. Game review are a great, but in my opinion, they aren’t the best fit for mobile gaming. Knowing if a big new game is good or bad only makes sense when people are trying to make a choice between a handful of relatively expensive games. In the world of mobile gaming, choice isn’t a problem – discovery is. I’d much rather write articles helping you to discover great games than waste time writing articles on games you’d probably never know about without reading the article.

We’re also not going to waste time on games without controls optimized for controllers like the Gamevice. There are other great sites to go to for coverage of more generalized mobile gaming. We read them all, and we aren’t here to compete with your favorites. We are here to talk directly to owners of the Gamevice about games that work with the Gamevice. This is an enthusiastic, passionate group of gamers, and they have been underserved. We owe it to our fans to fix that – that is our mission.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be launching a series of articles about new and upcoming games, as well as taking the wraps off of our newest products.

This blog is only the beginning of what I hope will become a major resource for Gamevice fans, and for mobile gamers in general. We have thousands of Gamevice games to talk about, with more coming all the time. I’m excited to have the opportunity to tell you all about them.

-Kevin MacLeod