Jonathan Blow's The Witness has had some details released about translations, a physical version, and voiceover work according to a blog post on the game's website.
The Witness is a game focusing on puzzles and exploration set on an abandoned island. This particular blog post mainly relates to packaging and translation concerns, and an included trailer titled "Long Screenshot #2" spends over two and a half minutes panning around various environments in the game.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzNh-hdceiU
Firstly, the voiceover is essentially done - "most of it is in the can" according to Jonathan Blow. Although there aren't any other characters on the island, the voiceovers will be used for voice recordings that you find around the island. The voice actors will be revealed after the New Year.
There have been some requests for a physical release, and Jonathan Blow has stated that he is in talks with some companies regarding such an endeavor. He muses on release timing windows and states that the physical release will probably come out after the digital release and that he doesn't want to either rush or delay the digital version in order to have it release simultaneously with the physical version as there are necessities for a certain amount of lead time.
Support for other multiple languages - English, Italian, French, German, Spanish (Spain & Latin America), Portuguese (Portugal & Brazil), Arabic, Russian, Chinese (Simplified & Traditional), Japanese, Korean, Polish, and Indonesian - has been mostly completed. Arabic took a greater amount of programming work, probably owing to the fact that it is read from right-to-left as opposed to all of the other languages on this list but has also come along well.
Jonathan Blow is best known for creating Braid, a side-scrolling puzzle platformer that is widely regarded as one of the best examples in the genre for its interesting puzzle mechanics as well as its ambiguous and overall interesting story that has been alluded to be related to the development of the nuclear bomb. The Witness will have been in development for nearly eight years at the time of its release and will be releasing on January 26, 2016 for Playstation 4 and Windows.
Are you excited for The Witness? Do you think this title can live up to Jonathan Blow's previous title considering how well-regarded it is? Let us know in the comments below!
