The Witness Is Coming To Xbox One, Get The Details

One of the more talked about indie games that came out earlier this year for PS4 and PC was Thekla Inc's The Witness. The first-person puzzle title will also be making its way to the Xbox One, according to creator and head of Thekla Inc, Jonathan Blow.

IGN managed to get in a word with Blow, who revealed to them that The Witness is set to release on September 13th, 2016. That's just a few weeks away, arriving nine months after the game released on the PlayStation 4 and PC.

According to Blow, the game will be exactly the same on the Xbox One as it is on the PlayStation 4 and PC. There will be no changes in content or specialty features added or removed. The developer also states that there are "some technical differences" but that the game is practically the same. I wouldn't doubt it if there were changes to the resolution. It's not uncommon for Xbox One games to get a game that was previously on PC or PS4 and then it ends up getting downgraded in terms of either resolution or frame-rate, which is what happened with the definitive version of Tomb Raider, which was 60fps on PS4 and only 30fps on Xbox One.

Jonathan Blow, however, does not get into the nitty gritty details on what the actual technical differences are between the Xbox One and PS4 version of The Witness, but only goes so far as to let people know that they do exist.

The game itself, however, will be the exact same thing as it was on the other platforms. This consists of players traveling around a beautiful, empty island solving lots and lots and lots of puzzles. It's certainly not a game suited to my tastes, but if you enjoy solving tons of puzzles you'll have a blast with The Witness. Not everyone was thrilled with the title due to the rapidly increasing difficulty of the puzzles and the lack of a proper narrative to keep gamers hooked into the world, it ended up turning some people off from the incessant puzzle designs.

Blow also revealed that the game would be arriving on the iOS as well. There's no release date for the mobile version, but the technical differences were most certainly highlighted by the developer, as he clearly states that the weaker mobile hardware made it difficult to translate the game from home console and PC to portable devices. A lot of assets and design materials had to be downgraded to run at a decent frame-rate on Apple's smart devices.

And while they don't have a release date for the mobile version because they still have a ton of work to do -- and they need to completely tweak and rework the controls, as well as change how players traverse and interact with the world while also ensuring that performance is up to par -- Xbox One owners will be able to experience The Witness starting next month when it launches on September 13th.