The Witness, the puzzle-based exploration game from acclaimed Braid creator Jonathan Blow and his development studio Thekla Inc., finally has a release date: January 26, 2016.
The game was initially set to launch around November 2013, as one of the first titles for the then-new PlayStation 4. However, the game wasn’t ready at the time, leaving fans wondering when it would come out.
Since then, the developers were hard at work not only improving, but expanding the overall game. Blow wrote that the original game would take eight to 12 hours to complete. Now, he said that the game is 10 times bigger, adding that the game could take 80 or even 100 hours to play, especially if you’re the completionist type.
He also compared the number of assets in the game since his last update in May 2014. At that time, there was a total of 38,387 files that made up the game. That number significantly increased to almost an additional 20,000 assets — 57,068, to be exact.
With four months between the announcement and release day, the number of assets shouldn’t increase that much. Blow said that the work now is mainly performing bug fixes and polishing the overall experience.
