Entry Area

Entry Area
Elements	Hexagons Squares
Panels	TBD

For puzzle hints and solutions, see Entry Area (Walkthrough).

The Witness starts in a long, dark vault hallway and serves to introduce you to the most basic principles of its line-drawing puzzles.

The rule for puzzles in this area asks you to start your line at the circle, and get it to the little rounded nub at the end. This is the way to solve every puzzle, but the way you go about getting to the end will change based on the area you are in.

Once you're done with the Entry Area and the two sequences of puzzles afterwards, you've completed what is essentially the tutorial of The Witness. You're free to explore the rest of the island as you wish, but remember that because the world is open, you may run into puzzle types you're unfamiliar with.

If you want to take it slow, try moving on to the Orchard or the Glass Factory next, which are both in the general vicinity.

Before you begin, you should know...

Puzzle Types present

• Mazes

Head over to our Puzzle Types page for everything you need to know about the various puzzle rules in The Witness.

Discarded Panels

Side Gate

This panel is behind a locked gate near the Entry Area, which you will need to unlock after unlocking the main gate. Once done, return to the puzzle panel in one of the towers that had two solutions, and enable the other switch that leads out the back of the tower. Head around the fort to find a now unlocked wooden gate, and follow the trail looping around the walls to another door with a puzzle. On the other side of the door you'll find a broken wall and a tree, and to the right is where the panel is lying.

Briefcase Vault

Just after leaving the Entry Area's main gate, look to your left as you head down the path to find a vault carved into the hill. Solve the puzzle on the door to find the briefcase within and get the blueprints.

Audio Logs

Entrance Roof

The doorway that introduces to you The Witness has a secret right above it! You won't be able to get here until you get past the main gate. After you get outside of the Entry Area you will be able to hug the left wall as you go up a hill until you find a gap to walk onto the top of the walls. Walk around until you're on the roof of the main entrance of the game. Here you will see a drink and some pillows. Under the yellow pillow is another tape!

Transcript

Through many births
I have wandered on and on,

Searching for, but never finding,
The Builder of this house.

Main Gate

To find this audio tape, open the main gate in the Entry Area, and head down the path and hang a left to find a hill leading onto the Entry Area's ramparts. Take the left path along the ramparts until you are above the main gate, where you'll find the small log on the far side of the gate's top.

Transcript

I am standing on the threshold about to enter a room.
It is a complicated business.

In the first place, I must shove against an atmosphere
pressing with a force of fourteen pounds
on every square inch of my body.

I must make sure of landing on a plank
travelling at twenty miles a second round the sun—

a fraction of a second too early or too late,
the plank would be miles away.

I must do this whilst hanging from a round planet
head outward into space,

and with a wind of aether blowing
at no one knows how many miles a second
through ever interstice of my body.

The plank has no solidity of substance.
To step on it is like stepping on a swarm of flies.

Shall I not slip through?

No, if I make the venture one of the flies hits me
and gives a boost up again;

I fall again and am knocked upwards by another fly;
and so on.

I may hope that the net result will be that I remain about steady,
but if, unfortunately, I should slip through the floor
or be boosted too violently up to the ceiling,

the occurrence would be, not a violation of the laws of Nature,
but a rare coincidence. These are some of the minor difficulties.

I ought really to look at the problem four-dimensionally
as concerning the intersection of my world-line
with that of the plank.

Then again, it is necessary to determine
in which direction the entropy of the world is increasing

in order to make sure that my passage over the threshold
is an entrance, not an exit.

Verily, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle
than for a scientific man to pass through a door.

And whether the door be barn door or church door
it might be wiser

that he should consent to be an ordinary man and walk in
rather than wait till all the difficulties involved
in a really scientific ingress
are resolved.

Arthur Eddington, 1927

Side Gate

This tape is behind a locked gate near the Entry Area, which you will need to unlock after unlock the main gate. Once done, return to the puzzle panel in one of the towers that had two solutions, and enable the other switch that leads out the back of the tower. Head around the fort to find a now unlocked wooden gate, and follow the trail looping around the walls to another door with a puzzle. On the other side of the door you'll find a broken wall and a tree, where the log is lying.

Transcript

Of all the communities available to us,
here is not one I would want to devote myself to,

except for the society of true searchers
which has very few living members at any time.

Albert Einstein, 1924

Before Glass Factory

Behind a set of puzzle in the entry area's second part, just before the glass factory, look behind to find this well hidden audio log.

Transcript

The physicist Wolfgang Pauli once spoke
of two limiting conceptions,

both of which have been extraordinarily fruitful
in the history of human thought,
although no genuine reality corresponds to them.

At one extreme is the idea of an objective world,
pursuing its regular course in space and time,

independently of any kind of observing subject;
this has been the guiding image of modern science.

At the other extreme is the idea of a subject,
mystically experiencing the unity of the world

and no longer confined by an object
or by any objective world;

this has been the guiding image of Asian mysticism.

Our thinking moves somewhere in the middle,
between these two limiting conceptions;

we should maintain the tension resulting
from these two opposites.

Werner Heisenberg, 1974