Entry Area

Entry Area
Elements	Hexagons • Squares

The Entry Area is the first area encountered in The Witness. It is comprised of a fort and its immediate surroundings on the southwest peninsula of the main island. It introduces the basic maze-solving mechanic of the game's puzzles.

The player spawns in a long, dark underground hallway that lets into the fort's courtyard, and must solve the panels strewn around the fort to open a laser gate blocking access to the rest of the island. A short distance away, two series of panels introduce the hexagon and square symbols.

In the vicinity are the Orchard and the Glass Factory which are a gentle ramp up in difficulty.

Fort Courtyard

After escaping a dark tunnel and solving two trivial puzzles, exit onto a brightly colored courtyard. Passage to the rest of the island is prevented by a laser force field. The diamond-grid panel to the right of the gate is blocked by three latches with a cable attached to each latch. Tracing a cable leads back to a panel in each of the three corner towers of the fort.

Latch 1

One latch is actually powered by a sequence of three panels, each with a progressively larger maze. Note that only a rounded endpoint counts as an exit.

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Latch 2

While the panel has two starting points, only the right one connects up to the exit:

Latch 3

This panel has two exits, but only the bottom one will power up the correct cable:

Once all three latches are unlocked, solving the gate panel is straightforward:

Down the path

After exiting the fort, to the left of the path is a locked entry leading into a hill, with a panel covered in black and white squares and small black hexagonal dots. Further down to the left is a long row of blue puzzles with only the leftmost activated, and to the right is a similar sequence of green puzzles in a white shed.

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Around the fort

There's a door behind the fort, which can only be unlocked by solving the two-solution maze puzzle in the courtyard so that the top wire, not the bottom, lights up. You can only access this after you've unlocked the laser door in the starting area.

After returning to this panel, exit the courtyard and head down the path, pass the bunker door, and then up the hill to the left.

Go past the crumbling part of the fortress wall and down towards the cliff, where you'll see the top wire hanging out of a window and connected to a newly unlocked door.

This small, hidden area contains two panel puzzles, one to open the first door, one to open the second door out to the main Entry Area, a discarded panel puzzle and an audio log.

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Cleaning up

Spoiler warning! This section contains major spoilers for The Witness.

A pillar in the Entry Area adorned with triangle symbols is actually a puzzle that activates another larger puzzle on the ground nearby. Solving both counts towards the main puzzle count.

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The solution to the pillar puzzle is:

Pillar solution
RIGHT (3) UP RIGHT (3) UP RIGHT (3) UP RIGHT (3) UP RIGHT (3) UP RIGHT (4) UP LEFT UP

Triangle panel

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 fort'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.

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Vault door solution

Audio logs

Patio 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!

“

Through many births I have wandered on and on, Searching for, but never finding, The Builder of this house.

„

Laser 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.

“	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

Fourth fort tower

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.

“	Of all the communities available to us, there 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

Behind the blue panels

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.

“	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