Jonathan Blow, the main man behind Braid and upcoming The Witness posted on the Playstation blog today to announce that the voice recordings have been successfully finished.
And as a small teaser he also announced the rather impressive cast of voice actors that will be lending their touch to The Witness in the form of audio logs.
They are in no particular order:
- Ashley Johnson whom you might know as Ellie from The Last of Us
- Phil Lamarr who played Marvin in Pulp Fiction as well as Vamp in MGS2 and Hermes in Futurama
- Matthew Waterson who played Sir Lucan in The Order: 1886 as well as various Fallout 4 roles
- Terra Deva, a musician most famous for her single "At Night" with the Swiss group Shakedown.
Despite Terra being a musician there is actually no music in The Witness, at all. Instead the entirety of the atmosphere and mood will be carried through the background noises of nature and wind as well as local ambient sound. I can see this being incredibly hard to pull off well because if you fail you end up with an extremely boring game but I doubt someone like Jonathan Blow would settle for anything less than excellent.
As for the above mentioned voice actors they will be used in the many audio logs you will find throughout your journey but they might not be what you expect, as Blow said:
"The Witness deliberately riffs on several traditional elements of game design, and one of those elements is the classic audio log, where you are wandering along and you find a recording that was placed there by someone before.
The Witness has recordings like this, but let’s just say they are done in a highly non-traditional way. When you first encounter them you won’t find much in the way of answers, but, if you keep looking, you will eventually be able to piece together what’s going on."
What this is going to mean in actual gameplay terms I have no idea but the more I hear about The Witness the more intrigued I am. A while back I might have called it pretentious but right now I am looking forward to it something fierce.
The Witness is coming to the PC & PS4 this January 26th with the iOS version coming at a later date.