10 Years Later, This is Still the Hardest Platinum Trophy I’ve Ever Earned - IGN

Seven minutes of pure puzzle panic.

10 years ago, a game almost broke me. A wide-eyed 24-year-old, as yet undecayed by nearly a decade in games media, I found myself enraptured by The Witness. Eager to eat up every one of the maze-like puzzles hidden around its island setting, I simply couldn’t get enough. That’s until I hit its final challenge. It was optional, but not for me. This brick wall of a bastard drained brainpower out of me each time I smashed my head against it. But the moment I finally broke through was a rush like little else — the kind hardened soulslike players get when finally striking down a boss after several hours of trying. It’s still the single most difficult trophy I’ve ever earned, and as such, my most prized PlayStation platinum. But while that digital achievement sits proudly in my account, it's nothing compared to how it made me feel in the moment, and I’ve been chasing the same sort of thrill ever since.

Indie developer Jonathan Blow’s 2016 masterpiece holds many secrets. The further you explore The Witness’s island setting, the more layers are revealed to you. At face value, it's a simple premise: complete the electronic-screen-bound digital mazes in each of its biomes to unlock the island’s central mystery. Each of these environments comes with its own ruleset, too. They’re all fundamentally about tracing a line between a start and an end point of a grid, but rarely, if ever, is it that simple. The clues to a successful route are always there, whether they be seen in the sun reflecting off the ocean or heard in recordings of wildlife chattering among the trees, making each of these main areas relatively manageable. Search beyond that beaten path, though, and things start to change.

It all gets very testing; there’s no doubt about that. But at least it’s somewhat relaxing. No music to distract you or imminent threats breathing down your neck make for a soothing setting to aid the inevitable headaches. Until you find its darkest secret and decide to embark on its fiendish final challenge, that is.

“Just like a legitimate puzzle is only a puzzle if you might never figure it out, a legitimate challenge is only a challenge if you might never beat it,” its creator, Jonathan Blow, told Kotaku in 2016. And it really did feel like that.

There’s no way of cheesing this final conundrum-filled-cavern. There is no way to look up the solutions, nor any way of taking shortcuts, as each of the challenge’s mazes is randomly generated. To unlock the tomb-like building at the end of this snaking cavern, you’ll have to solve puzzles that are freshly generated at the start of each attempt. But before you even begin to solve them, you have to actually find them; the first battle is to locate each and every maze that is scattered around the cave, with brainteasers hidden up high and wrapped around pillars. By this point in the game, at least you’ll know the type of puzzle and the rules dictating each’s solution. But putting that information into practice is a completely different proposition.

That would be hard enough to do when you have all the time in the world to think, but that would be far too easy. Instead, this challenge gives you just under 400 seconds — the time it takes for two classical compositions, In the Hall of the Mountain King and Anitra’s Dance, to play back-to-back on a gramophone in one final, pretentious cherry on the cake — to solve all 14 puzzles. That’s just under half a minute for each. And these aren’t rudimentary line traces from A to B, but labyrinths that contain some of the island’s most complex rulesets, featuring symbols, colours, and other tricks that simply can’t be brute-forced.

Oh, and pause your game to even have the audacity to think about taking notes, and you’ll have to start all over again.