The Witness: how to solve the first puzzle in the garden

Guide by Brenna Hillier Contributor

Published on Jan. 26, 2016

The Witness is supposed to be hard, and you're not supposed to get help. What are we all doing here?

The Witness: how to solve the first puzzle in the garden

The Witness begins with a one way tunnel leading to a locked door which teaches you the controls for simple maze puzzles in the next room - the garden.

Once past this door, you'll find the first proper puzzle of the game - a tall gate made of intercrossing white bars. How do you get past it?

In keeping with the spirit of the game, and its creator's wish for you to solve it yourself, we'll offer several levels of hints starting from general guidelines through slightly cryptic directions to complete solution. We'll put images between them, so you can hopefully avoid seeing the most explicit tips - but be warned! The images themselves may contain spoilers, though we'll do our very best to avoid it, and they won't necessarily have anything to do with the tips we've placed around them.

Ready to go? Good.

Top level goal and guidelines

Unlock the gate.
Everything you need to solve the puzzle is in the garden. There's nothing in the cave or tunnel.

Subgoal

Deliver power via three cables to uncover the lock on the gate.

General Method

Solve each of the maze puzzles to supply power to the cables.

Clue #1

Make sure you're sending power where it needs to go.

Clue #2

All the maze puzzle terminals must be powered (and solved!) to proceed.

Clue #3

One of these things is not like the others.

Clue #4

Even if you think you've solved all the maze puzzles, open the interface and look closely at the puzzle.

Explicit clue

The maze puzzle in the corner with the sofa (left of the door from the tunnel, if facing into the garden) is the problematic one.

Solution

Solve all the maze puzzles as normal, except the one in the corner with the sofa (left of the door from the tunnel, if facing into the garden). You need to go past the first accessible goal point here (upper right corner) and reach the second one (lower right corner). This will send power to the gate. The gate lock can be opened via any valid path to the goal, which is the bottom of the pattern.