References to Tetris in the Marsh

There are many references to the game Tetris™ in the Marsh. The most obvious one is the use of polyominoes — that some call Tetris™ pieces although it is technically incorrect — in the puzzles. There are also less obvious references, but when everything is put together, it provides a strong evidence that the whole Marsh area has been designed to be a reference to Tetris™.

Progression in the Marsh as a metaphor for the falling pieces in Tetris™
Consider the shape of the marsh, as can been seen from the mountain or from the noclip screenshot on the right: it's basically a rectangle, approximately the shape of the Tetris playing field. You enter this field from the top (on the lake side), as do the Tetris pieces in the Tetris playing field. Gravity make the pieces fall, and similarly you have to go toward the sea (at least in the beginning), where is the third moving platform. And with this platform you have to place polyominoes so that they form a line, which is what you want to accomplish in Tetris™ after the piece reaches the bottom of the field.

Tetris™ Controls
The first two moving platforms relate to the controls in Tetris: with the first platform you translate a polyomino in a direction that would be horizontal, according to the metaphor of the Marsh as a Tetris playing field; with the second platform you rotate a polyomino by multiples of 90°. The two operations match the two main Tetris controls: moving pieces horizontally and rotating them by steps of 90°. The last control in Tetris makes the piece fall faster, and the shortcut door in the upstairs structure similarly allows you to reach the third moving platform faster.

Tetris™ game mechanics
In Tetris, when you complete a line, it disappears and the blocks above it go down one line. There is a reference to this mechanic in the rule introduced by the puzzles in Row 9 (red underwater room): when all filled-yellow polyominoes have been cancelled (corresponding to the completion of a line), the constraint on the area shape is removed (corresponding to the removal of the line's blocks). And the downward movement of the blocks above the completed line clearly corresponds to the rule “outline-blue = -1 level” of the correspondence between color mixing and vertical directions.

The removal of a line can only happen after a piece has stopped falling, and similarly, you can only make a line in the third moving platform when you've reached the end of the Marsh and after you used the platforms that represents controls of the falling piece.

Tetris puzzle
This is the unique puzzle in the underwater room at the magenta exit of the second moving platform. It is a reference to the Tetris™ game: each of the 7 tetronimoes used in Tetris™ are represented once, and all you have to do to find a solution is to pack the tetronimoes approximately where they are drawn, starting from the bottom ones, as if they were falling and stacking. Like in Tetris™.

This puzzle is the only one in an underwater room to use the same colors than Row 1, and not to use blue-outlined polyominoes. This whole section of the marsh (including this underwater room) is actually optional to unlock the laser, so this is a good place to hide an Easter Egg puzzle.

(Note: the picture of this puzzle evokes a penguin, with the top polyomino representing its beak, the two bottom ones representing its feet, and the 4 other polyominoes representing its wings. ClementSparrow is pretty sure that he has seen it in a free Linux game inspired by Tetris — Linux' mascot is a penguin — but can't find any picture of this. Does anybody remember this?)

Other Tetris references in puzzles
The first row contains puzzles that can also represent the Tetris™ playing field. Note the elongated shape of the first three puzzles, and the fact that in all puzzles of this row, the unique polyomino has to touch the bottom line of the puzzle/field. The last two puzzles of the row actually use real tetronimoes.

While the puzzles of the first row only contained one polyomino, which is characteristic of the beginning of a Tetris™ game, the second row always uses two pieces, one of them corresponding to the piece used in a puzzle of the first row. This (partial) correspondence between the two rows in reinforced by the layout of the rows, as the first one goes from right to left, but the second one is in the back of the former and goes from left to right, so both rows go in the same absolute direction. Also, the second row is not visible when you play the first one, as one would expect if it represents the future state of the game.

The puzzles in the second row are also linked to typical interactions in Tetris™ or to the mechanics of this game:


 * The first puzzle contains two monominoes that have to be separated, while the second puzzle contains two monominoes that have to bet grouped together in a same area. The transition from the first puzzle to the second therefore mimic how the tetronimoes in Tetris™ get glued together when they cannot go down anymore.


 * The third puzzle represents one of the main objectives in Tetris: packing pieces together (note how the monomino is one row higher than the other piece, suggesting it came after).


 * The fourth, fifth and sixth puzzles of the row, together represent the motion of one of the two pieces, which is moved to the right to fit in the available space at the bottom, next to the square. The fact that these puzzles come together is reinforced by the fact that the solution of the first of them also works for the two others.

Tetris™ Effect
We could also talk about the "Tetris effect" (when you have played Tetris too long and continue to see falling tetronimoes some time after you have stopped playing), of which The Witness provides a nice variant (when you see circles and grids everywhere out of the game). This effect is also referenced elsewhere in the game: in the pause menu, and in the developers' video at the end of the Hotel.

Relation with other principles
The principle of opposing experience and analytical reasoning can also be interpreted in the context of game design as “there is a fundamental difference between being able to discuss some game mechanics, and the experience of actually playing with those mechanics.” And here, the game designers made references to Tetris' game mechanics, but you would agree that playing The Witness does not give any knowledge of what it is like to play Tetris...

What Blow said about it
In this interview on YouTube, Jonathan Blow said:"– JB: There is of course a little bit of a mental callback to earlier video games like Tetris, right. But, but that's like secondary or tertiary, right, you know. Although there is one... [pauses to think]""– Interviewer: fairly blatant reference?""– JB: no there's one puzzle... [pauses again to think] there's one puzzle that i think of is having more to do with Tetris but probably players don't really... in reality. So maybe it's not worth talking about. Um... but, um... really that one was... [pauses to think] had very little of a fictional element to it right and just much more of a part of constructing this system of interacting ideas."The puzzle in question seems to be the one discussed in the Tetris Puzzle section above.

Similar references to classic games in Blow's work
In Braid, Jonathan Blow already made references to the Super Mario universe, including Donkey Kong, but also to Sonic.