SOUND THE ALARM! RESET THE COUNTER!
It has been 0 days since the last incident.
Sorry about all the commotion, but it has happened again. This is the story of a puzzle so ordinary and unassuming that you’d never suspect it could cause all this fuss. A puzzle so renowned for stumping unsuspecting players, that when they inevitably request a helping hand from fellow puzzlers, it causes a frenzy.
That puzzle is Swampy Boots.
But first, to fully understand how Swampy Boots gained such notoriety, we need to take a step back.
This puzzle is found in The Witness — a first-person puzzle game that is a favourite of many in the thinky community. In it, you explore a serene and strangely uninhabited island filled with puzzle panels. On each of these panels, you are invited to draw a line through a maze-like grid in order to satisfy various symbols. Once a panel is solved, it powers up a cable to the next panel where you face your next conundrum.
The Witness is very much about discovering the rules as you go. Rather than presenting a tutorial with the rules spelt out, you’re expected to discern the rules through experimentation and by observing which solutions are accepted and which are not. This non-verbal communication between the puzzle designer and the player has become a staple of modern puzzle game design.
The island of The Witness is divided into several areas — the desert, the town, the bamboo forest, and so on — each designed to communicate a different ruleset to the player. Nestled between the treehouse area and the mountain, we find the swamp, home to our fiendish friend.
Spoiler warning: The following two paragraphs contain some light spoilers for the “Tetris” mechanic in The Witness, although we’ll keep it quite vague.
Puzzles in the swamp explore what is referred to by fans as the “Tetris” mechanic. These puzzles revolve around drawing a line to divide the grid into regions — regions that match the shape of Tetris-like symbols within the grid (“polyominoes”, if you want the fancy word).
After making your way along metallic walkways, crossing pools of brightly colored water, and uncovering a few nuances of the Tetris blocks’ rules, you come to an entirely inconspicuous series of panels lining the side of the path. These puzzles explore a particular idea: what happens when these Tetris-like blocks have gaps in them?
By this point, the player is no doubt accustomed to these twists and turns, quickly figuring out how this rule works and making light work of each puzzle that stands before them. That is, until the last puzzle in this series: the dreaded Swampy Boots.
You see, ever since the game was released, members of the /r/TheWitness Reddit forum (myself included) would love to give subtle hints to anyone who requested them. It’s incredibly fun guiding someone to those delightful “aha” moments without outright spoiling it for them. Of course, different players would generally get stuck on different puzzles, except for one puzzle that kept coming up again and again.
In fact, it came up so often that on 27th June 2020, Reddit user /u/Ripuru-kun proposed creating a counter, keeping track of every time “that puzzle” was posted. This is the moment “that puzzle” became something more than just a nameless curiosity. When /u/Ripuru-kun described it as “the one swamp [puzzle] with the minecraft boots crafting recipe shaped tetrominos”, user /u/ultimatt42 responded “Ah, the ol' reddit Swampy Boots” and a legend was born.
The name of Swampy Boots was inspired by the Minecraft recipe for crafting boots, as a similar shape appears in the puzzle.
Hint requests for Swampy Boots became such a notable event that two weeks later, on 11th July 2020, /u/ultimatt42 created a dedicated forum to keep track of every occurrence. Since then, /r/SwampyBoots has received 66 reported incidents, including one from YouTube’s resident Sudoku experts, Cracking The Cryptic. That’s more than one per month since the forum was created — an especially high number when you consider that the game is now 9 years old. Think about all the poor individuals who don’t come to Reddit for help!
Swampy Boots has come to occupy a very special place in the hearts of The Witness fans. Alongside all the reported incidents are many wonderful and surprisingly high-effort memes, including recreations of the puzzle in Animal Crossing and Baba Is You, and even hand-crafted pillows, rugs, and scarves dedicated to the incredible Swampy Boots.
You know, there’s something sort of beautiful about an in-joke like this. Something so abstract, so esoteric, yet we can all share a moment of joy when another person gets to experience it. Our own kind of non-verbal communication that expands beyond the game.
But enough of that. Let’s get back to the more important question: what is it that makes Swampy Boots such a confounding puzzle? Well, this might surprise you, but Swampy Boots is far from the hardest puzzle in the game — it's no shipwreck puzzle, after all. No, it’s not beloved because it’s difficult, but because the sticking point is just so silly. A sneaky and ever-so-subtle detail that so many players seem to miss.
But I wouldn’t want to spoil that for you, would I? After all, I’d be denying us another exciting incident. I’ll go prepare the alarm.
If you love games like The Witness, may I recommend checking out our Thinky Games database? You can find similar rule-discovery games, first-person puzzlers, and logic games, or just go exploring for anything else you might like. If you haven’t played it yet, I highly recommend Taiji, a game greatly inspired by The Witness. Enjoy!
Disclaimer: Thinky Games is part of the Carina Initiatives and may have professional relationships with individuals and businesses related to the subject of this article. Please see our Editorial Policy for details.
