The Witness, as we learned back in November, will not have music, but will have voice acting. Today, developer Jonathan Blow revealed the actors providing those voices on the PlayStation Blog: Ashley Johnson, Phil LaMarr, Matthew Waterson, and Terra Deva.
Johnson has had numerous videogame roles but is most famous for her portrayal of Ellie in The Last of Us, while LaMarr is the guy who got his skull vaporized in the back seat of Jules Winnfield's car in Pulp Fiction. (He also voiced Ratbag in Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and Hermes in Futurama.) Waterson's credits include Fallout 4 and Halo 5, while Deva is “an oft-performing musician” who apparently did a stint in the Mickey Mouse Club.
Blow said in the post that The Witness “deliberately riffs on several traditional elements of game design,” including audio logs, a common and useful but, let's admit it, fundamentally silly tool of exposition in which harried or dying NPCs pause for a moment to record a brief summary of their thoughts, which they leave lying here and there like discarded tissues. The Witness will have similar recordings (hence the need for voice actors) but Blow added that “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,” he said. “I will warn you, though, that the story in The Witness, such as it is, is fairly subtle and happens mostly implicitly. You really have to explore and read between the lines to know what’s going on. So do not expect a traditional game story like The Last of Us or The Order!”
The Witness is slated to come out on January 26.
