Episode 7 of The Witness starts in the desert where Episode 6 stopped and heads back toward the middle of the island. A panel crossed by tree shadows gives no sign of right or wrong and gets left for later. Then a stone gateway leads to a walled garden of hedge mazes, and the video ends as the third maze gate swings open.
Panels that won't answer
"Let's see if we can get to where we just shot that ray beam." The route climbs through pale quarry stone. An orange panel in a gray frame is out of reach: "here is a puzzle but there's locks on the side." A blue grid of dots on a rusty wall takes several lines and nothing lights. "Nothing errors."
In the woods, a small blue panel on a rust-colored wall goes the other way. "This is going to be an easy solve? Yes!"
The panel in the shadows
Next is a white grid with yellow lines on a post, with branch shadows falling across it and dark screens on posts nearby. Line after line goes in, and none gets a reaction. "So we are trying to solve this puzzle that gives no indication of what to do." The commentary asks viewers to hold back hints "unless I'm totally stumped."
A recording plays nearby, a passage that says "Zen values only the concrete and the simple." A door close by gets a second look: "I see there's a little timer in there, on the door." Then: "I'll come back to this."
Into the mazes
Past fields of red and pink flowers, through a stone gateway and a dark tunnel, the path opens into a garden of hedges. "Ooh, a maze. It's a maze." A gate in the hedges has a panel with a maze on it. "Is this duplicating the maze I just walked through?" The first line fails, so it is back through the hedges to retrace the route, and the next line lights the panel and opens the gate. "So good."
Grass, then sound
The second maze has brown hedges and dry grass on the ground. "So the grass blocks this. Okay, so where... the path has no grass." Following the bare ground through the maze gives a line that opens the gate.
The third maze "doesn't have any grass." The commentary settles on sound: "I think we have to work on sounds on this one. So where it's wet." The first line at the gate fails. The screen goes to the game's title menu for a moment and comes back in the maze, and the walk starts again, this time listening to the footsteps: "this is good sounds, and then bad sounds, where, right there, it's like wet or something."
Where it ends
After a run of lines at the gate panel that fail, one runs from the bottom corner to the exit at the top. "Oh, okay, I did it, I solved it." The gate swings open and the video ends. The shadow panel, the blue dot panel and the locked panel in the quarry are still unsolved.
