Order of the Sinking Star: Jonathan Blow on creating 'the biggest puzzle game ever'
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Braid-creator Jonathan Blow on making the 'biggest puzzle game ever'
Image source: Thekla, Inc., Arc Games
By Laura Cress, Technology reporter
Published 56 minutes ago
For a decade, Jonathan Blow has been laboring on what he believes is "the biggest puzzle game ever made". The American developer is recognized as one of the pioneers of the modern indie game movement, creating the genre-defining puzzle-platformer Braid in 2008. Now, a decade after his last project, The Witness, The Order of the Sinking Star is set to be released on Thursday—a game boasting roughly 1,500 puzzles that Blow estimates could take around 500 hours to complete.
So why create something most players may never even start, let alone finish?
"Some people decide what to make based on what's practical or what makes business sense," Blow says. "It's never been the way that I think."
"I sort of make bad business decisions in a sense...because I let the design dominate that process. But then because we did that, we always have something unique," he continues.
The game's description likens itself to a "game design supercollider"—four worlds viewed from above, built on the mechanics of four existing free puzzle games (with permission from their designers). These ideas are then "smashed together" to create entirely new brainteasers.
For instance, one world's mechanics, based on Mirror Isles by Alan Hazelden (2014), involves players using mirror reflections to swap places across islands. When combined with another free game created by Hazelden, Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes, where players throw stones into water to create paths, new puzzle opportunities arise.
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Risk and reward seem to ultimately drive Blow, who believes the industry's culture has shifted since he started.
"Somewhere along the way...this idea that the best designers were trying to always make new experiences...just sort of got dropped by the wayside," he says.
Blow is known for his candid takes on the industry—previously calling social media games like Farmville "evil" and World of Warcraft's quest design "unethical." In December 2025, Hazelden publicly distanced himself from Blow, writing in a Bluesky post that Blow was "dismissive of diversity efforts" and "pro-MAGA".
Blow, who has not responded to these critiques publicly, tells me he instead decided to "sit down and focus on the games."
"What the players want from developers is good games," he says. "They don't want us to be arguing, especially with each other, about political stances."
Blow expresses skepticism about AI, which was "not part of the pipeline at all" for The Order of the Sinking Star, despite recognizing it as an "advancement" and *"interesting technology." He questions the often-cited benefits of AI: "If you're saying you're ten times as productive and it's been 3 years, you should have been able to do thirty years of work." "So where's this output of 30 years of work?"
Despite his rejection of AI, Blow acknowledges the industry faces an "uncertain time" in how it approaches artificial intelligence.