Jonathan Blow’s Ambitious New Puzzle Game Is 500 Hours Long, And it Looks Fantastic (Preview)

Jonathan Blow is one of the most notable names in the indie game scene, with some even labeling him as one of gaming’s auteurs. If you’re relatively new to gaming, you may not be familiar with the name because Blow hasn’t released a brand new game since 2016. In fact, he’s only made two games as the lead creative, Braid and The Witness, but has worked on numerous other titles in various other capacities. Blow is a pretty intelligent guy, even going as far as trying to make his own programming language, known as Jai. It has been in the works for over a decade, and Blow intends for it to be used for game development.

There’s a common theme here: Jonathan Blow takes his time. There was a seven-year gap between Braid and The Witness. His next game, Order of the Sinking Star, will have taken even longer. It’s an ambitious new game that will consume those who seek to complete it, and that’s partially why it has taken so long to make. I got to speak with Jonathan Blow and see the game in action last week, leading to a very enlightening experience.

Order of the Sinking Star Is A Massive New Puzzle Game That Will Occupy You For Quite Some Time

Off the top, let me say that Order of the Sinking Star is one heck of a game. The game is a gorgeous top-down experience where the player will embody a number of characters, including thieves, wizards, and warriors. You’ll work your way through a world of magic and monsters, clearing areas by solving puzzles. Each character has unique abilities to help them complete all of the puzzles in the game, allowing the experience to feel quite varied. The levels have a grid-like structure, allowing you to clearly visualize how things can move around the space and understand the rules with ease.

One of the puzzles I saw had two playable characters on opposite sides of the screen, separated by a body of water. The character on the left side had mirrors that he could move around, while the character on the right side was surrounded by monsters. By pushing the mirrors around, the player is able to teleport anything in the mirror’s path. If you’re clever enough, you can even teleport a monster into the water to drown it. Ultimately, the goal is to get the other character to the other side by utilizing the mirror and the abilities of the respective characters. It’s clever and looks like a challenge that would tease my brain.

It’s also not a super linear experience, either. Order of the Sinking Star places you in what is called an Overworld, which is sort of a hub. You can go north, south, east, or west, and each direction has its own sub-game with new game mechanics, different narrative threads, and unique characters. As you play, the Overworld’s fog of war will clear and allow you to see a larger picture of the map. Blow showed me a zoomed-out version of just some of the world after parts of it had been cleared, and it looked absurd in terms of scale.

You’ll be exposed to a plethora of locations and biomes as a result of this, which Blow said is a conscious effort to keep the game visually interesting. That’s necessary because this is not a small game, by any stretch of the imagination. Order of the Sinking Star features over 1,000 handmade puzzles, which means it will take quite a long time to beat. Blow said it’s five to six times bigger than The Witness and gave an estimation of just how long it will take to finish.

“This is not a promise, but the number I have in my mind is about 500 hours,” said Blow. “Someone who sucks at puzzles is going to take a lot longer. We do have two playtesters right now who are both professional puzzle game designers, and those guys are past the 200-hour mark each. They might finish in under 300 hours… and that’s for people who make puzzle games as a living. I might even be wrong on the low end of that 500 hours; it might be more for regular people, but it’s a big game is the point. It’s been a challenging development process for that reason.”

To make such an expansive game with so many puzzles, Blow and his team started by taking four general game ideas and sort of mashing them together. They start playing around with the ideas, making levels they know might not make it to the final game, and eventually start honing in on what makes it cool and fun to play. Given it’s already a pretty long game, they stripped out anything that artificially gated you from getting to the stuff they think is most interesting and engaging. Blow believes that this has led to the most refined puzzles of his career, as each one gets to the meat of the experience.

The puzzles were also somewhat designed to be playable with multiple people in a couch co-op environment. One of the things Blow learned from The Witness is that people would play it with their friends or spouse in the room, but they could all work together to solve the puzzles as they’re often directly on the screen. The player is more or less sitting there staring at it, letting their internal gears turn. There isn’t any big action, so anyone around them can also participate. Order of the Sinking Star will leverage a similar idea, allowing you to see everything clearly on the screen and give others the opportunity to chime in.

I couldn’t help but wonder what the game would be like in co-op, as there are multiple characters. However, you can’t just make a single-player puzzle game a co-op game. The puzzles are designed specifically for the amount of people that can play it. Blow does like the idea of a co-op expansion after the game is finished, but nothing is in the cards right now and there’s certainly no promise being made for such a thing.

Jonathan Blow on AI and What’s Next (It’s Not a Puzzle Game)

Given the amount of time it takes to make such a complex game, Blow’s interest in technology and programming, and the fact that he works with a relatively small team, I asked what his stance is on AI in game development. Others have suggested AI could be used to make games quicker and more efficiently, so how does someone who has spent about a decade working on one game feel about that?

“We used a very small amount of AI for drafting, but there won’t be any AI-generated things in the final game because I don’t think it’s good enough, honestly,” he said. “I do think it’s very useful in some cases when you’re drafting a game. For instance, we use AI temporary voice because when you’re writing dialogue, reading it back in your mind is very different from experiencing it as you play the game.”

Blow noted that when they went in to do voice-over for The Witness, they sometimes found that what was written wasn’t working when it was actually spoken out loud. However, the introduction of AI allows them to avoid the issue of burning money on an actor and a recording space while trying to resolve dialogue problems. Now, they can hear it in action with a temporary AI voice over, refine the script, and then bring it to a real actor who will then be used in the final game.

Order of the Sinking Star is due out sometime in 2026 for PC, with plans for Steam Deck support. Other platforms are also possibly on the horizon, but they aren’t committing to anything just yet. So, what’s after this? I noticed Blow has an interest in extraction shooters like Arc Raiders on social media and asked if he had any desire to make something like that after years of puzzle games. To my surprise, he does.

“I kind of do. I wouldn’t mind making an extraction shooter, I have a very vague idea for an extraction shooter that is very different. Even the word ‘shooter’ doesn’t really [fit], it’s an extraction some-kind-of-game. I know what the next game is after this, and it’s not a puzzle game, but it’s also not in the extraction shooter genre. As we’ve said, it has taken me a long time to make games. I hope we can do the next game much, much faster.”

Blow notes that the new game engine and programming language created for Order of the Sinking Star were partially why this game took so long. However, they won’t have to do that again as they’re happy with what they’ve created, and it will streamline the process. He also doesn’t plan to have so much single-player content in the next game, which will also help get it across the finish line faster.

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