Jonathan Blow says The Order of the Sinking Star is 'biggest puzzle game ever made'

Jonathan Blow, the American developer who created the 2008 puzzle-platformer Braid, said he has spent ten years working with a small team on what he calls "the biggest puzzle game ever made". The game, The Order of the Sinking Star, is due to be released on Thursday, the BBC reported on 7 October 2026. It comes a decade after his last project, The Witness.

Blow estimated the game contains roughly 1,500 puzzles and could take around 500 hours to complete. It is due for release on PC, Nintendo Switch 2 and PlayStation 5. According to the BBC, the game's blurb likens it to a "game design supercollider".

The player travels through four worlds, viewed from overhead, built on the mechanics of four pre-existing free puzzle games by other designers, used with their permission. One world uses mechanics from Mirror Isles, a free 2014 game by Alan Hazelden, in which players use mirror reflections to swap places across islands. The BBC reported that combining these with Hazelden's Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes, where players throw stones into water to create paths, creates new puzzle opportunities.

Blow said he lets design rather than business considerations shape his work. "Some people decide what to make based on what's practical or what makes business sense," he said. "It's never been the way that I think." He said that as the industry has grown, the idea that the best designers always tried to make new experiences "just sort of got dropped by the wayside".

In December 2025, Hazelden publicly distanced himself from Blow, writing in a post on Bluesky that Blow was "dismissive of diversity efforts" and "pro-MAGA", the BBC reported. Blow has not responded to those critiques publicly, and told the BBC he decided to "sit down and focus on the games". "What the players want from developers is good games," he said.

Blow said he is sceptical of AI, which was "not part of the pipeline at all" for the game, though he recognises it as an "advancement" and an "interesting technology". Of claims about increased productivity, he said: "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." The BBC also reported that Blow previously called social media games such as Farmville "evil" and World of Warcraft's quest design "unethical".