Braid-creator Jonathan Blow on making the 'biggest puzzle game ever'

For ten years, Jonathan Blow has been working with a small team on what he believes is "the biggest puzzle game ever made".

The American developer is renowned as one of the fathers of the modern indie game movement, creating the genre-defining puzzle-platformer Braid in 2008.

Now, a decade on from his last project, The Witness, The Order of the Sinking Star is due to be released on Thursday - a game with roughly 1,500 puzzles that he estimates could take around 500 hours to complete.

So why make something the majority of players may never get even halfway through, 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 says.

The game's blurb likens itself to a "game design supercollider" - four worlds viewed from overhead, built on the mechanics of four pre-existing free puzzle games from other designers (with their permission to do so).

These ideas are then "smashed together" to create brand-new brainteasers.

For example, one world's mechanics, based on those from the free 2014 game Mirror Isles by Alan Hazelden, sees players use mirror reflections to swap places across islands.

When combined with the system of another free game created by Hazelden, Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes - where players throw stones into water to create paths - brand-new puzzle opportunities suddenly arise.

Taking a risk on making something more experimental is what appears to ultimately drive Blow, who says that as the industry has grown, the culture for developers has also changed.

"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.

The outspoken designer is renowned for his frank takes on the industry - previously calling social media games such as Farmville "evil" and World of Warcraft's quest design "unethical".

In December 2025, Hazelden publicly distanced himself from Blow - writing in a post on Bluesky that he 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 says he is sceptical of AI, which was "not part of the pipeline at all" for Order of the Sinking Star, even though he recognises it as an "advancement" and an "interesting technology".

Of the benefits often cited by those who use the tech, such as increased productivity, he asks: "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 rejecting the tech, Blow says the industry faces an "uncertain time" in how it deals with AI, particularly with newer creators who may rely too heavily on it to code rather than learning the "weird glyphs" themselves.

"A danger is that not many people know how to program in the future," he says.

"And if AI can't really do everything, then the supply of programmers might not be enough to make good stuff."

Blow's refusal to compromise on any aspect of the Order of the Sinking Star transcends its core design.

The developer decided to make his own programming language, Jai, from scratch.

He then used this, alongside a custom engine, to make the game.

A game's engine is a piece of software that packs everything needed to craft a playable experience - including graphics rendering, physics simulation and scripting - into one place for creators.

Some developers turn to pre-built game engines such as Unity or Unreal Engine, rather than taking on the considerable challenge of building an engine from scratch.

For Blow, creating his own engine in this language meant he could build something "tuned and authored very specifically" to what he wanted to make.

It is yet another reason he gives for why this project, which started as a simple "design experiment", has taken ten years to finish.

"I do want the next project after this to be less on hard mode, or really it was nightmare mode, because we did so many things on hard mode at the same time," he reflects.

"But it's also been rewarding in a certain way. Because otherwise, what else are you in the industry for?"

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