Jonathan Blow’s The Order of the Sinking Star

His latest undertaking, The Order of the Sinking Star, arrives a decade after his last major release, The Witness. Packing roughly 1,500 puzzles into a sprawling experience that Blow estimates could demand 500 hours to fully conquer, it stands as a monument to uncompromised design. But in an era obsessed with scalable live-service loops and rapid market cadence, why build something most players might never even finish?

Rejecting Practicality for Pure Design

Commercial viability rarely dictates Blow’s roadmap. While mainstream publishers lean heavily on focus groups and data analytics, the outspoken designer lets pure mechanics take the wheel.

“Some people decide what to make based on what’s practical or what makes business sense,” Blow observes. “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.”

That uniqueness is baked into the very DNA of The Order of the Sinking Star. The game functions as a mechanical supercollider. Four distinct overhead worlds are built upon the foundational mechanics of four pre-existing free puzzle games created by independent developers, utilizing their systems with explicit permission.

Consider how these systems interact. In one world, players borrow mechanics from Alan Hazelden’s 2014 title Mirror Isles, utilizing mirror reflections to swap positions across islands. When fused with another Hazelden creation, Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes—where players hurl stones across water to establish pathways—brand-new cognitive hurdles spontaneously emerge. It is puzzle design via chemical reaction.

The Hard Mode Philosophy of Engine Building

Blow’s refusal to compromise stretches far beyond core puzzle logic. Refusing to lean on off-the-shelf software, he and his team opted to bypass industry standards like commercial tools entirely. Instead, Blow engineered his own programming language from scratch, named Jai, and built a custom game engine to house the experience.

Building a proprietary engine means manually writing systems for graphics rendering, physics simulation, and scripting. Most studios avoid this immense overhead, turning instead to pre-built frameworks to accelerate production. For Blow, however, custom tooling allowed absolute precision.

“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,” Blow reflects. “Pero it’s also been rewarding in a certain way. Because otherwise, what else are you in the industry for?”

Navigating Industry Shifts and AI Skepticism

The gaming landscape has transformed dramatically since Braid launched independent development into the cultural mainstream. As market analysts frequently highlight, corporate consolidation and shifting development pipelines have altered creator culture. Blow remains vocal about these shifts, maintaining a critical stance on industry trends, including the recent rush toward artificial intelligence.

AI played zero role in the pipeline for The Order of the Sinking Star. While acknowledging the technology’s novelty, Blow remains deeply skeptical of productivity claims.

“If you’re saying you’re ten times as productive and it’s been three years, you should have been able to do thirty years of work,” he points out. “So where’s this output of thirty years of work?”

Furthermore, he warns of long-term educational deficits. If younger creators rely exclusively on automated code generation rather than mastering foundational programming syntax, the industry risks facing a severe talent bottleneck.

Project Metrics at a Glance

Focusing on the Work Above All

Controversy and industry friction have occasionally followed the designer. Yet, when confronted with outside noise, his response remains stubbornly singular: return to the monitor.

“What the players want from developers is good games,” Blow concludes. “They don’t want us to be arguing, especially with each other, about political stances.”

Whether players have the endurance to tackle a 500-hour labyrinth remains to be seen. But in an ecosystem often criticized for homogenizing creativity, the arrival of The Order of the Sinking Star stands as an unapologetic testament to uncompromising vision.

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