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Jonathan Blow, creator of the 2008 platformer Braid and the critically acclaimed 2016 puzzle title witnessrevealed his third game: Order of the Sinking Star. Via video chat before Game Awards 2025As the game was announced, Blue showed me his next world.
The new title from Blow’s personal studio will be Thekla, Inc. serves as another puzzle game, but like his first two successes, Order of the Sinking Star has its own unique rules and layers of depth. In it, players wander through another world of islands that contain countless small puzzles to jump into. Each is a single screen of squares on a grid full of doors with obstacles and enemies to navigate. Beat those to unlock islands with more mind-blowing challenges, and soon you’ll encounter puzzles in the overworld.
Like other Blow games, Order of the Sinking Star is designed to reveal layers of meta-mechanics for players as they dive deeper. Each of the four quadrants of the overworld map has a different story, characters, and basic mechanics – for example, three of the characters push, pull, and move blocks to reach the exit. But more heroes with different powers – even dragons – further complicate the many mysteries as they go on.
This is just one of the four quadrants in the game, which have their own unique flavors of spatial challenge – all of which rise in complexity in the places where they combine.
The arrangement of the sinking star was partly inspired by the Japanese subgenre of Sokubun Games, in which players carefully move boxes around a room (usually a warehouse) to avoid trapping themselves in a corner. The new game’s puzzles feel like thoughtful affairs, with simple levels giving way to more complex mind games and a backstory that flows to the player in bits and pieces. Order of the Sinking Star will be released in 2026, and it looks promising.
The upper quarter of the overworld contains puzzles for the heroes moving boulders, boxes, and each other around a grid.
Tried creating a demo of the game engine, and ended up with a full game
After making The Witness, Blow got tired of developing in C++, so he decided to make his own called Jai. But his team did not stop there, but turned to creating its own specialized game engine. Order of the Sinking Star was intended to be a small proof of concept that would showcase the types of games that could be made with it. But Blow and his team couldn’t resist adding more and more puzzle dynamics.
“It was supposed to be a small game, but for some reason, it’s stupid to build a game around a fusion explosion and expect it to be small,” Blue said. “And for this game, it ended up being really big. I probably wouldn’t do something that big again unless I had a much bigger team somehow.”
Order of the Sinking Star has a slightly cartoonish look, at least from what was finished – I’ve seen a large number of unfinished drawings, as Blow was keen to show off some of the later game mechanics that never got final renders. The complexity of the game will not be in the paid pixels and vibrant graphics. But this is probably for the best, as the simpler approach makes obstacles and map components as obvious as possible to players.
More complex puzzles involve level hazards such as dragons.
However, while players can move forward in any direction into the overworld, the mechanics can become complex very quickly. Blue showed me the first area, the northern quadrant, which is modeled after a traditional sword-and-sorcery fantasy world. Players control three characters, each with different abilities: a warrior who can push objects, a thief who can’t stop himself from stealing and dragging the last thing they touch behind them, and a wizard who teleports to switch places with the thing they encounter. Some puzzles only have one character, while more advanced puzzles require players to switch between all three characters.
Players are brought into the game without much preamble so they can get caught up in the puzzle, but textual hints and audio logs (of which Blow is a fan) will share the contextual story. The story consists of a queen using heroes to help delve deeper into her land of puzzles in the northern section of the game.
Teleportation devices will enable players to move around different quadrants; If they get stuck, they can return to another area with different dynamics. The eastern quadrant, for example, revolves around using a magic mirror that radiates a copy of the player character at a 90-degree angle, moving back and forth side to side. In this land’s puzzles, players can switch from one character to another and back again to hop across islands.
In the overworld, you’ll find areas on the borders of quadrants, which contain puzzles that integrate their mechanics. This area mixes mirror cloning (top left) and moving through walls (bottom right).
But Blue and his team didn’t spend all that time creating four different puzzle biomes. On the borders of the overworld where any of these quadrants collide, players will find levels that integrate their mechanics. Following the northeastern border, players will find maps with both fantasy hero and mirror puzzle mechanics mixed together.
Given how long the Blow team has been in the game and what little I’ve seen, I only expect these complexities to grow and expand, surprising players with cutting-edge changes to these basic rules. This is what made The Witness so compelling for me to explore deeper, as the game’s mysteries began to influence each other. Well, that, along with the philosophical underpinnings of the game’s setting and lore, revealed its message.
How can people in a society freed from scarcity find meaning? This is what the Order of the Sinking Star demands.
The philosophy of the upcoming Blow game
With such depth of storytelling intertwined with Blow’s previous blockbuster successes, it’s smart to expect similar meaning woven into Order of the Sinking Star. Like other Blow games, the secrets are in the structure.
In the case of Order of the Sinking Star, the mystery lies in the overworld that players return to and explore among the puzzles. What is it, who made it and why? As the player falls into the puzzles, the characters they control deliver a few lines of dialogue, which combine with audio logs to tell a larger story: 500 years in the future, humanity exists in a post-scarcity world.
“If you don’t have any problems and everyone is basically infinitely rich, what is the point of life at that point?” He said blow. “Are people still interacting in a normal way? Are they talking to each other? How do they feel day to day about themselves?”
Although a true post-scarcity society is in the distant future, we are also the richest society in the history of the world, as Blue points out — and we have already demonstrated many of the problems of a rich society. He was quick to say that not everyone in the United States feels wealthy right now. But even those who have roofs over their heads and who have jobs and live with someone in conditions where they are generally taken care of are still challenged by the questions that a post-scarcity civilization might pose, which Blue was soon shaking up.
“How do I spend my days, and do I spend them happy? What does it mean to be happy to me? Is it a superficial form of happiness or a deep form? What are these two different things? Should one judge that, and what kind of judgment?” He said blow.
The game’s story and art have not been finalized, so the delivery of these themes has not been finalized. But Blow confirmed that Order of the Sinking Star has “a lot more story than any of my previous games – so I’m really interested in making sure it’s good.”
When game worlds meet, new puzzle dynamics emerge – like this one that mixes stone skipping (left) with heroic rock moving (right).
Making games that go beyond what’s already out there – and what’s next for Blow
Although the 1993 classic first-person puzzle game Myst was partly inspired by (and compared to) The Witness, there weren’t many games like it when it came out in 2016. Blow wasn’t sure people would play the game, but a lot of them did. This supported his philosophy that you might have an idea of what people will buy based on what’s out there, but no one can say how a game of unknown design will fare.
“That’s something that’s interesting for a designer, and that’s what I try to do: make things outside of what currently exists, and then hopefully other people will appreciate those things as well,” Blue said.
A lot has changed since his last game came out in 2016, including the buzz of an increasing number of games jostling for attention upon release. Blue plays some of these games, especially his favorite genre of puzzle games, which he still believes can be “really magical” when they have a mind-expanding idea. But many other games are made by designers who don’t have high goals in mind, and their central idea is just a disingenuous gimmick.
When I ask him about recent puzzle games he’s enjoyed, his tastes tend to be more esoteric, like last year Confronting the Shogun. Even a 20-minute demo of the game hasn’t been released yet, Trifolium: The Adventures of Gary PritzlnickBlow comes to mind before other popular puzzle games like this year’s Blue Prince.
However, he points out that The Blue Prince proves his point that games that challenge players’ tastes can leave them wanting the unexpected.
“If you asked people in January 2025, what game would they most want to play this year, none of them would probably describe Blue Prince because they didn’t know they wanted to play it, right?” He said blow.
Developing the game engine has been a long process that Blow and his team hope will translate into less time developing their next game. He already got an idea of what he wanted to do. While it’s one of several potential game ideas he and his team could delve into, he’s already designed a prototype for it privately — before The Witness even came out.
“It’s not a puzzle game; I’ll give you a hint about that,” Blue said. “I’m looking forward to working on a non-puzzle game.”
We’ll have to see if Blow can resist avoiding the clockwork mechanics that made his games so irresistible to puzzle brains.