American developer Jonathan Blow, author of the 2008 game Braid, is releasing the new title The Order of the Sinking Star. The game is released on Thursday, with Blow having worked on it with a small team for ten full years.
The project is described by Blow as "the greatest puzzle game ever made". It contains approximately 1500 puzzles, with the author estimating that a player might need around 500 hours for complete completion. In the game description, a comparison is made with a "super collider for game design".
The game consists of four worlds viewed from above. Each of these worlds is based on the mechanics of four existing free puzzle games, used with their permission. One world is based on the mechanics of the 2014 game Mirror Isles by Alan Hazelden, in which players use mirror reflections to change positions between islands. Hazelden is also the author of the free game Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes, in which stones are thrown into the water to create paths.
Blow has previously attracted attention with his sharp stances on the industry. Social games such as Farmville were described by him as "evil", while the task design in World of Warcraft was described as "unethical". In December 2025, Alan Hazelden publicly distanced himself from Blow in a post on Bluesky, stating that Blow had "undermined efforts for diversity" and was "pro-MAGA". Blow has not publicly responded to the criticism; he has stated that he decided to "sit and focus on games".
Blow is sceptical of artificial intelligence. For the Order of the Sinking Star, he states that AI "was not at all part of the production process", yet he recognises it as "progress" and a "fascinating technology". For the creation of the game, he developed his own programming language, Jai, from scratch, and used it alongside his own engine. The engine is software that combines everything needed to create a playable game experience, including graphic rendering, physics simulation and scripting, with developers instead using ready-made solutions such as Unity or Unreal Engine.
The project began as a simple "design experiment", taking ten years to complete. Before the new title, Blow's previous project was The Witness.
