Jonathan Blow Announces 250-Hour Puzzle Game, Order of the Sinking Star
▼ Summary
– Order of the Sinking Star is a new, ambitious puzzle game from Jonathan Blow, revealed in 2025 and featuring up to 1,000 puzzles that can take hundreds of hours to complete.
– The game is a grid-based isometric adventure with a branching overworld, where puzzles introduce and combine mechanics like character-specific abilities, teleporting mirrors, and hostile creatures.
– It employs a hands-off teaching style, introducing mechanics through basic challenges and providing a rewind tool for experimentation, with complexity growing as mechanics are layered and combined.
– The developer is considering a hint system to guide players, as the game’s vast, non-linear overworld and need to retain puzzle knowledge over time could be overwhelming.
– The game contains an underlying story told through characters from different timelines, is built on a new proprietary engine, and is scheduled for a PC release in 2026.
The gaming world is about to receive its most formidable puzzle challenge yet with the announcement of Order of the Sinking Star, a new project from acclaimed designer Jonathan Blow. Revealed at The Game Awards 2025, this grid-based isometric adventure promises a staggering scope, featuring an estimated 1,000 individual puzzles that could demand 250 hours for a standard playthrough, with completionists potentially investing double that time. Building upon the legacy of Braid and The Witness, Blow’s latest endeavor layers intricate mechanics within a vast, branching overworld, pushing the boundaries of the genre.
A recent hands-off demonstration revealed a game that begins with deceptively simple concepts. Early puzzles function as tutorials, introducing characters with unique abilities, like a thief who can only pull objects or a wizard who must swap places with items in his line of sight. These initial block-pushing mazes quickly give way to far more complex challenges. The demo showcased mechanics such as mirrors that teleport entities across distances, hostile creatures that kill on contact, and beams that allow phasing through walls. Crucially, the game teaches these rules not through explicit explanation, but by placing players in basic scenarios that demonstrate their function, then steadily ramping up the difficulty.
A signature rewind tool, reminiscent of Braid, allows for unlimited undo steps, encouraging experimentation without the frustration of constant restarts. The true test emerges when these mechanics combine. One puzzle required jumping through gates to switch characters mid-solution, setting up specific obstacles for each one. Another introduced a mind-bending twist where a character phased through multiple mirrors simultaneously, creating controllable clones. These scenarios demand players think several moves ahead, building upon a deep, cumulative understanding of the game’s systems.
Zooming out to view the overworld map underscored the project’s immense, and somewhat overwhelming, scale. Progression is non-linear, allowing players to explore in any cardinal direction and pivot to a different area if stuck. The overworld itself contains meta-puzzles that unlock new map sections. This structure fosters a sense of discovery where a breakthrough in one area might suddenly illuminate the solution to a puzzle encountered hours earlier, creating a deeply interconnected web of challenges.
This very scope presents potential hurdles. The sheer volume of puzzles and mechanics could prove daunting, and the intricate knowledge required for later puzzles might fade if a player takes an extended break. While the map uses visual glints to highlight points of interest, tracking personal progress across such a vast landscape could become difficult. When asked about guiding players, Blow noted the team is considering a hint system or limited-use nudges, but is cautious about creating a crutch. He emphasized that environmental design and visual cues within puzzle rooms will also play a key instructive role.
Beneath the complex gameplay lies an unfolding narrative. Different sections of the overworld feature characters from various timelines within the game’s lore. Their intersecting stories and the cooperation between ancient civilizations hint at a broader mystery about the fate of their world, potentially carrying a thematic message about collaboration. Similar to The Witness, the story is revealed subtly, though this time through distinct, voiced characters who interact in small ways as their paths cross during puzzle-solving.
Order of the Sinking Star also serves as a showcase for a proprietary game engine and programming language developed in tandem by Blow and his team. Plans are in place to release these tools as open-source software shortly after the game’s launch. Currently slated for a 2026 release on PC, with other platforms to follow, this ambitious title aims to redefine the depth and longevity of the puzzle adventure.
(Source: IGN)
