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

Braid creator Jonathan Blow on making the “biggest puzzle game ever”

For the past 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 widely regarded as one of the founders of the modern indie game movement, having created the genre-defining puzzle-platformer Braid in 2008.

Now, a decade after his last project, The Witness, The Order of the Sinking Star is set for release on Thursday — a game with about 1,500 puzzles that he estimates could take roughly 500 hours to finish.

So why make something that most players may never get even halfway through, let alone complete?

“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 description compares it to a “game design supercollider” — four worlds seen from overhead, built on the mechanics of four existing free puzzle games from other designers, with their permission.

Those ideas are then “smashed together” to produce entirely new brainteasers.

For instance, one world’s mechanics, based on those in the free 2014 game Mirror Isles by Alan Hazelden, has players using mirror reflections to swap positions across islands.

When that is combined with the system from another free game by Hazelden, Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes — in which players throw stones into water to create paths — entirely new puzzle possibilities emerge.

Taking a chance on making something more experimental is what seems to drive Blow in the end, and he says that as the industry has expanded, the culture for developers has changed too.

“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 known for his blunt views on the industry — previously describing social media games such as Farmville as “evil” and World of Warcraft’s quest design as “unethical”.

In December 2025, Hazelden publicly distanced himself from Blow, writing in a post on Bluesky, external that he was “dismissive of diversity efforts” and “pro-MAGA”.

Blow, who has not publicly responded to those criticisms, says he instead chose 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 the industry is uncertain about how it should approach AI

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 sees it as an “advancement” and an “interesting technology”.

Of the advantages often claimed by users of the technology, such as greater 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 technology, Blow says the industry is in an “uncertain time” in how it handles AI, especially with newer creators who may depend too heavily on it to code instead of 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.”

In 2008 Jonathan Blow released the genre-defining puzzle platformer Braid, whose post-release story is documented in the film Indie Game: The Movie

Blow’s refusal to compromise on any part of The Order of the Sinking Star goes beyond its central design.

The developer chose to create his own programming language, Jai, from scratch.

He then used that, together with a custom engine, to make the game.

A game engine is software that brings together everything needed to create a playable experience — including graphics rendering, physics simulation and scripting — in one place for developers.

Some developers use pre-built, commercially available engines such as Unity or Unreal Engine instead of taking on the challenge of coding from scratch.

For Blow, building his own engine in this language meant he could create something “tuned and authored very specifically” to what he wanted to make.

It is another reason he gives for why this project, which began as a simple “design experiment”, has taken ten years to complete.

“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?”