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

Jonathan Blow has spent a decade leading a small team to build The Order of the Sinking Star, a massive overhead puzzle game of roughly 1,500 puzzles that he estimates could take about 500 hours to finish. Designed as a "game design supercollider," it combines mechanics from four existing free puzzle games - with the original creators' permission - into four distinct worlds that are smashed together to yield hundreds of novel brainteasers; examples include mirror-swapping from Mirror Isles and path-making from Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes. Released on PC, Nintendo Switch 2 and PlayStation 5, the project reflects Blow's insistence on design-first decisions over commercial practicality and his appetite for experimental, risk-taking work, even amid public tensions with one contributor who distanced himself over Blow's perceived political stance.

Blow also engineered the toolchain to match his ambitions: he created a new programming language, Jai, and a custom engine rather than using off‑the‑shelf middleware, which partly explains the ten‑year development span and his remark that the project was “nightmare mode.” He excluded AI from the pipeline, expressing skepticism about claims of massive productivity gains and warning that overreliance on AI could shrink the pool of programmers able to make complex games. He says the payoff is a uniquely authored experience and hopes his next project will be less technically brutal to produce.