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

Jonathan Blow has spent the last ten years on a puzzle game he says may be the biggest ever made. The Order of the Sinking Star is due out on Thursday, and by his estimate it packs roughly 1,500 puzzles and about 500 hours of play. That is not a project built for quick wins or a neat completion badge. It is built for obsession.

Blow has always been the kind of developer who treats caution like a trap. He says he makes “bad business decisions” when design gets in the way of practicality, but argues that is exactly how you end up with something unique. That approach powered Braid in 2008, and later The Witness. Now it has produced a game made from four worlds, viewed from overhead, and assembled from mechanics borrowed with permission from four free puzzle games.

The pitch is wild in a very Blow way: a “game design supercollider.” One example uses the mirror-swap trick from Mirror Isles, a 2014 game by Alan Hazelden, and combines it with stone-throwing paths from Hazelden’s Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes. The result is not a remix so much as a mash-up engine for new problems. Blow says the industry has drifted away from the idea that great designers should keep making new experiences, and he clearly sees this project as a corrective.

He is also blunt about the politics around games. Hazelden publicly distanced himself from Blow in December 2025, accusing him on Bluesky of being “dismissive of diversity efforts” and “pro-MAGA.” Blow has not answered that publicly. Instead, he says he focused on making games and argues players want good games, not developers arguing with each other about politics.

AI is another place where he refuses the easy path. He calls it an advancement and an interesting technology, but says it was not part of the pipeline for The Order of the Sinking Star. He worries that newer creators may lean too hard on it and stop learning to program properly, leaving the industry short on people who can actually build things if the software falls short.

Even the tools were built to match the ambition. Blow wrote his own programming language, Jai, and used a custom engine instead of relying on Unity or Unreal. Ten years later, he says the whole thing has been “nightmare mode.” But he also sounds like someone who would do it again if the alternative was playing it safe.