Order Of The Sinking Star Is Jonathan Blow's Most Ambitious Game Yet

Jonathan Blow is not interested in holding your hand. The indie auteur's previous efforts, games like Braid and The Witness, are much more interested in letting you figure everything out for yourself. Blow's digital worlds are mysterious puzzle boxes that arrive with no instructions, and it's up to you to work out how it all fits together. His latest game, Order of the Sinking Star, is set to be his most ambitious yet by far.

Announced at The Game Awards last year, Order of the Sinking Star is described as a "narrative adventure set in a realm of magic and enigma." There are over 1000 interconnected, hand-crafted puzzles spread across a huge world filled with mysteries to solve. Clearly, this has been no small undertaking for Blow, who released The Witness a decade ago.

"The games are very different," Blow tells me of his latest effort and how it compares to his previous releases. "We've never made a sequel. The number one thing you do in this industry, if you want to make money when you have a successful game, is you make the sequel immediately. There's no Braid 2. There's no Witness 2."

"That would be the primary way that you would apply lessons. So part of the reason these games take so long is we do a little bit of sequel thing inside the next game itself. We learn what's working, what's not working, and then we redesign everything at some point in the middle to get the better version."

Blow sees video game design as a way to better understand the universe. Why do things work the way they do? How does it all fit together? It's a design philosophy that has clearly underpinned Blow's work from the very beginning, but Order of the Sinking Star might be the purest expression yet of this philosophy.

"I'm really interested in just what this world is, and this universe that we're in. How does it work, and why does it work that way? And are there ways that we can use video games as a way of understanding where we are and who we are? So this game uses a lens on that question that I would say is very specific."

He continues: "If you look at old spiritual and philosophical texts from various cultures, there are some things you can find in common about creation stories. Why the world is the way it is, or how it came to be. In general, one thing that these stories or these philosophies have in common is that they postulate some fundamental creative mechanism or creative force to how the universe works, right? Even from an atheistic point of view, you look at a physicist. The physicist has a theory that's about particles with forces that interact between them. And so, in game design, we have our own version of that. But it's very, very simple and idealized. It's like you have an object with some kind of game mechanics, object A, and then you have another, object B, with some other game mechanics, and then you put them in the same place, and you let people play with them at the same time, and they interact, and they generate surprise, right?"

"We've known for a while that this is one of the things that makes puzzle games good. The thing is, though, like, why does that even work? Why can you make some rules about how objects interact with each other, and then they generate complex, surprising situations? It's something we use as designers, but we don't understand why it works. And so, one of the things that's going on with this game is that we're just looking at that very deliberately; we're setting up a lot of situations where these surprising, delightful things happen, and you get to see it over and over."

This, of course, is where Order of the Sinking Star's many, many puzzles come into play. Players explore a huge realm split into four unique worlds with their own mechanics, contraptions, and stories. Ultimately, these different worlds begin to bleed into one another, which in turn leads to different mechanics and puzzle systems coming together to create new challenges and surprises. It's very much a game that rewards experimentation and curiosity, but you're also encouraged to explore at your own pace.

In much the same way Elden Ring allowed you to wander off the beaten path if you were stuck on a certain boss, Order of the Sinking Star gives you the option to abandon a particularly tricky puzzle and go and attempt some others until, hopefully, something clicks for you.

"We actually designed the game both so that it's very non-linear," Blow explains. "So if you get stuck on a puzzle, you can go somewhere else. There are a lot of optional puzzles. We don't force you to solve anything. We don't force you to solve everything at all. It's kind of a chill game in that way."

In the midst of all this, there's a story waiting to be discovered. A story that addresses and analogizes the very ideas that inspired the game in the first place.

"The story gets told in two basic ways," Blow explains. "One of them is a very traditional audio log structure where you're wandering, and you find a little voice diary that somebody left, and you play that. And then one of the other ways is also traditional at this point, of just like characters saying stuff to each other in the middle of a level. And both of those are very useful in different ways to express different kinds of ideas. It was just about finding that structure of what works. We were in this game originally going to have cutscenes, and then we just decided that wasn't going to work for various reasons."

While Order of the Sinking Star is very obviously not a sequel to Braid or The Witness, it shares the same DNA as its predecessors. In fact, Blow tells me the seed that ultimately grew into his latest game began as early as development on The Witness.

"Usually with every game, I explore something in that design, and then it leaves me with some question or some interest that follows on from that into the next game," he says. "So, in The Witness, I was doing a lot about non-verbal communication. The Witness also had this format where there are different biomes, and every biome has a different puzzle topic, but then those can come together."

"In Order of the Sinking Star we've become a lot more specific about that, in that the map, the geometry of the map, corresponds to the different topics of the things that are going on and that that just allows us to be very, very clear about the way that we're exploring the topics. And there are the parallels to philosophical and religious thoughts that also just followed on from The Witness. I mean, The Witness was very clear about doing that in a very specific way. However, The Witness was more about sudden epiphanies, or dawning of understanding. And in this game, it's much more about the nuts and bolts of how constructive or creative processes happen."

So, if Order of the Sinking Star was inspired by Blow's work on The Witness, is it fair to assume he's already started thinking about his next game? It turns out he absolutely has — and it might not be the kind of project you'd expect.

"Plans can always change, or the order of things coming out could change, but the next game after this is likely not to be a puzzle game," he tells me. "The reason for that is because I want to take some of these ideas and look at them in a different way. I won't spoil too much, but look at ideas in a way a puzzle game can't."

Order of the Sinking Star is expected to arrive on PC via Steam and (just announced) Nintendo Switch 2 later this year. Keep an eye on this one, as it's shaping up to be one of 2026's most interesting releases.