Jonathan Blow, creator of the 2008 platforming game Braid and the 2016 critically acclaimed puzzle title The Witness, has revealed his third game: Order of the Sinking Star. Over a video chat ahead of The Game Awards 2025, where the game was announced, Blow showed me his next clockwork world.
The new title from Blow's personal studio Thekla, Inc. will be yet another puzzle game, but like his first two successes, Order of the Sinking Star has its own idiosyncratic rules and layers of depth. In it, players wander an overworld of islands that host myriad little puzzles to hop into. Each is a single screen of squares on a grid filled with doors with obstacles and enemies to navigate. Beat those to unlock islands with more brain-teasing challenges, and soon, you'll even run into puzzles on the overworld.
Like Blow's other games, Order of the Sinking Star is designed to reveal layers of meta-mechanics to the players as they dive deeper. Each of the four quadrants of the overworld map contains a different story, characters and basic mechanics -- for instance, a trio of characters pushing, pulling and teleporting blocks around to reach the exit. But more heroes with different powers -- even dragons -- complicate the many puzzles as they go on.
And that's just one of the four quadrants in the game, which have their own unique flavors of spatial challenge -- all of which skyrockets in complexity in the places where they merge.
Order of the Sinking Star was partially inspired by the Japanese subgenre of Sokobon games, in which players carefully move boxes around a room (typically a warehouse) to avoid blocking themselves in a corner. The new game's puzzles look to be thoughtful affairs, with simple levels giving way to more complex brainteasers and a background story trickling to the player in bits and pieces. Order of the Sinking Star will come out in 2026, and it looks promising.
The top quadrant of the overworld has puzzles of heroes moving boulders, boxes and each other around a grid. Thekla Inc.
Try making a game engine demo, end up with a whole game
After making The Witness, Blow was tired of developing in the C++ programming language, so he decided to make his own called Jai. But his team didn't stop there and diverted to making their own specialized game engine. Order of the Sinking Star was intended to be a small proof of concept that would showcase the kinds of games possible to make with it. But Blow and his team couldn't resist adding more and more puzzle dynamics.
"It was supposed to be a small game, but for some reason, it's kind of stupid to build a game that's about a combinatorial explosion and expect it to be small," Blow said. "So for this game, that ended up meaning it's really, really big. I probably will never do something this big again unless somehow I have a much bigger team."
Order of the Sinking Star has a slight cartoonish look to it, at least from what was finished -- I saw a good number of unfinished graphics, as Blow was eager to show off certain later game mechanics that hadn't gotten finalized visuals. The complexity of the game won't be in pushed pixels and lifelike graphics. But that's likely for the best, as the simpler style makes the obstacles and map components as clear as possible to the players.
... continue reading