Ten years in the making, Jonathan Blow's new game breaks all the rules of gaming's greatest puzzle

It's not every day that Jonathan Blow releases a new game. It's more accurate to call it a once-in-a-decade event, but for those who follow Blow's work, the next project in the pipeline is a somewhat known quantity. Order of the Sinking Star began as a small engine test for Jai, Blow's programming language created specifically for games. It's appeared in Blow's myriad tech demos and design talks over the years, and its development is a focal point on his Twitch channel. However, it wasn't until last week, when I sat down with Jonathan Blow himself to talk about it, that I could finally give it a name.

For the uninitiated, Order of the Sinking Star is a Sokoban-style puzzle game. Unlike its contemporary Rogue, the Sokoban-like never really took off. There are a few notable exceptions - Baba is You, Void Stranger, and A Monster's Expedition - but for the most part, Sokoban is relegated to small passion projects and the minigame bargain bin. My own earliest encounter with Sokoban wasn't Sokoban itself; it was on Victory Road in Pokémon Blue. Who could forget the arduous, painfully straightforward task of nudging boulders onto switches? It's not the best introduction to Sokoban, but it's also proof of how intuitive it is at a mechanical level.

Of course, Jonathan Blow has not spent a decade developing a Sokoban-like. Instead, he describes Order of the Sinking Star as a "game design supercollider" that takes the basic principles of four freeware puzzle games that you've probably never heard of and smashes them together. Specifically, these are Sean Barrett's Promestt, Jonah Ostroff's Heroes of Sokoban, and Alan Hazelden's Mirror Isles and Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes - all chosen for their "combinatoric potential." Strike up a partnership with those developers, and the founder of indie game studio Thekla is off to the races.

Whereas The Witness took place on a single island, Order of the Sinking Star spans multiple worlds. In its opening gambit, players venture along the overworld's four cardinal directions, each leading to a world that adopts the name, characters, and mechanics of its corresponding puzzle game. Once the player understands the mechanics of these puzzles and unlocks the overworld's ordinal directions, these parallel worlds and characters collide. Blow describes the moment-to-moment gameplay as "wandering from screen to screen, solving puzzles to explore further." Naturally, there's a bit more to it than that.

Order of the Sinking Star dresses Sokoban's boxes in a fantasy wrapper. Our main protagonist is a deposed queen who narrowly escapes execution and is spirited away to a world between worlds. Neon crystals are an early-game obstacle, but later levels include goblins and dragons that the player can pit against one another to progress. "We try to keep things spicy by having a lot of different realms that you travel through that all look different," Blow says, but that elaborate set dressing comes with a big caveat.

"I always insist on the levels being extremely readable so that you can actually solve the puzzles and you're not confused by the graphics, because I do think that is a problem a lot of puzzle games have when they try to look nice." This early preview of Order of the Sinking Star features copious greyboxing, a quiet indicator that there's still a way to go until it has the polish we expect from an imminent release. However, the bits that are launch-ready fit Blow's brief: pretty, full of character, and cleanly presented. It's a far cry from its forebears, the majority of which run on the PuzzleScript text engine.

Like any auteur, echoes of Blow's earlier works persist through Order of the Sinking Star, regardless of its myriad influences. The Mirror Isles are modeled after Alan Hazelden's game of the same name, but the central character's ability to create mirror clones brings to mind Braid's shadow clones. Even looking at the bigger picture, the way the player tests mechanical possibilities and limitations in individual levels and then applies that knowledge to traverse the overworld harks back to the micro-to-macro transition in The Witness. Neither of these is a one-to-one comparison, but they're both cut from the same cloth.

Alongside the traditional Sokoban level reset, the player can rewind time to return to a specific position. It's a welcome addition in a puzzle game with so many variables, and there's no better illustration of that than the Hearty Heroes of Hauling. This gaggle of Dungeons and Dragons class archetypes boasts abilities that can bend, and even break, Sokoban's rules. The Warrior can push a line of obstacles, the Wizard can swap his position with another object via teleportation, and the Thief breaks the golden rule in Sokoban: she pulls boxes rather than pushes them. If you're familiar with Jonah Ostroff's Heroes of Sokoban, this is charted territory, but that's also the point.

Individually, these characters represent a novel approach to Sokoban, but together, Sokoban's core conceit of moving boxes isn't the challenge; it's working out how these mechanics synergize without breaking the puzzle, especially once their worlds start to overlap. "Professional game designers all know that this is good design - that you make these things that interact and play off each other - but we don't understand why it works," Blow says. "I wish people were more interested in that. I think it's actually a fundamental mystery of the universe that we live in. I wanted to make a game where we could focus on that phenomenon."

Order of the Sinking Star is that game. Unlike The Witness, which uses simple puzzles as its core conceit, Blow repurposes the rigid rules of Sokoban to examine that emergent complexity. Even the environmental objects aren't always obstacles to overcome, but tools to achieve your goals. "What makes a puzzle actually fun and worth playing?" Blow believes there's a common misconception that solving a puzzle makes it inherently fun. "It's not a false statement, but that doesn't necessarily make it interesting or worth your time, especially in a large quantity."

Just like Braid and The Witness before it, Order of the Sinking Star isn't a test of logic or intelligence for the sake of it. "For me, it's about the illumination that goes off in your mind," he says. It's also the reason why the thousand-strong puzzles had to be handcrafted. "You can't really do that with procedural generation," Blow explains. "The procedural generator doesn't really know what those ideas are, at least not with current technology."

Anyone who's played Blow's earlier works will be able to pinpoint these moments of epiphany, when established mechanics force a shift in perspective - either literal or allegorical. Blow confirms that Order of the Sinking Star has three endings, each with "surprises attached," though these revelations will likely unfold gradually, with more hints for players to catch given the game's sheer scale. I'm afforded a brief glimpse of the overworld, sans its fog of war, from a zoomed-out perspective: a hundred colorful screens bolted together, each with puzzles packed within them.

Blow's preoccupation with interactivity as a fundamental property of our universe trickles down from Order of the Sinking Star's mechanics to its narrative. "I've never been a fan of what most games do with respect to story," Blow admits. It's a stance he's held for some time; he maintains it's a structural problem. "Story and player choice are fighting with each other all the time," he explains. "You either negate player choice, or you make story irrelevant."

In Order of the Sinking Star, player choice is defined in exploration, whereas storytelling unfolds in a breadcrumb fashion through character anecdotes and audio logs. While these are basic narrative vehicles, juggling six different worlds and the various characters within them is a complicated affair - and that's before we address the fabricated origins of the overworld itself. "Whoever built this place that you're in is expecting people to show up here and require some kind of tutorialization and orientation."

Blow is a figure synonymous with indie games, crystallized alongside Phil Fish, Edmund McMillen, and Tommy Refenes in the seminal documentary Indie Game: The Movie. However, the landscape is vastly different from when he rose to prominence. Blow agrees. "We're working with a publisher for the first time, and part of the reason we're doing that is the internet is so noisy." It's a concession that, for all Thekla is insular and self-sufficient, it's not immune to the challenges of a saturated market. Still, as The Witness approaches its tenth anniversary, Blow's legacy looms large for puzzle game fans heading into 2026.