A New Jonathan Blow Puzzle Epic
Nine years after The Witness, Jonathan Blow is back with a new and even more ambitious puzzle game called Order of the Sinking Star. Revealed at The Game Awards, this project has been in development for around ten years at his studio Thekla, and it is aimed squarely at players who love deep, methodical problem solving on PC.
Order of the Sinking Star is not a quick weekend game. Blow estimates that a completionist could spend around 500 hours working through its more than 1000 handcrafted puzzles. To support this scale and complexity, the team built a brand new engine and even a new programming language just for this project. The result is a puzzle experience that Blow describes as a kind of game design supercollider where multiple systems crash together to create surprising interactions.
As with his earlier work, players can also expect the game to weave in philosophical and even spiritual themes alongside the mechanics. The puzzles are the main focus, but there is also a narrative and conceptual layer asking why we find certain challenges meaningful or interesting in the first place.
A Giant Overworld Of Interlocking Worlds
Instead of a small hub or linear sequence of stages, Order of the Sinking Star is built around a huge overworld that itself is a kind of giant puzzle space. Blow likens it to imagining a Sokoban style block pushing game expanded to the size of a continent. This overworld is made up of six interconnected worlds that you can gradually explore in different directions as you solve puzzles.
At the start, the map is covered in a fog of war. Each puzzle or stage you clear helps lift that fog, revealing new paths, new areas and new types of challenges. The structure is designed to give you freedom: you can approach many sections in the order you like and you are not forced to clear every single puzzle to eventually reach the ending.
The early part of the game focuses on introducing different playable characters and helping them find one another within this sprawling world. As they meet and the systems of their individual areas begin to mix, the game opens up into more complex combined puzzles that blend rules from multiple worlds at once.
Four Core Puzzle Styles Mashed Together
The supercollider idea comes from starting with several fully formed puzzle concepts and then letting them interact. Blow describes it as beginning with four self contained games that were then merged so that objects and rules from one world could affect another. That collision of systems produces a huge space of possibilities for new kinds of puzzles.
One of the core puzzle styles is based on classic block pushing. You control a character in a room filled with crystals or blocks and must move them around to create a path to the exit. The twist is in how different characters interact with those blocks.
The basic character can simply push blocks. The early puzzles with this character are more approachable and act as an introduction to the game’s logic. You can push many things but that also makes it very easy to trap yourself, though unlimited undo lets you rewind mistakes.
A thief character cannot push at all. Instead she always pulls blocks when she moves away from them, even if that is not what you wanted. This forced pull behavior changes how you plan every step because you are constantly dragging pieces behind you.
A wizard character does not push or pull. Whenever he moves toward a movable object he automatically swaps places with it using a teleport like effect. If he can move an object, he will, obsessively. This means he cannot simply walk toward a block in a normal way which turns standard movement into a puzzle of indirect routes and careful positioning.
Beyond these character focused rooms, other worlds introduce entirely different mechanics. One shown in the demo uses colored beams of light. Walking through a beam grants your character a specific power such as being able to walk through walls like a ghost. Entering a different beam replaces your current power with a new one, forcing you to think about the order in which you collect and use abilities to cross a level.
The real challenge will come later when these separate systems start to overlap. Expect puzzles where block pushing interacts with beams, or where a character’s quirky movement rules combine with other world specific mechanics. This layering is what Blow wants players to explore as they work through an enormous space of potential interactions.
Designed For Obsessive And Casual Solvers Alike
Hearing about 500 hours of puzzles might be intimidating, but the game is not demanding that everyone clear every level. There is an endgame meter that fills up as you complete puzzles across the world. Once you have done enough, you can reach the ending without having to solve all 1000 plus challenges.
This means there is room for both kinds of players. If you are the type who wants to see everything and break every last puzzle, the game is ready to consume hundreds of hours of your time. If you just want a long, thoughtful puzzle adventure that you can complete without going full completionist, the structure supports that too.
Order of the Sinking Star looks like it will appeal strongly to fans of The Witness and other deep logic games on PC. With a custom engine, a huge overworld and layered mechanics that encourage experimentation, it aims to be the kind of puzzle game you can live in for months. Whether that fills you with excitement or terror probably depends on how much you enjoy staring at a screen and wrestling with a single brain teaser until it finally clicks.
Original article and image: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/puzzle/jonathan-blows-new-game-has-the-most-jonathan-blows-new-game-pitch-imaginable-a-game-design-supercollider-that-takes-4-puzzle-games-and-jams-them-together-into-a-500-hour-saga/
