December 18, 2025
Brain teasers or brain breakers?
Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles for you
1,400 puzzles, 9 years later — fans split between “bring it” and “not another slog”
TLDR: Jonathan Blow’s new game packs 1,400 puzzles and could take 400–500 hours, aiming for 2026. Commenters are split between excitement and dread, roast the chaotic trailer, and debate how much time went to his custom tech versus the game—making this reveal as polarizing as his last hit.
Jonathan Blow just revealed Order of the Sinking Star, a puzzle epic aiming for 2026 with a jaw‑dropping 1,400 brain teasers—enough to keep completionists busy for 400–500 hours. The community? Already doing laps around the drama. One camp is hyped for a new labyrinth from the mind behind The Witness. The other camp still has PTSD from line puzzles and is muttering “not another island of chores.”
The spiciest take: was The Witness fun? __alexs says it was a slog, crossing fingers Blow finally learned the fun part. Meanwhile, trailer talk lit up fast—dwroberts calls it a “barrage of voice clips” begging for an ASAP redo. And the meta‑debate is peak nerd soap opera: phtrivier wonders how much of those nine years were spent building Blow’s custom language and engine versus the actual game, hoping that work speeds up future projects.
Cue jokes and mini‑memes: “1,400 puzzles? My backlog just filed a restraining order,” “combinatoric explosion is my inbox,” and the headline‑confusion gag—block_dagger laughing that a front‑page “Braid” post wasn’t even about Blow’s famous game. Some readers linked posts questioning originality, throwing a little “not new” shade at the mechanics. Love him or roll your eyes, Blow’s combinatoric explosion is already detonating the comments, and the trailer is catching strays like it wandered into a puzzle with no solution.
Key Points
- •Order of the Sinking Star was announced via a Game Awards trailer with a planned 2026 release.
- •Jonathan Blow began the project as a short proof-of-concept for a new engine and programming language after The Witness.
- •Development expanded over nine years, resulting in approximately 1,400 puzzles.
- •Blow estimates completionist playtime at roughly 400–500 hours.
- •The game centers on 2D, grid-based navigation puzzles with a central hub and four directional branches featuring distinct mechanics (e.g., block hauling, mirror-based teleportation/cloning, stepping-stone puzzles).