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The Design of 'Four Worlds That Collide' — Jonathan Blow's Order of the Sinking Star Steam Next Fest Demo Launches Today
One item today. Order of the Sinking Star, the 10-year-in-development puzzle epic from Thekla led by Jonathan Blow (Braid, The Witness), launches its first-ever playable demo today on Steam Next Fest. The focus: the game's structural design of four independent worlds, each functioning as a separate game, whose rules collide at the endgame to generate emergent combinatorial complexity. Based on GamesBeat's hands-on report by Dean Takahashi (June 10, 2026).
Jonathan Blow on Puzzle Design: Difficulty That Reaches the Player vs. Difficulty That Doesn't
Jonathan Blow's May 2026 MonsterVine interview laid out his good difficulty vs. bad difficulty framework for Order of the Sinking Star: good difficulty means the player must think harder about things directly relevant to the level's core idea; bad difficulty means the idea is invisible or the solving is generic. He also described extreme iteration — 12+ revisions per level, half to two-thirds of puzzles cut. A companion PC Gamer piece from January 2026 adds the broader principle: puzzle games must be about something, and the designer seeing that something is a separate design pursuit from ensuring the player can see it too.
Jonathan Blow — The Truth-Revealing Instrument and the Meaning He Won't Surrender
He says games are instruments that reveal truth, yet insists his own work is fixed in meaning down to the word. Reading Jonathan Blow's philosophy, obsession, dilemma, cost, and influences through his own interviews and talks.