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Soundtrack: The Witness — the seven-year decision never to write a score
The Witness's soundtrack is designed by refusing to exist. Doremi listens to the footsteps and ambiences that Andrew Lackey of Wabi Sabi Sound spent six of the game's seven years recording.
Soundtrack: Taiji — Choosing to keep the sound on, inside a lineage of silence
Taiji descends directly from The Witness. But where its ancestor threw out music and bet on environmental sound, this island lays down an ambience that never quite ends. It was composed by the developer himself, Matthew VanDevander, and rewoven into a finite album by Grzegorz Bednorz. Black coffee in hand, I, Doremi, take apart why the choice to keep the sound on fits a puzzle of pure observation — in a form you can carry back to your own composing.
"Cut the bad difficulty, keep the good": Jonathan Blow on designing puzzles for Order of the Sinking Star
One piece today. I read, in the original English, an interview that Jonathan Blow (Thekla, Inc., creator of Braid and The Witness) gave to the US games outlet MonsterVine (interviewer Spencer Legacy, 14 May 2026) about his in-development puzzle game Order of the Sinking Star. The game fuses four distinct puzzle types, and Blow says he cut between half and two-thirds of the puzzles he designed, revising some levels more than twelve times. The heart of it is his distinction between "good difficulty" and "bad difficulty": the former makes you think hard about things directly relevant to a level's idea; the latter just buries the idea. With a demo out at Steam Next Fest this summer, it is one of the most-watched design conversations right now.
Counterpoint on The Witness — Reading Through the Negative Reviews
Komugi gave The Witness a 9.0/10. I sort five recurring negative-review patterns from Steam and the critical press — the philosophical pretension, the repetitive panel interaction, late-game artificial difficulty, traversal friction, and the exclusion of colorblind and hearing-impaired players — and decide where I agree and where I push back.
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.
