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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.
Designing the player's cognitive load — a two-layer combat-puzzle structure, and tuning the difficulty curve
Two highlights today. Game Developer's interview with the team behind Capcom's Pragmata explains how they made a 'two-layer' design work, stacking a real-time Snake-style hacking puzzle on top of third-person combat. The second is PurpleSloth's devlog on difficulty design, recounting how lessons from their previous game Chronescher fed into their next title TRAILS. Both answer the same question — how to manage the player's cognitive load — from opposite directions.