Braid and The Witness creator announces first new video game in nine years

Jonathan Blow has revealed new game Order Of The Sinking Star, a massive indie epic that has over 1,000 handcrafted puzzles.

Despite Jonathan Blow being one of the most famous indie developers in the world, with 2008 title Braid being highly influential on the scene at the time, he doesn’t have the longest of gameographies. Although he was a programmer on other titles, before striking out on his own, It’s basically just Braid, which was recently remastered, and 2016’s The Witness.

New game Order Of The Sinking Star seems to have more in common with The Witness, as it’s a puzzle game on a huge scale, with four completely different sets of mechanics, representing four different kingdoms in a fantasy world.

Unveiled at The Game Awards, the game is out next year on PC, with console version to follow. It’s not just the work of Blow though, who is keen to describe it as a collaborative effort with all the people at his new studio Thekla, Inc.

We spoke to Blow at length a few days ago and we’ll run that interview next week, although we haven’t seen much more of the game than you can make out from the trailer.

As you can hear, the game is fully voiced, despite the simple, Zelda-esque, visuals, and the idea is that you explore out from a central point on the map until the four kingdoms, and the puzzle mechanics associated with them, begin to blend together.

So, for example, one character is able to manipulate mirrors that shine lights in specific directions, another can create stepping stones in water, and another (the thief) is unable to stop themselves from dragging a moveable item with them if they touch it.

At the start of the game you’re just dealing with one mechanic at a time, until they all start to intersect, which not only expands the scopes of the puzzles but also the story, as the various characters meet and interact.

It all looks very promising to us, especially as Blow specifically designed it around the idea of what if four completely separate games were combined together, increasing the complexity as they go.

It’s also interesting given how perfunctory puzzles have become in most triple-A games recently, with developers apparently terrified of creating anything players might be stuck on for more than a few seconds.

As if all that wasn’t ambitious enough, they created a new game engine just for this game, and a whole new programming language as a replacement for C++, that they’re going to release for free once the game is out.

The Witness but with more variety (and hopefully a shallower difficulty curve) sounds great to us and we were very impressed with Blow when we spoke to him, so we’ll have more on Order Of The Sinking Star soon.

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