Jonathan Blow's New Game Has The Most 'jonathan Blow's New Game'...

Nine years on from The Witness, Jonathan Blow would, once again, quite like you to solve his puzzles. He'd like you to solve quite a lot of them, actually. Revealed during The Game Awards, Order of the Sinking Star is a big box of proper stumpers that's deep enough to drown in.

Blow and the devs at his studio, Thekla, have been working on it for 10 years, they created a new engine and new programming language, he reckons you could put 500+ hours into its 1000+ "handcrafted" puzzles, and the sell-it-to-me-in-a-sentence elevator pitch is that it's a "game design supercollider." Oh, and yes, there will absolutely be philosophy scattered throughout.

Which is just about the most Jonathan Blow sequence of words it's possible to put to paper, and if—like me—you felt just a touch of fatigue at some of The Witness' more ponderous diversions, might have you tempted to punch out here and now. But wait! I've seen Order of the Sinking Star: Blow walked me through a short, hands-off demo just a couple of weeks before its TGA debut, and I confess my interest is piqued.

"You know, most games, when you're making a game," says Blow, "You work on the mechanics, you work on the core ideas until you get something fun. Then you hammer on it, you tune it until you feel like it's reached its potential, and then people ship that game.

"With this one, we wanted to go past that. So we started with four things that are fully self-contained games and then we mashed them together so that the objects in all the different worlds interacted with each other, and it generates this huge amount of possibilities of what could happen in the game." That's the "game design supercollider" part, if you were wondering.

Those four games manifest in Order of the Sinking Star as an enormous overworld (though that overworld is made up, confusingly enough, of six worlds in total). Imagine a Sokoban the size of the Indian subcontinent and, congratulations, you have more or less approximated a mental image of Jonathan Blow's latest game. The worlds are home to different kinds of puzzles. Blow kicked us off with the most straightforward: block-pushing conundrums. Just your character, a room, and a bunch of crystals to move around so you can reach the end.

Move the crystals correctly and you'll satisfyingly, neatly engineer yourself an exit. Ham-hand it and prepare to ensconce yourself in a corner of the room, imprisoned by crystals you can no longer reposition (though you have unlimited undos with whi

Source: PC Gamer