The 500-Hour Grind
After ten years in development, Jonathan Blow is finally dropping The Order of the Sinking Star this Thursday. If you’re a fan of his genre-defining 2008 hit Braid or 2016’s The Witness, you know the vibe: Blow doesn’t do small. This new project packs about 1,500 puzzles that could easily take you 500 hours to beat. Real talk: most players won’t finish it, but for Blow, that’s not the point.
Business vs. Design
Blow is lowkey famous for making "bad business decisions" because he lets the design dominate the process. Instead of taking the easy route, he built a custom game engine and his own programming language, Jai, from scratch. While most devs lean on pre-built engines like Unity or Unreal to save time, Blow wanted his tech "tuned and authored very specifically" for his vision. He admits the last decade has been "nightmare mode," but he’s already looking to make his next project slightly less intense.
The AI Take
While the industry is currently obsessed with AI integration, Blow is keeping it strictly analog. He didn’t use AI for this project at all. He’s skeptical of the productivity claims developers make, noting that if people were actually ten times more productive with AI, we’d have seen decades of work completed in just a few years. He’s also worried that if new creators rely on AI to code, the industry might face a future shortage of programmers who actually understand the "weird glyphs" of the craft.
Why it matters
Blow’s approach is a massive flex in an industry that usually prioritizes quick monetization. By refusing to compromise on his vision, he’s created a "game design supercollider" that mashes up mechanics from existing indie titles. For gamers, it’s a rare chance to see a project driven entirely by experimental design rather than market trends. Whether you’re ready to sink 500 hours into it or not, the commitment to building from the ground up is definitely a move.
