Jonathan Blow's Order of the Sinking Star Is Out Now — 1,000 Puzzles, $30, and a Decade in the Making

LOS GATOS, CALIF. — FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2026 — Jonathan Blow does not make small games. The man behind Braid — the indie that helped launch the entire modern indie wave back in 2008 — and The Witness, the 2016 puzzle monolith that ate entire months of people's lives, has been quiet for a decade. Now he's back with something that makes The Witness look like a warm-up act. Order of the Sinking Star launched Thursday on PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC, and the numbers are genuinely absurd: more than a thousand handcrafted puzzles, an estimated 500 hours for full completion, all for thirty bucks.

Let that sink in for a second. The original plan, according to Blow himself in an Engadget interview last December, was a game that would run 10 to 20 hours. Then, in his words, "it just blew up." Ten times the game he set out to make, built over ten years, and priced like an impulse buy. This is the kind of swing only Jonathan Blow takes — and it's why puzzle fans have been vibrating about this game since it was announced at The Game Awards last December.

01 What it actually is

At its core, Order of the Sinking Star is a top-down puzzle adventure, and if you played The Witness you know the shape of this: a sprawling, interconnected world stuffed with puzzles that teach you their own rules by making you fail at them. But Blow didn't just scale up his own design this time — he built what he's called a kind of game-design supercollider, pulling in level design from some of the sharpest puzzle minds in the business.

The credits read like a puzzle-game hall of fame. Alan Hazelden — the mind behind the beloved freeware puzzlers Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes and Mirror Isles — contributed designs, along with Sean Barrett (Promesst), Jonah Ostroff (Heroes of Sokoban), Zach Polansky (Enigmash), Patrick Traynor (Patrick's Parabox), and Marc ten Bosch (Miegakure), plus design contributions from Blow's Twitch followers collected over the years, according to Gematsu's reporting. Each of the game's four worlds starts from one of those designers' existing games and then — this is the part that has reviewers losing their minds — the mechanics start colliding with each other. Rules you learned in one world show up in another, combining into things the game never explicitly teaches you.

02 The thirty-dollar math

Here's the part that stopped me cold when I did the arithmetic. Thirty dollars. Five hundred hours. That's six cents an hour for the completists — and even if you bounce off after 50 hours, you're still at sixty cents an hour, which is better value than almost anything with a $70 price tag this fall. Blow told Engadget the game ballooned far past its original scope, and instead of slicing it up or charging more, the team just... shipped all of it. For the price of two movie tickets.

There's also a story hiding inside that price. Puzzle games live and die on word of mouth — nobody buys a thousand-puzzle game because of a TV spot. They buy it because someone they trust tells them they have to see puzzle 400 for themselves. Thekla ran a free demo during Steam Next Fest back in June, and your progress in that demo carries over to the full release, per Gematsu. At launch, Steam is also offering 10% off bundles pairing the game with Mewgenics, Animal Well, or the original soundtrack, according to Arc Games' launch announcement. The whole rollout is engineered for one thing: get it into the hands of the people who will not shut up about it.

03 What the reviews say

The review embargo lifted this week and the consensus is about as strong as it gets for something this weird. OpenCritic has it at an 82 Top Critic Average with 80% of critics recommending it across 15 reviews, per review roundup site Lanbrew. Metacritic sits at 86 on PC, 85 on Switch 2, and 83 on PS5 — generally favorable across the board. Shacknews went all the way to 10/10, calling it "a masterpiece" with "immaculate, mind-bending puzzles." MonsterVine gave it 5/5, calling it one of the best puzzle games it's ever played. Screen Rant's 9/10 review called it a game-of-the-year contender. Steam players are even more enthusiastic — SteamDB shows the game at 97% positive reviews.

It's not universal praise, and the criticisms are worth knowing before you buy. Multiple reviewers note there's no hint system, which in a thousand-puzzle game is either a feature or a war crime depending on your temperament. The story and dialogue split opinion — Metro GameCentral gave the Switch 2 version 9/10 but found the writing pretentious. And several reviewers flag performance problems on Switch 2 specifically, which is worth keeping in mind if that's your platform of choice. The PC and PS5 versions are the safe bets right now.

04 The messy parts

No Jonathan Blow launch would be complete without some controversy, and this one delivered two. The stranger of the two: Kotaku's review revealed that review copies shipped with roughly half the voice cast replaced by AI voices — not text-to-speech, but AI-generated performances sitting alongside real human actors. Thekla warned reviewers in advance and said the full professional cast would be in the launch build, but imagine trying to evaluate a story-driven game's writing while half the cast sounds like a demo reel from the uncanny valley. Kotaku's reviewer called the dissonance "bizarre" and said it made the story impossible to fairly judge. It's a genuinely odd choice for a studio to make, and it'll be interesting to see whether the day-one version actually resolves it.

The other mess was about credits. After the demo went out, eagle-eyed players noticed that some of the contributing designers appeared to be missing from the credits — a bad look for a game Blow himself has pitched as a game-design supercollider, per Gematsu. Thekla said all contributors would be acknowledged in the full game's credits as well as in information provided to MobyGames and press outlets, per Wikipedia's reporting on the launch. Blow himself told Gematsu the game "simply wouldn't exist" without those designers. The credits are fixed in the release version, but it's the kind of thing that sticks to a launch.

05 How to play it

Order of the Sinking Star is out now on PC via Steam (it's Steam Deck Verified, per SteamDB), Nintendo Switch 2, and PlayStation 5 for $29.99. If you played the June demo, your save carries over. And if you're on the fence, that 97% Steam rating from early players is doing a lot of talking. Just clear your schedule. Actually, clear your next few months.