When Jonathan Blow reveals a new game, you pay attention. While controversial due to the strong opinions about game development and politics that he's shared online, he made two of the most influential indie games ever, Braid and The Witness. While a remaster of Braid did come out last year, Blow's Thekla studio has not put out a brand new video game. Over that time, they've been crafting a brand-new programming language and game engine called Jai, and are now revealing the first game built with it.

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At The Game Awards 2025, Thekla and publisher Arc Games announced Order of the Sinking Star, a block-pushing puzzle game built with a proprietary programming language and game engine. Ahead of its reveal, I got to see Order of the Sinking Star in action and speak to Jonathan Blow about the project. He explained what keeps Thekla coming back to puzzle games (for now) and why this was the game he used to design a new programming language and game engine.

Jonathan Blow likes making puzzle games

Order of the Sinking Star follows in Braid and The Witness' footsteps

For about a decade, Thekla has been working on Jai, a new programming language and game engine that will serve as the backbone for the studio's game going forward. Order of the Sinking Star will be the first game to utilize the engine, having been built alongside it. Like Braid and The Witness, it's a puzzle-focused game that'll really make players think about how its core mechanics intertwine.

It's based on Sokoban, the Japanese term for block-pushing puzzles. Of course, Order of the Sinking Star gets much more complex with that, with multiple worlds that feature different gimmicks around that basic block-pushing idea. I saw a world where players had a Dungeons & Dragons-like party of characters with different abilities to swap between, while another world was full of mirrors players could teleport through.

"Solving the puzzle is showing the game that you understood what the puzzle was about," Blow responded when asked what draws him to the puzzle game genre. "If a puzzle has meaning and structure to it, and you can look at it and understand something new in the process of solving, then by solving it, you're also telling the game that you got the idea, and that's just a really nice structure that I've been fortunate to be able to play with a lot."

Obviously, it's hard to grasp the quality of a complex puzzle game from a brief hands-off demo, but what I saw definitely left me intrigued. The scale of the project is also impressive, with official press materials for the game claiming it has "hundreds of hours" of content for players to experience. That's not even accounting for the game's narrative, which Blow said was included because "it's nice to give your brain something else to do besides just trying to solve puzzles."

Order of the Sinking Star is the proof-of-concept for a new game engine

An open-source version of it will be released for free after release

The wealth of content Order of the Sinking Star is set to have is a result of a lengthy development cycle, but Blow admits the game has taken so long in part because it has been built alongside a game engine. A top-down, block-pushing puzzle game might not scream tech demo like Astro's Playroom or Lumen in the Land of Nanite do, but Blow explained that this style of game actually made a lot of sense to build the engine with.

"Part of the reason why it's this style of game is the design part, right? I wanted to bring worlds together and intertwine the mechanics, and the Sokoban-style games give you a framework for that. If the objects all live in squares and you can move them around from square to square, that's a well-defined interaction before we talk about what the objects are."

That said, he admits he thought Order of the Sinking Star would take two years when he started, but it ultimately took longer because "the game itself was much bigger and more complex than I had expected." Hopefully, we don't have to wait as long for Thakla's next game, which he teased won't be a puzzle game like his previous works.

Thekla also plans to release their engine for free as open-source software for game developers, "hopefully not too long after" Order of the Sinking Star's launch. "Because we've worked for a long time on it, it'll be a much better engine that people get," Blow asserts.

It's a bold choice, as many developers are homogenizing their use of game engines like Unity, Unreal Engine 5, and GADOT. For Jonathan Blow, it's ultimately about control. "The good thing about making your own engine is that you have a great deal of control over what happens, and it helps you make sure that the resulting game is of a very high quality," he tells me.

Order of the Sinking Star looks like another great puzzle game

2026 may be just as good for that genre as 2025 was

2025 was already a fantastic year for puzzle games thanks to games like Blue Prince and Lumines Arise. Order of the Sinking Star looks like it will carry that momentum forward when it launches on Steam early next year. It'll be the full game launching then too, not early access, with the release of its game engine then coming shortly thereafter.

For now, it's only slated for PC. When I asked Blow if that was the case because his game engine was not optimized for console, he teased that Thekla and Arc Games are "finalizing those plans," and while there's nothing to announce at this time, he "wouldn't be too surprised if we end up on consoles next year." No matter what group of platforms it ultimately ends up launching on throughout the year, Order of the Sinking Star is certainly a title fans of indie games should put on their radar.