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Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles

372 points by furcyd 10mo ago

sxzygz 10mo ago
In case you assume novelty, a comment [1] from ArsTechnica reader Jensen404 explains otherwise by linking to [2] a post on Bluesky. [1] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/12/jonathan-blow-has-spent-the-past-decade-designing-1400-puzzles-for-you/?comments=1&post=44134565 https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/12/jonathan-blow-has-spe... [2] https://bsky.app/profile/draknek.bsky.social/post/3m7qybidq7k2s https://bsky.app/profile/draknek.bsky.social/post/3m7qybidq7...
- tormeh 10mo ago
  Seems like the original puzzles were licensed for this game, in which case why not?
  - deleted 10mo ago
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  - serial_dev 10mo ago
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    - embedding-shape 10mo ago
      Does that change how good/bad the game someone releases is? Don't get me wrong, being obviously anti-scientist isn't that great if I absolutely have to judge them, but I'm not sure if that has any impact on how fun a game is. If I'd stop consuming stuff from people/organizations I disagree with politically, I literally would have to move into a cave and start my own hunter-collector society from scratch. Is this really how others make decisions in their daily lives?
      - zaneyard 10mo ago
        I enjoyed Braid and this revelation doesn't change that, but there's a lot of entertainment and it's easy to not support someone who has views (or at least doesn't express them publicly) that conflict with my own personal values.
      - rkomorn 10mo ago
        I don't particularly go hunting for information about artists, studios, etc, to find out if I agree with them. I just happen to no longer like their stuff when I find out things I don't like. It's not "how I make decisions" but more just something that affects my taste for things.
      - speedgoose 10mo ago
        Separating the art from the artist is a long and old debate. I personally can’t watch Roman Polanski’s art, the classic and easy example. You can be a great movie producer, pedophilia and rapes are big no-no to me. But not to everyone apparently. For the non vocal people believing in pseudoscience and fascist propaganda, I can close my eyes more easily. I don’t want to know. I can guess sometimes but I won’t check. As soon as they become vocal, it kills the art for me. I can’t enjoy art from people against my values, me, and my friends and family.
        tialaramex 10mo ago
        Death of the Author. One of the important elements here is the extent to which materially it matters. If I buy a book Lovecraft wrote a hundred years ago the money isn't going to end up diverted to support the "patriots" who want to intimidate my neighbours, whereas when I buy a Harry Potter box set for a relative you can bet that Rowling's share will help fund "Gender Critical" movements trying to make life worse for some of my friends and colleagues... For books particularly I can totally buy Death of the Author, what I think I read might be entirely different from what the author says they intended, which further nobody can prove is what they actually intended. For that last for example I do not for one moment believe Vernor Vinge that he "Didn't know" what Rabbit is in "Rainbow's End". It's an AI. Maybe Vinge doesn't intend the book as a Singularitarian Catastrophe (you can argue the book thinks it's about avoiding such a catastrophe) but I don't see any way to interpret it where Rabbit isn't a super-human AI.
    - adito 10mo ago
      I don't know why you just handpicked the covid trutherism without quoting the full thing, here the full quote from the link above: > Additionally, in recent years it has become increasingly clear that Jon’s beliefs/priorities and mine are not aligned. He’s adversarial to people talking about privilege and representation, is dismissive of diversity efforts, has dabbled in covid trutherism, and is pro-MAGA. Here the post after just for a full picture > I believe Trump is a self serving authoritarian who's dismantling democracy, trying to make trans people illegal, and wanting to set up concentration camps for immigrants - whereas Jon in February called him "the best President we have had in my entire life".
      - serial_dev 10mo ago
        I left a link to the exact post I'm referring to with the whole thread available for context. And I didn't include the whole thing, because it doesn't change my point which is that IMO BSky people are insufferable. A game is released (which in part includes their work if I understand it right) and they can't help themselves and make this about Trump. I'm sure I'd have the same opinion if I saw what's happening in Truth Social. These echo chambers are not good.
        VoidWarranty 10mo ago
        I think you're projecting your own biases here. They "can't help" make the conversation about Trump because they have a public image to maintain. If your image and following are on BSky, then it's not an echo chamber to address the crowd in kind with its nature. That's just good branding.
        johnnyanmac 10mo ago
        >because it doesn't change my point which is that IMO BSky people are insufferable. Yes, but we're here to talk about Jonathan Blow and his new game. You can argue his politics are relevant. Your opinion on Bluesky, not so much.
        kennyloginz 10mo ago
        I think when politics are normal, this is a fine position…. Don’t really care if the author is no new taxes vs expanding safety net. But, politics have become much more extreme. Imagine your wife or friends parents being deported. It’s absolutely sensical to not support people that are loud about hurting your loved ones.
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  - embedding-shape 10mo ago
    > These games are the starting point, but the bulk of the game is new puzzles combining mechanics from different games together. > I made two free games which were later licensed to be used and remixed in this project. Seems indeed to be the case. Blow designed (I guess) the mashup and "composition" if you will, but the puzzles themselves have all been designed and licensed by others, so seems the title of the HN submission and article is wrong. Blow didn't design these puzzles at all.
    - shwaj 10mo ago
      We don’t know that, AFAICT (after reading the Ars article and the Bluesky post). Some of the puzzles are probably reused, and other new ones using the same mechanics may have been written. I’m not sure why you’d so confidently state “Blow didn’t design these puzzles at all”… do you have something against him personally?
    - frde_me 10mo ago
      He quite literally has designed puzzles live on stream, yet you conclude he hasn't.
    - eudamoniac 10mo ago
      The license was for the puzzle mechanics. Probably a few of the tutorial puzzles are the same, but Blow would not copy paste puzzles themselves. That would be both financially and artistically silly.
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- jstimpfle 10mo ago
  I haven't played any of these games, but "explains otherwise" seems to be a misrepresentation given that the commenter you linked is saying himself that Blow's game combines ideas and rulesets from several other previous games. Elsewhere in the arstechnica comments you linked > But, uh... this isn't a "Linus Torvalds is a jerk" sort of situation. "Controversial" undersells just how outlandish and inappropriate Blow's views are. Blow is a full-bore fascist sympathizer who also doesn't seem to think that women have any role to play in his profession. What's going on on these platforms? Is there any serious evidence to the strong claims?
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  - pendenthistory 10mo ago
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    - mariusor 10mo ago
      When you support political leaders that push fascist discourse where regular people that happen to have more empathy for their fellow man are presented as the enemy - in Hegseth's book the call to arms against them is literally in the first paragraph - I think it stops being about not far enough left, but about being way too far right.
      - pendenthistory 10mo ago
        Yeah, when you call half the US fascist and nazi there is not much we can talk about.
        mariusor 10mo ago
        I said nothing about "half the US", and nazi is just your projection I think. But I'd like to know, are you disagreeing with me that the "us vs. them", where them is minorities, women, liberals is *not* in fact one of the upmost fascist tenets?
- ImprobableTruth 10mo ago
  > These games are the starting point, but the bulk of the game is new puzzles combining mechanics from different games together Seems like the puzzles are novel, but the mechanics are not?
  - lucraft 10mo ago
    The basic mechanics look like very standard type of puzzle mechanics (e.g. Sokoban) that have been in many games over decades.
    - christophilus 10mo ago
      He hired a level designer who also wrote a Sokoban game. (Can’t remember the name, but it was free and web-based, IIRC.) That game had some really great, unique ideas in it, and I’d be shocked if the new Blow game was bog standard.
      - nilstycho 10mo ago
        It was Jack Lance, who wrote Enigmash. Tragically, he died in 2023 at the age of 25. Jack Lance superlatively creative. I cannot find the words to express how much the world lost. I do not know of a finer puzzle designer. https://jacklance.github.io/games.html https://jacklance.github.io/games.html
        christophilus 10mo ago
        Oh, man. Yes, that’s the one. I had no idea he’d died. :/
  - dgb23 10mo ago
    With Blow the devil is simultaneously in the details and at the meta level. For example in the Witness, which I consider one of the best puzzle games ever made, you get a fairly simple core mechanic, but the game builds upon it in very interesting ways. It feels like a journey of learning and always challenges you in some novel way at each step. There are also several revelations along the way, where you discover new layers on top of the core puzzles. I would expect that this new game will feature similarly careful design.
- koolala 10mo ago
  The core idea of the witness wasn't novel either. The novelty was how far they went with it.
- sunrunner 10mo ago
  I’m a fan of Alan Hazelden and Draknek’s work but stating upfront that he a) wasn’t involved with the work directly but b) agreed for it to be used years ago, while then going on to write what seems to read as a light hit-piece for Blow himself, and then using that to launch into a point about how his politics and Blow’s don’t align (not relevant for puzzle game progeny) feels like more like him using the trailer for Blow’s game as a trampoline for his own personal beliefs and politics. He also used the same thread to mention his own grant fund while not acknowledging that Thekla (Blow’s company) also has (or had at some point) a similar scheme [1] Meanwhile the various accusations about Blow’s politics beliefs are mysteriously missing, or at least seem to be large extrapolations from other Twitter comments also not cited. Is there something in the thread I missed? [1] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/thekla-raises-grant-money-for-underrepresented-devs-to-usd100k https://www.gamesindustry.biz/thekla-raises-grant-money-for-...
  - johnnyanmac 10mo ago
    >Meanwhile the various accusations about Blow’s politics beliefs are mysteriously missing He sort of went mask off during COVID, so I believe it. I also believe Blow is a smart dude and would try to erase that history right before a PR rally for his game. I'm not even on Twitter but I hear about such events in the gamedev scene for years.
    - sunrunner 10mo ago
      Also not on Twitter and try hard to avoid the easy source-less Internet drama, though I recall some comments about the vaccines being rushed out and not going through the standard trial processes and periods. It doesn’t seem untrue, though given the environment at the time justified, but that comment was extrapolated to “He’s a hard-right anti vaxxer”. No citations of my own though, so this is just memory. Either way, this is why I try to stay off Twitter.
      - wahnfrieden 10mo ago
        You are picking a small comment among a mountain of them and giving the most charitable possible interpretation of it. Strange for you to join conversation to defend the guy as you admit you have no sources to cite.
__alexs 10mo ago
The Witness was a slog, maybe he's learnt how to make puzzles which are actually fun this time.
- actionfromafar 10mo ago
  I was gonna buy it for Christmas!
  - pandemic_region 10mo ago
    An excellent choice sir, you will have a Christmas holiday to remember.
  - __alexs 10mo ago
    I don't hate it but also it's a deeply flawed game. It walked so that Talos Principle could run.
    - jsheard 10mo ago
      The Talos Principle came out a few years before The Witness though.
      - __alexs 10mo ago
        I guess I am just entirely wrong on that front. 10 years is a long time ago :)
    - actionfromafar 10mo ago
      Good tip, thanks, clearly I'm behind more than a decade. :)
  - Laremere 10mo ago
    The Witness is, in my opinion, simply one of the best games ever made. There are many layers to the game, and moments of insight that the game leads you to, but also trusts for you to make the final connections. However, I do understand why some consider it a slog. There are many puzzles in the game that people will dislike, indeed many puzzles that I disliked. It seems Jon prioritized finding all of the interesting things that they could say about the puzzles in the game over making sure that all of the puzzles were actually enjoyable to a majority of people. My advice is if you don't like an area, just go somewhere else. You don't need to complete every area to roll credits. It also may be a matter of expectations. Puzzle games tend to be on the shorter side, but The Witness is lengthy. So jumping in expecting to finish in an afternoon is a way to set yourself up for frustration.
phtrivier 10mo ago
I wonder how much of the 10 years spent making "a programming language, an engine, and a game" were actually spent on each slice. Hopefully, jai and the engine will help make the next game faster...
- progbits 10mo ago
  It's hilarious he had to build a new language just so he could create a sokoban game with graphics of flash era. I'm sure it builds fast and whatever, but you could make this in python in few weeks.
  - bena 10mo ago
    He made Chip's Challenge. He took a decade to make Chip's Challenge.
  - KeplerBoy 10mo ago
    Or in one of those game engines people like to use.
  - panstromek 10mo ago
    the game was not the motivation to make the language
  - jesse__ 10mo ago
    > you could make this in python in few weeks lol
  - kjksf 10mo ago
    He didn't have to. He wanted to. Which is the same motivation as creator of rust, zig, nim, ruby, perl, python had. They all wanted to make a programming language better at something. So I don't see anything "hilarious" about it.
    - sesm 10mo ago
      Rust was created on a Mozilla payroll to provide a C++ alternative with better concurrency support for the purpose of browser engine rewrite. Also, Rust doesn't have a 'creator', the person tasked with leading the project didn't have the authority to make the decisions, see https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/307291.html https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/307291.html
block_dagger 10mo ago
Weird that the post above this one in the front page has “Braid” in its title and it’s not about Blow’s famous game.
dwroberts 10mo ago
Interested to play this but I think the trailer does it a huge disservice. Just a barrage of voice clips and no real structure to it. I think it would help the game a lot if they replace that trailer ASAP
- jsheard 10mo ago
  Yeah it's a real step backwards from how The Witness was presented: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul7kNFD6noU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul7kNFD6noU This looks to be the first of Jon Blows games to put writing front and center, so I wonder if the clunkiness goes beyond the trailer. That's not really his forte.
  - klausa 10mo ago
    Would you not consider Braid to have put writing front and center?
    - hyperbolablabla 10mo ago
      The writing of Braid wasn't fantastic imo. But the game really spoke for itself.
    - kibwen 10mo ago
      It's been about 15 years since I played it, but I recall the writing in Braid being memorably shallow, clumsy, and pretentious (with the grand twist at the end being that they guy who spent the whole game acting like a clingy stalker was actually a clingy stalker this whole time).
      - klausa 10mo ago
        I very deliberately did not say anything about my opinion about the quality of writing in Braid (and I think replaying it again wouldn’t do it any favors) ;) But I do think that the writing was fairly central to the intended experience and design of the game.
      - 10mo ago
piker 10mo ago
I always find Jonathan Blow and Casey Muratori to be great educators and advocates on the “simplicity” end of the spectrum. Jonathan can be super abrasive and comes with some political baggage, but does a good job advocating against what he perceives as unnecessary complexity in software. Opponents would suggest his domain and cherry-picked examples create the perfect environment for his positions and that he does take a long time to ship stuff. That said, he pulls off some compelling games with relatively minimal resources.
- krapp 10mo ago
  I feel like "simplicity" is often fetishized to the point of counter-productivity. Show me anything that either Blow or Muratori are doing that couldn't be done in an existing language or framework. People laugh at games with thousand-case switch statements or if/else chains but they shipped and the end user doesn't care about logarithmic complexity. And most of the time it doesn't even matter. What fails with games more often than not is the design, not the code. What features in Jai make it superior to C++ for writing games specifically? Or does it, like Typescript for JS, only exist because of extreme antipathy towards C++? Time is a resource too, and arguably a far more valuable one for developers than LOC or memory or what have you.
  - manuisin 10mo ago
    This. As much as I love listening to JB, graphics wise he’s not doing anything ground breaking, it could even be done on the web. But I understand for him the architecture for his games being perfect is what makes it worth it for him.
  - incrudible 10mo ago
    This reads as if the process and the finished work are somehow separable. If your code is a mess that you hate working on, it seeps through to your design and your design process. I too had a brief period where, for example, I thought dynamic typing lessens friction, but in reality it just causes massively more friction down the line. Many people never get to go down the line, so that is fine for them, but not me.
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martin_balsam 10mo ago
This interplay between different worlds reminded me of Enigmash, by Jack Lance [1] [1] https://jacklance.github.io/PuzzleScript/play.html?p=cfdcc6e23f1fb3e9de2fd42fafaf4d4c https://jacklance.github.io/PuzzleScript/play.html?p=cfdcc6e...
- jsheard 10mo ago
  That's no coincidence, Thekla employed Jack Lance to work on Sinking Star until his death in 2023. Not that you'd know from the marketing, which doesn't mention any of the puzzle designers involved aside from Jon Blow.
  - jackling 10mo ago
    Is it typical for the marketing for a game to reference those who worked on the game? Those designers were employees of Thekla as far as I can tell, why would they get a shout out?
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    - psyopsy 10mo ago
      Shhhhhh… don’t spoil their little hate party. Everyone knows that the whole marketing team really wanted to include every employee’s name in the 90 sec trailer, but Jon said, “absofuckinlutely not!” Like a fascist would! /s
- bananaboy 10mo ago
  Jack Lance was one of the designers! https://bsky.app/profile/ostroffj.bsky.social/post/3m7wal2qthk2a https://bsky.app/profile/ostroffj.bsky.social/post/3m7wal2qt...
elcapitan 10mo ago
I found the voice acting in the trailer very annoying, hope this can be turned off in the final game. Or maybe I'm just too used to the "voice" over this game is him ranting about software development, from watching his streams :D
- sesm 10mo ago
  Yes, we should have Jonathan's voice ranting about JavaScript instead.
- Maxatar 10mo ago
  The voices used in the trailer will not be the same as the finished game.
pandemic_region 10mo ago
One of the things I enjoyed most about the Witness were the environment puzzles where you had to align things in the scenery with your viewpoint to complete it. And also definitely the little philosophical voice recordings were great. It's a game that deserves playing with an open mind and spirit in order to fully appreciate everything it offers.
- lowdownbutter 10mo ago
  spoilers
Revisional_Sin 10mo ago
Okay, but are the puzzles fun?
- jan_Inkepa 10mo ago
  Puzzle design is his strong point (and the team has several v. good puzzle designers on it), so it's safe to assume there'll be some good ones there. The sheer quantity make me wonder about how the game will be structured - they can't presumably all be stumpers (aka hard puzzles that you'll have to step back from and think about) - maybe there'll be more of a gentle flow between puzzles, like in the Witness, or maybe there'll be lots of optional levels/branching in the game design. I guess we'll see! I'm curious :)
- Stevvo 10mo ago
  Depends on your definition of fun. In both Braid and the Witness, eventually you come across a puzzle you cannot solve and have to use Google to find the answer, because the game never bothered to even hint at how it could be solved. That's pretty much the opposite of fun. Just pretentious; I would expect more of the same.
  - starburst 10mo ago
    That says more about you than about the game.
    - Stevvo 10mo ago
      Blow has actually talked about those puzzles in streams, said he regrets it because more players than not stopped playing the games at that point. It's the definition of bad design to implement some untested abstract idea without giving the player any hints.
      - Jensson 10mo ago
        There are no hard puzzles in Braid, at least not that are required to beat the game, so not sure what you mean. I never played the witness so I don't know about that game.
elcapitan 10mo ago
He'll also be on the Wookash Podcast today [1] (small but nice Gamedev-related podcast) [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHFvEtIbf5E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHFvEtIbf5E
- justin66 10mo ago
  His podcast is really good. Its strengths are that he gets really interesting programmers and basically lets them talk.
pdpi 10mo ago
If you count names and causes of death as separate puzzles, Return of the Obra Dinn is around 100 puzzles long. The two Portal games are less than 100 puzzles put together. Blue Prince is what? 50ish elaborate, intricate puzzles? (darts and parlour notwithstanding). Chants of Senaar, Opus Magnum, Space Chem are all in that same ballpark too. Puzzle games with a lot of levels, like Patrick's Parabox or Baba Is You, clock in at 250ish puzzles. So... why would I want a game with 1400 puzzles? At one puzzle a minute, that's 24 hours of gameplay. There's no reasonable scenario where each individual puzzle is something you can savour while having the game be completable in a vaguely timely fashion. How many of those puzzles are going to be even remotely memorable?
- tialaramex 10mo ago
  Well, but wait, why doesn't each Parlor count? Is your expectation that somehow each of the 1400 puzzles in Blow's game will be like finding Room 46 in Blue Prince? [[Massive spoilers implied, stop reading if you don't want a Blue Prince playthrough "spoiled" in some sense]] Take the Atelier, if you're Jon Blow that's obviously 45 puzzle boxes, plus 45 picture pairs = 90 puzzles just to spell out the clues before you even try to understand how to "solve" the Atelier and actually inherit the manor [[If you're reading this and thinking "But I did inherit the manor by finding room 46, hey, shoo, you didn't finish the game I told you not to read this]].
  - cubefox 10mo ago
    From the article: > now encompasses around 1,400 individual puzzles that could take completionists 400 to 500 hours to fully conquer
  - egypturnash 10mo ago
    searches for images ofthe Atelier online damn I sure did not get that far in Blue Prince, I gave up when I had about half the keys to the underground room. I just figured getting all those and figuring out the right data to input into the rooms behind them would trigger The Real End. Mostly I just remember being stuck on that @#$%^ art gallery rebus. And having done somthing at some ppint that made it much less likely to spawn, to boot.
voidstranger 10mo ago
If you haven't already, and want to scratch a puzzle game itch (sokoban style) check out Void Stranger. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2121980/Void_Stranger/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2121980/Void_Stranger/ For all that is holy, please don't read anything about it. And I really mean that! Just trust and go in blind. You will have an amazing time. It is truly one of the most unique gaming experiences and it is the kind of game you can only play once.
- Mond_ 10mo ago
  Strong +1, Void Stranger is amazing and has a spiraling depth that just keeps going and going.
saberience 10mo ago
So he spent 10 years making a pseudo-3D version of Sokoban with 2010 era graphics? I think he must have spent 9 years working on his new programming language and one year working on the game.
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- ModernMech 10mo ago
  If you want to do X, "build a programming language first then use it to do X" is a tried and true way to never do X.
gortok 10mo ago
The folks that dismiss JB’s work by saying “this could have been done in <x>” are missing the point of why anything is done. If you are entirely utilitarian in how you approach making a game (as in this case) then you’ll want to create as little as possible to make the game. An existing game engine, an existing programming language, existing libraries, etc. If your goal is the economic return that making a game will (hopefully!) provide, this is understandable. However, how I see JB based on his past work and talks is someone who wants to spend their life bringing things into existence. From all available evidence it appears the art of creating and the art of having created is his work and his legacy. The economic return is rhe by-product, but not the goal. We are in this earth for a finite amount of years, and he is spending his time creating new things. It’s an admirable use of time, and at least from my perspective holds a universe of meaning that working under the utilitarian approach loses.
- saberience 10mo ago
  Blow made his own language because he's so eye-wateringly arrogant and thinks every language (that he didn't make) sucks, and only he is smart enough to design a better language for programming games. Seriously, this is why he did it. His ego and arrogance is off the charts and if it wasn't made by him, he thinks it sucks (e.g. he doesn't like Linux, probably because he realizes Torvalds is actually smarter than him). He also doesn't like C++ or Rust, again, it's probably a good indicator he has a deep inferiority complex and so he has to prove he's the smartest person in the world by writing his own, "better" language. I.e. I don't think he's making a programming language for some "love of creating", I think he's doing it because he has a deep psychological issue/insecurity, which drives his need to always be the "smartest person in the room", his arrogance, the way he dismisses others who don't agree with his viewpoints etc.
  - hyperbolablabla 10mo ago
    This is a very reductive take. Even if you don't like Jon, calling Jai an exercise in arrogance is simply untrue. When he started making Jai in ~2014, there were very few viable alternatives to C/C++ in the systems programming space that offered the kind of expressive power becoming of a langauge built this century. Rust is great, but it prioritising correctness is not always the right choice, especially not for games. Jai introduced many ideas that languages like Zig and Odin ended up adopting.
k2xl 10mo ago
Interesting read. As an indie puzzle dev (shameless plug: https://thinky.gg https://thinky.gg), I find the biggest leap happens when a system’s rules are rich enough that solving becomes about understanding the space and recombining elements, not memorizing solutions. Games with extensible grids and turn mechanics reward that kind of play and creation much better than static collections of challenges
magicalhippo 10mo ago
A side note, if you've played The Witness but not yet The Looker[1], you probably have been missing out. I quite enjoyed The Witness but The Looker was just great. [1]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1985690/The_Looker/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1985690/The_Looker/
- calmbonsai 10mo ago
  I played The Witness and didn't find it remotely fun. I've enjoyed all of Blow's other titles. I suppose I was coming in with expectations of a modern Myst and/or Riven, but it was not that. There was not enough active narrative to keep me engaged with the puzzles and there wasn't enough "reward" in completing them.
  - vntok 10mo ago
    > I played The Witness and didn't find it remotely fun All the more reason to try the Looker!
  - magicalhippo 10mo ago
    > I suppose I was coming in with expectations of a modern Myst and/or Riven, but it was not that. If that was your expectation going in I can definitely understand you feeling underwhelmed. That said, you may still enjoy The Looker...
    - calmbonsai 10mo ago
      I'll give The Looker a shot. I usually pick-up "some puzzle thing" around Christmas time.
  - NooneAtAll3 10mo ago
    Sounds like you'll really enjoy the Looker then
    - immibis 10mo ago
      They say The Looker is made for two kinds of people: if you loved The Witness, you'll love The Looker, and if you hated The Witness, you'll love The Looker. It's a pretty short game - a couple of hours, if you don't spend hours and hours stuck on one of the puzzles. (just look up a walkthrough at that point - the game's not so awesome to be worth spending hours stuck)
andersa 10mo ago
I'm always a bit baffled by this project. While it's cool that he can create hundreds of hours of content for his puzzle game, does anyone actually want to play a single puzzle game for this long? Would it not be better to make a few different, shorter, higher quality experiences?
- WhyOhWhyQ 10mo ago
  I agree. His first and second game are based on deep themes and unique concepts. He explores the medium of video games in new ways. The selling point of this game seems to be "largest puzzle game ever". I'm excited to see if there are deeper ideas once I play it though. One of Blow's favorite games is Steven's Sausage Roll. I personally didn't enjoy it because the intellectual content of that kind of puzzle is, as far as I can tell, exploring a large tree of sausage roll states. And while I had a few aha moments playing it, as far as I can tell the way you do that at the end of the day is just to try all the possible states.
- thenoblesunfish 10mo ago
  People do the New York Times crossword every day for years..
smileson2 10mo ago
I'm really intersted in giving this game a shot since I'm a big fan of puzzle games personally I've never really meshed with a number of blows opinions but it is interesting to hear his reasoning and where he's comming from which is what opinions are for
viktorcode 10mo ago
I hope the game will be released with the language.
- femiagbabiaka 10mo ago
  IIRC he’s always said after, but I hope so too.
- 0x1ceb00da 10mo ago
  The programming language will ship with a smaller version of sokoban as demo.
arghandugh 10mo ago
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- infinite_salt 10mo ago
  So true, we should also ignore Picasso and Degas for saying things we find disagreeable
  - stopping 10mo ago
    It's worth learning from people even if we deeply disagree with them, but we still have the choice to not offer them our patronage. I see nothing wrong with pointing out how prominent figures choose to exercise their influence. People should be informed about what their spending supports. I would go so far to argue that this is one of the only remaining effective ways for individuals to collectively shift the cultural needle.
  - yAak 10mo ago
    That's not what arghandugh was saying at all. But I'm guessing you know that.
- jovial_cavalier 10mo ago
  Yep. That's exactly what I'm going to do.
s3graham 10mo ago
FWIW, Sean and Alan's contribution to puzzle designs: ref: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@nothings/115704420859870435 https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@nothings/115704420859870435 and: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@draknek/115704125102372454 https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@draknek/115704125102372454
- jackling 10mo ago
  Damn I thought STB and Jon were friends for a while. I find this indicative on how Jon has changed these past 5 years.
  - spicyusername 10mo ago
    What do you mean by that?
    - jackling 10mo ago
      Sean has been on Jon's stream, and there's a good video where briefly Sean states that he have Jon some syntax advice for Jon's language Jai. I assumed they were friends as there are several videos of them conversing. The parent comment pointed out that Sean agree's with the negatives about Jon, which could not mean much, but the fact that Jon's negative as described in the Dreknek are really bad indicates to me that Sean likely doesn't view Jon as a good friend anymore. This is surprising to me because I really did enjoy one of their videos where they try and solve a problem together. The fact that Sean agrees with this critical take of Jon is further evidence of how much Jon has changed since the pandemic. STB Is the intial's for Sean T Barrett, who also created a software library with the same name.
      - hyperbolablabla 10mo ago
        Frankly STB is a bit of a lefty nutjob, those types are known for excommunicating good friends over minor political schisms... Talking from experience.
socalgal2 10mo ago
I hate this kind of headline. No, Jonathan Blow did not spend the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles. A team of developers made 1,400 puzzles and Blow directed them. This headline is like writing "Walt Disney hand drew 60,000 frames of Snow White". (correct me if I'm wrong)
- spicyusername 10mo ago
  Do you have a source for that? I always got the impression it's been mostly Blow and a partner working on Jai and this new game.
  - socalgal2 10mo ago
    there's plenty of comments here referencing other designers on the project.
elcapitan 10mo ago
This is the most HN possible thread about Jonathan Blow, he would love this lol
CyberDildonics 10mo ago
He also spent some of that time yelling at viewers, talking about how much smarter than everyone he is and talking about his language that he'll never release.
- nurettin 10mo ago
  I didn't see him brag that much, but he says things like don't start with being a web dev, JavaScript kills your prospects of becoming a better programmer, etc. He probably thinks that formal education and books that teach people how a computer works and how to code in different paradigms don't exist, that everyone is a wannabe who only learns on hand at a job like he did. His job recommendation: "there are so many things you can do, go to SpaceX!". Better life advice would be to learn your fundamentals (computer architecture, fp, algos) and be knowledgeable about the direction the industry is going instead of finding some niche and pouting at everything else.
  - CyberDildonics 10mo ago
    He mostly says it from the angle that everyone else is dumb instead of himself being smart.
    - spicyusername 10mo ago
      Every time I hear people talk this way I can't help but feel like they're projecting.
eudamoniac 10mo ago
My seemingly unpopular opinion based on this thread: The Witness is the greatest puzzle game of all time. My spouse agrees. You either get it or you don't.
- nurettin 10mo ago
  Let's dilute the thread. I did half the game and stopped playing. Not really got stuck, just got exhausted. It is a chore, I get what it is doing, the progression and addition of new mechanics while preserving the old ones yeah great whoopdi do. But there are games which are a lot more immersive and have an actual point and have better physics based puzzles and an actual story like portal and talos principle that don't make you feel like you are remotely debugging a crash on saturday night while everyone else is having fun. You either get that or not.
  - eudamoniac 10mo ago
    Portal is trivial and Talos Principle is good but a bit contrived. I have never played a puzzle game that I considered a chore. The puzzles are the game. You don't need a story or a point in them. I also play chess and there is certainly no immersion or physics in that. The Witness also has the sublime revelation in it that makes it more memorable than most games. I don't even remember the god's name in TP, but I can envision clearly every Witness locale.
    - nurettin 10mo ago
      > You don't need a story or a point in them. Well, that was pretentious.
      - eudamoniac 10mo ago
        I guess crosswords, chess, sudoku, solitaire, and competitive programming need to add plots and narratives to their next editions, lest they be thought to have pretensions! (Of what?)
reactordev 10mo ago
Jonathan is on another level. I met him once long, long ago at a GDC thing and knew he’s a product of the matrix. He’s like a functioning rain main. What’s cool has been to watch him grow from this young adult who made a game about time to this beast he is today. Hats off my guy. Now finish your programming language!
spicyusername 10mo ago
It's interesting to me how Blow seems to ruffle so many feathers. I don't really get it. He's made two well received games, now a third one and an entire programming language, and anytime I tune in to his content he seems like a competent programmer with the kinds of opinions you'd expect from any kind of craftsman: sharp and borne out of their own personal experience. I never hear anything that strikes me as inflammatory. What's there to fuss about? If you disagree with one of those opinions, great! Maybe this is just what experiencing the world solely through the internet does to people. Makes them prickly and uncalibrated.
- kilpikaarna 10mo ago
  Apparently he's always had a pretty intense and acerbic personality. There's an article in The Atlantic from 2012 called The Most Dangerous Gamer that goes a bit into his character and history. As far as politics go, in the past he mostly seemed kind of small business owner libertarian (which, fair enough, he's sunk a lot of his personal wealth into running a game studio). He's seemingly been getting increasingly grouchy about the e.g. state of software development and society in general for some time, and over the past year or so he's started expressing explicit Trump support/appreciation. Possibly exacerbated by the development of this game and Jai dragging on, apparently getting burned by what he considers bad hires (bet he's not easy to work for tho...), and such. Though I would say it feels like it's mostly hot takes on streams or X, not necessarily very coherent politics. But the indie game scene and many of his former associates are very left wing, and with the political climate, esp. in the US, also being what it is he's quite the pariah in many places now.
- psyopsy 10mo ago
  He ruffles the very sensitive Internet dwellers who have all correct beliefs. Many years ago, during the peak growth of internet cancel culture, Jon made the mistake of saying an uncontroversial truth about occupational interests heavily correlating with gender. They took that and twisted it into “he thinks women are inferior.” Since then, they look for any reason to hate on him. It’s political tribe brain rot as usual. Check out The Witness subreddit. For a game those people claim to love, they seemed to have absorbed absolutely none of the narrative philosophy.
smeeger 10mo ago
do any of you remember gamasutra
insane_dreamer 10mo ago
Hadn't heard of The Witness before, but from what I can tell, these are something like enhanced Sokoban puzzles? Has there ever been anything on the level of Myst/Riven published in the last 20 years?
- FelipeCortez 10mo ago
  you should try The Witness
pengaru 10mo ago
What's the market size for such a sokoban puzzle game? I've watched a few of Blow's programming streams which usually spanned both Jai and sokoban development, this was years ago when the sokoban game was clearly an unpolished development mule for the language. It never seemed like a wise use of resources to try polish that turd of a game concept, certainly not for 9 years. Am I wrong?
user____name 10mo ago
The Billy Corgan of gaming.

372 points by furcyd 10mo ago

sxzygz 10mo ago

In case you assume novelty, a comment [1] from ArsTechnica reader Jensen404 explains otherwise by linking to [2] a post on Bluesky. [1] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/12/jonathan-blow-has-spent-the-past-decade-designing-1400-puzzles-for-you/?comments=1&post=44134565 https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/12/jonathan-blow-has-spe... [2] https://bsky.app/profile/draknek.bsky.social/post/3m7qybidq7k2s https://bsky.app/profile/draknek.bsky.social/post/3m7qybidq7...

tormeh 10mo ago
Seems like the original puzzles were licensed for this game, in which case why not?
- deleted 10mo ago
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- serial_dev 10mo ago
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  - embedding-shape 10mo ago
    Does that change how good/bad the game someone releases is? Don't get me wrong, being obviously anti-scientist isn't that great if I absolutely have to judge them, but I'm not sure if that has any impact on how fun a game is. If I'd stop consuming stuff from people/organizations I disagree with politically, I literally would have to move into a cave and start my own hunter-collector society from scratch. Is this really how others make decisions in their daily lives?
    - zaneyard 10mo ago
      I enjoyed Braid and this revelation doesn't change that, but there's a lot of entertainment and it's easy to not support someone who has views (or at least doesn't express them publicly) that conflict with my own personal values.
    - rkomorn 10mo ago
      I don't particularly go hunting for information about artists, studios, etc, to find out if I agree with them. I just happen to no longer like their stuff when I find out things I don't like. It's not "how I make decisions" but more just something that affects my taste for things.
    - speedgoose 10mo ago
      Separating the art from the artist is a long and old debate. I personally can’t watch Roman Polanski’s art, the classic and easy example. You can be a great movie producer, pedophilia and rapes are big no-no to me. But not to everyone apparently. For the non vocal people believing in pseudoscience and fascist propaganda, I can close my eyes more easily. I don’t want to know. I can guess sometimes but I won’t check. As soon as they become vocal, it kills the art for me. I can’t enjoy art from people against my values, me, and my friends and family.
      - tialaramex 10mo ago
        Death of the Author. One of the important elements here is the extent to which materially it matters. If I buy a book Lovecraft wrote a hundred years ago the money isn't going to end up diverted to support the "patriots" who want to intimidate my neighbours, whereas when I buy a Harry Potter box set for a relative you can bet that Rowling's share will help fund "Gender Critical" movements trying to make life worse for some of my friends and colleagues... For books particularly I can totally buy Death of the Author, what I think I read might be entirely different from what the author says they intended, which further nobody can prove is what they actually intended. For that last for example I do not for one moment believe Vernor Vinge that he "Didn't know" what Rabbit is in "Rainbow's End". It's an AI. Maybe Vinge doesn't intend the book as a Singularitarian Catastrophe (you can argue the book thinks it's about avoiding such a catastrophe) but I don't see any way to interpret it where Rabbit isn't a super-human AI.
  - adito 10mo ago
    I don't know why you just handpicked the covid trutherism without quoting the full thing, here the full quote from the link above: > Additionally, in recent years it has become increasingly clear that Jon’s beliefs/priorities and mine are not aligned. He’s adversarial to people talking about privilege and representation, is dismissive of diversity efforts, has dabbled in covid trutherism, and is pro-MAGA. Here the post after just for a full picture > I believe Trump is a self serving authoritarian who's dismantling democracy, trying to make trans people illegal, and wanting to set up concentration camps for immigrants - whereas Jon in February called him "the best President we have had in my entire life".
    - serial_dev 10mo ago
      I left a link to the exact post I'm referring to with the whole thread available for context. And I didn't include the whole thing, because it doesn't change my point which is that IMO BSky people are insufferable. A game is released (which in part includes their work if I understand it right) and they can't help themselves and make this about Trump. I'm sure I'd have the same opinion if I saw what's happening in Truth Social. These echo chambers are not good.
      - VoidWarranty 10mo ago
        I think you're projecting your own biases here. They "can't help" make the conversation about Trump because they have a public image to maintain. If your image and following are on BSky, then it's not an echo chamber to address the crowd in kind with its nature. That's just good branding.
      - johnnyanmac 10mo ago
        >because it doesn't change my point which is that IMO BSky people are insufferable. Yes, but we're here to talk about Jonathan Blow and his new game. You can argue his politics are relevant. Your opinion on Bluesky, not so much.
      - kennyloginz 10mo ago
        I think when politics are normal, this is a fine position…. Don’t really care if the author is no new taxes vs expanding safety net. But, politics have become much more extreme. Imagine your wife or friends parents being deported. It’s absolutely sensical to not support people that are loud about hurting your loved ones.
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- embedding-shape 10mo ago
  > These games are the starting point, but the bulk of the game is new puzzles combining mechanics from different games together. > I made two free games which were later licensed to be used and remixed in this project. Seems indeed to be the case. Blow designed (I guess) the mashup and "composition" if you will, but the puzzles themselves have all been designed and licensed by others, so seems the title of the HN submission and article is wrong. Blow didn't design these puzzles at all.
  - shwaj 10mo ago
    We don’t know that, AFAICT (after reading the Ars article and the Bluesky post). Some of the puzzles are probably reused, and other new ones using the same mechanics may have been written. I’m not sure why you’d so confidently state “Blow didn’t design these puzzles at all”… do you have something against him personally?
  - frde_me 10mo ago
    He quite literally has designed puzzles live on stream, yet you conclude he hasn't.
  - eudamoniac 10mo ago
    The license was for the puzzle mechanics. Probably a few of the tutorial puzzles are the same, but Blow would not copy paste puzzles themselves. That would be both financially and artistically silly.
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jstimpfle 10mo ago
I haven't played any of these games, but "explains otherwise" seems to be a misrepresentation given that the commenter you linked is saying himself that Blow's game combines ideas and rulesets from several other previous games. Elsewhere in the arstechnica comments you linked > But, uh... this isn't a "Linus Torvalds is a jerk" sort of situation. "Controversial" undersells just how outlandish and inappropriate Blow's views are. Blow is a full-bore fascist sympathizer who also doesn't seem to think that women have any role to play in his profession. What's going on on these platforms? Is there any serious evidence to the strong claims?
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- pendenthistory 10mo ago
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  - mariusor 10mo ago
    When you support political leaders that push fascist discourse where regular people that happen to have more empathy for their fellow man are presented as the enemy - in Hegseth's book the call to arms against them is literally in the first paragraph - I think it stops being about not far enough left, but about being way too far right.
    - pendenthistory 10mo ago
      Yeah, when you call half the US fascist and nazi there is not much we can talk about.
      - mariusor 10mo ago
        I said nothing about "half the US", and nazi is just your projection I think. But I'd like to know, are you disagreeing with me that the "us vs. them", where them is minorities, women, liberals is *not* in fact one of the upmost fascist tenets?
ImprobableTruth 10mo ago
> These games are the starting point, but the bulk of the game is new puzzles combining mechanics from different games together Seems like the puzzles are novel, but the mechanics are not?
- lucraft 10mo ago
  The basic mechanics look like very standard type of puzzle mechanics (e.g. Sokoban) that have been in many games over decades.
  - christophilus 10mo ago
    He hired a level designer who also wrote a Sokoban game. (Can’t remember the name, but it was free and web-based, IIRC.) That game had some really great, unique ideas in it, and I’d be shocked if the new Blow game was bog standard.
    - nilstycho 10mo ago
      It was Jack Lance, who wrote Enigmash. Tragically, he died in 2023 at the age of 25. Jack Lance superlatively creative. I cannot find the words to express how much the world lost. I do not know of a finer puzzle designer. https://jacklance.github.io/games.html https://jacklance.github.io/games.html
      - christophilus 10mo ago
        Oh, man. Yes, that’s the one. I had no idea he’d died. :/
- dgb23 10mo ago
  With Blow the devil is simultaneously in the details and at the meta level. For example in the Witness, which I consider one of the best puzzle games ever made, you get a fairly simple core mechanic, but the game builds upon it in very interesting ways. It feels like a journey of learning and always challenges you in some novel way at each step. There are also several revelations along the way, where you discover new layers on top of the core puzzles. I would expect that this new game will feature similarly careful design.
koolala 10mo ago
The core idea of the witness wasn't novel either. The novelty was how far they went with it.
sunrunner 10mo ago
I’m a fan of Alan Hazelden and Draknek’s work but stating upfront that he a) wasn’t involved with the work directly but b) agreed for it to be used years ago, while then going on to write what seems to read as a light hit-piece for Blow himself, and then using that to launch into a point about how his politics and Blow’s don’t align (not relevant for puzzle game progeny) feels like more like him using the trailer for Blow’s game as a trampoline for his own personal beliefs and politics. He also used the same thread to mention his own grant fund while not acknowledging that Thekla (Blow’s company) also has (or had at some point) a similar scheme [1] Meanwhile the various accusations about Blow’s politics beliefs are mysteriously missing, or at least seem to be large extrapolations from other Twitter comments also not cited. Is there something in the thread I missed? [1] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/thekla-raises-grant-money-for-underrepresented-devs-to-usd100k https://www.gamesindustry.biz/thekla-raises-grant-money-for-...
- johnnyanmac 10mo ago
  >Meanwhile the various accusations about Blow’s politics beliefs are mysteriously missing He sort of went mask off during COVID, so I believe it. I also believe Blow is a smart dude and would try to erase that history right before a PR rally for his game. I'm not even on Twitter but I hear about such events in the gamedev scene for years.
  - sunrunner 10mo ago
    Also not on Twitter and try hard to avoid the easy source-less Internet drama, though I recall some comments about the vaccines being rushed out and not going through the standard trial processes and periods. It doesn’t seem untrue, though given the environment at the time justified, but that comment was extrapolated to “He’s a hard-right anti vaxxer”. No citations of my own though, so this is just memory. Either way, this is why I try to stay off Twitter.
    - wahnfrieden 10mo ago
      You are picking a small comment among a mountain of them and giving the most charitable possible interpretation of it. Strange for you to join conversation to defend the guy as you admit you have no sources to cite.

__alexs 10mo ago

The Witness was a slog, maybe he's learnt how to make puzzles which are actually fun this time.

actionfromafar 10mo ago
I was gonna buy it for Christmas!
- pandemic_region 10mo ago
  An excellent choice sir, you will have a Christmas holiday to remember.
- __alexs 10mo ago
  I don't hate it but also it's a deeply flawed game. It walked so that Talos Principle could run.
  - jsheard 10mo ago
    The Talos Principle came out a few years before The Witness though.
    - __alexs 10mo ago
      I guess I am just entirely wrong on that front. 10 years is a long time ago :)
  - actionfromafar 10mo ago
    Good tip, thanks, clearly I'm behind more than a decade. :)
- Laremere 10mo ago
  The Witness is, in my opinion, simply one of the best games ever made. There are many layers to the game, and moments of insight that the game leads you to, but also trusts for you to make the final connections. However, I do understand why some consider it a slog. There are many puzzles in the game that people will dislike, indeed many puzzles that I disliked. It seems Jon prioritized finding all of the interesting things that they could say about the puzzles in the game over making sure that all of the puzzles were actually enjoyable to a majority of people. My advice is if you don't like an area, just go somewhere else. You don't need to complete every area to roll credits. It also may be a matter of expectations. Puzzle games tend to be on the shorter side, but The Witness is lengthy. So jumping in expecting to finish in an afternoon is a way to set yourself up for frustration.

phtrivier 10mo ago

I wonder how much of the 10 years spent making "a programming language, an engine, and a game" were actually spent on each slice. Hopefully, jai and the engine will help make the next game faster...

progbits 10mo ago
It's hilarious he had to build a new language just so he could create a sokoban game with graphics of flash era. I'm sure it builds fast and whatever, but you could make this in python in few weeks.
- bena 10mo ago
  He made Chip's Challenge. He took a decade to make Chip's Challenge.
- KeplerBoy 10mo ago
  Or in one of those game engines people like to use.
- panstromek 10mo ago
  the game was not the motivation to make the language
- jesse__ 10mo ago
  > you could make this in python in few weeks lol
- kjksf 10mo ago
  He didn't have to. He wanted to. Which is the same motivation as creator of rust, zig, nim, ruby, perl, python had. They all wanted to make a programming language better at something. So I don't see anything "hilarious" about it.
  - sesm 10mo ago
    Rust was created on a Mozilla payroll to provide a C++ alternative with better concurrency support for the purpose of browser engine rewrite. Also, Rust doesn't have a 'creator', the person tasked with leading the project didn't have the authority to make the decisions, see https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/307291.html https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/307291.html

block_dagger 10mo ago

Weird that the post above this one in the front page has “Braid” in its title and it’s not about Blow’s famous game.

dwroberts 10mo ago

Interested to play this but I think the trailer does it a huge disservice. Just a barrage of voice clips and no real structure to it. I think it would help the game a lot if they replace that trailer ASAP

jsheard 10mo ago
Yeah it's a real step backwards from how The Witness was presented: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul7kNFD6noU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul7kNFD6noU This looks to be the first of Jon Blows games to put writing front and center, so I wonder if the clunkiness goes beyond the trailer. That's not really his forte.
- klausa 10mo ago
  Would you not consider Braid to have put writing front and center?
  - hyperbolablabla 10mo ago
    The writing of Braid wasn't fantastic imo. But the game really spoke for itself.
  - kibwen 10mo ago
    It's been about 15 years since I played it, but I recall the writing in Braid being memorably shallow, clumsy, and pretentious (with the grand twist at the end being that they guy who spent the whole game acting like a clingy stalker was actually a clingy stalker this whole time).
    - klausa 10mo ago
      I very deliberately did not say anything about my opinion about the quality of writing in Braid (and I think replaying it again wouldn’t do it any favors) ;) But I do think that the writing was fairly central to the intended experience and design of the game.
    - 10mo ago

piker 10mo ago

I always find Jonathan Blow and Casey Muratori to be great educators and advocates on the “simplicity” end of the spectrum. Jonathan can be super abrasive and comes with some political baggage, but does a good job advocating against what he perceives as unnecessary complexity in software. Opponents would suggest his domain and cherry-picked examples create the perfect environment for his positions and that he does take a long time to ship stuff. That said, he pulls off some compelling games with relatively minimal resources.

krapp 10mo ago
I feel like "simplicity" is often fetishized to the point of counter-productivity. Show me anything that either Blow or Muratori are doing that couldn't be done in an existing language or framework. People laugh at games with thousand-case switch statements or if/else chains but they shipped and the end user doesn't care about logarithmic complexity. And most of the time it doesn't even matter. What fails with games more often than not is the design, not the code. What features in Jai make it superior to C++ for writing games specifically? Or does it, like Typescript for JS, only exist because of extreme antipathy towards C++? Time is a resource too, and arguably a far more valuable one for developers than LOC or memory or what have you.
- manuisin 10mo ago
  This. As much as I love listening to JB, graphics wise he’s not doing anything ground breaking, it could even be done on the web. But I understand for him the architecture for his games being perfect is what makes it worth it for him.
- incrudible 10mo ago
  This reads as if the process and the finished work are somehow separable. If your code is a mess that you hate working on, it seeps through to your design and your design process. I too had a brief period where, for example, I thought dynamic typing lessens friction, but in reality it just causes massively more friction down the line. Many people never get to go down the line, so that is fine for them, but not me.

deleted 10mo ago

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martin_balsam 10mo ago

This interplay between different worlds reminded me of Enigmash, by Jack Lance [1] [1] https://jacklance.github.io/PuzzleScript/play.html?p=cfdcc6e23f1fb3e9de2fd42fafaf4d4c https://jacklance.github.io/PuzzleScript/play.html?p=cfdcc6e...

jsheard 10mo ago
That's no coincidence, Thekla employed Jack Lance to work on Sinking Star until his death in 2023. Not that you'd know from the marketing, which doesn't mention any of the puzzle designers involved aside from Jon Blow.
- jackling 10mo ago
  Is it typical for the marketing for a game to reference those who worked on the game? Those designers were employees of Thekla as far as I can tell, why would they get a shout out?
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  - psyopsy 10mo ago
    Shhhhhh… don’t spoil their little hate party. Everyone knows that the whole marketing team really wanted to include every employee’s name in the 90 sec trailer, but Jon said, “absofuckinlutely not!” Like a fascist would! /s
bananaboy 10mo ago
Jack Lance was one of the designers! https://bsky.app/profile/ostroffj.bsky.social/post/3m7wal2qthk2a https://bsky.app/profile/ostroffj.bsky.social/post/3m7wal2qt...

elcapitan 10mo ago

I found the voice acting in the trailer very annoying, hope this can be turned off in the final game. Or maybe I'm just too used to the "voice" over this game is him ranting about software development, from watching his streams :D

sesm 10mo ago
Yes, we should have Jonathan's voice ranting about JavaScript instead.
Maxatar 10mo ago
The voices used in the trailer will not be the same as the finished game.

pandemic_region 10mo ago

One of the things I enjoyed most about the Witness were the environment puzzles where you had to align things in the scenery with your viewpoint to complete it. And also definitely the little philosophical voice recordings were great. It's a game that deserves playing with an open mind and spirit in order to fully appreciate everything it offers.

lowdownbutter 10mo ago
spoilers

Revisional_Sin 10mo ago

Okay, but are the puzzles fun?

jan_Inkepa 10mo ago
Puzzle design is his strong point (and the team has several v. good puzzle designers on it), so it's safe to assume there'll be some good ones there. The sheer quantity make me wonder about how the game will be structured - they can't presumably all be stumpers (aka hard puzzles that you'll have to step back from and think about) - maybe there'll be more of a gentle flow between puzzles, like in the Witness, or maybe there'll be lots of optional levels/branching in the game design. I guess we'll see! I'm curious :)
Stevvo 10mo ago
Depends on your definition of fun. In both Braid and the Witness, eventually you come across a puzzle you cannot solve and have to use Google to find the answer, because the game never bothered to even hint at how it could be solved. That's pretty much the opposite of fun. Just pretentious; I would expect more of the same.
- starburst 10mo ago
  That says more about you than about the game.
  - Stevvo 10mo ago
    Blow has actually talked about those puzzles in streams, said he regrets it because more players than not stopped playing the games at that point. It's the definition of bad design to implement some untested abstract idea without giving the player any hints.
    - Jensson 10mo ago
      There are no hard puzzles in Braid, at least not that are required to beat the game, so not sure what you mean. I never played the witness so I don't know about that game.

elcapitan 10mo ago

He'll also be on the Wookash Podcast today [1] (small but nice Gamedev-related podcast) [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHFvEtIbf5E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHFvEtIbf5E

justin66 10mo ago
His podcast is really good. Its strengths are that he gets really interesting programmers and basically lets them talk.

pdpi 10mo ago

If you count names and causes of death as separate puzzles, Return of the Obra Dinn is around 100 puzzles long. The two Portal games are less than 100 puzzles put together. Blue Prince is what? 50ish elaborate, intricate puzzles? (darts and parlour notwithstanding). Chants of Senaar, Opus Magnum, Space Chem are all in that same ballpark too. Puzzle games with a lot of levels, like Patrick's Parabox or Baba Is You, clock in at 250ish puzzles. So... why would I want a game with 1400 puzzles? At one puzzle a minute, that's 24 hours of gameplay. There's no reasonable scenario where each individual puzzle is something you can savour while having the game be completable in a vaguely timely fashion. How many of those puzzles are going to be even remotely memorable?

tialaramex 10mo ago
Well, but wait, why doesn't each Parlor count? Is your expectation that somehow each of the 1400 puzzles in Blow's game will be like finding Room 46 in Blue Prince? [[Massive spoilers implied, stop reading if you don't want a Blue Prince playthrough "spoiled" in some sense]] Take the Atelier, if you're Jon Blow that's obviously 45 puzzle boxes, plus 45 picture pairs = 90 puzzles just to spell out the clues before you even try to understand how to "solve" the Atelier and actually inherit the manor [[If you're reading this and thinking "But I did inherit the manor by finding room 46, hey, shoo, you didn't finish the game I told you not to read this]].
- cubefox 10mo ago
  From the article: > now encompasses around 1,400 individual puzzles that could take completionists 400 to 500 hours to fully conquer
- egypturnash 10mo ago
  searches for images ofthe Atelier online damn I sure did not get that far in Blue Prince, I gave up when I had about half the keys to the underground room. I just figured getting all those and figuring out the right data to input into the rooms behind them would trigger The Real End. Mostly I just remember being stuck on that @#$%^ art gallery rebus. And having done somthing at some ppint that made it much less likely to spawn, to boot.

voidstranger 10mo ago

If you haven't already, and want to scratch a puzzle game itch (sokoban style) check out Void Stranger. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2121980/Void_Stranger/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2121980/Void_Stranger/ For all that is holy, please don't read anything about it. And I really mean that! Just trust and go in blind. You will have an amazing time. It is truly one of the most unique gaming experiences and it is the kind of game you can only play once.

Mond_ 10mo ago
Strong +1, Void Stranger is amazing and has a spiraling depth that just keeps going and going.

saberience 10mo ago

So he spent 10 years making a pseudo-3D version of Sokoban with 2010 era graphics? I think he must have spent 9 years working on his new programming language and one year working on the game.

deleted 10mo ago
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ModernMech 10mo ago
If you want to do X, "build a programming language first then use it to do X" is a tried and true way to never do X.

gortok 10mo ago

The folks that dismiss JB’s work by saying “this could have been done in <x>” are missing the point of why anything is done. If you are entirely utilitarian in how you approach making a game (as in this case) then you’ll want to create as little as possible to make the game. An existing game engine, an existing programming language, existing libraries, etc. If your goal is the economic return that making a game will (hopefully!) provide, this is understandable. However, how I see JB based on his past work and talks is someone who wants to spend their life bringing things into existence. From all available evidence it appears the art of creating and the art of having created is his work and his legacy. The economic return is rhe by-product, but not the goal. We are in this earth for a finite amount of years, and he is spending his time creating new things. It’s an admirable use of time, and at least from my perspective holds a universe of meaning that working under the utilitarian approach loses.

saberience 10mo ago
Blow made his own language because he's so eye-wateringly arrogant and thinks every language (that he didn't make) sucks, and only he is smart enough to design a better language for programming games. Seriously, this is why he did it. His ego and arrogance is off the charts and if it wasn't made by him, he thinks it sucks (e.g. he doesn't like Linux, probably because he realizes Torvalds is actually smarter than him). He also doesn't like C++ or Rust, again, it's probably a good indicator he has a deep inferiority complex and so he has to prove he's the smartest person in the world by writing his own, "better" language. I.e. I don't think he's making a programming language for some "love of creating", I think he's doing it because he has a deep psychological issue/insecurity, which drives his need to always be the "smartest person in the room", his arrogance, the way he dismisses others who don't agree with his viewpoints etc.
- hyperbolablabla 10mo ago
  This is a very reductive take. Even if you don't like Jon, calling Jai an exercise in arrogance is simply untrue. When he started making Jai in ~2014, there were very few viable alternatives to C/C++ in the systems programming space that offered the kind of expressive power becoming of a langauge built this century. Rust is great, but it prioritising correctness is not always the right choice, especially not for games. Jai introduced many ideas that languages like Zig and Odin ended up adopting.

k2xl 10mo ago

Interesting read. As an indie puzzle dev (shameless plug: https://thinky.gg https://thinky.gg), I find the biggest leap happens when a system’s rules are rich enough that solving becomes about understanding the space and recombining elements, not memorizing solutions. Games with extensible grids and turn mechanics reward that kind of play and creation much better than static collections of challenges

magicalhippo 10mo ago

A side note, if you've played The Witness but not yet The Looker[1], you probably have been missing out. I quite enjoyed The Witness but The Looker was just great. [1]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1985690/The_Looker/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1985690/The_Looker/

calmbonsai 10mo ago
I played The Witness and didn't find it remotely fun. I've enjoyed all of Blow's other titles. I suppose I was coming in with expectations of a modern Myst and/or Riven, but it was not that. There was not enough active narrative to keep me engaged with the puzzles and there wasn't enough "reward" in completing them.
- vntok 10mo ago
  > I played The Witness and didn't find it remotely fun All the more reason to try the Looker!
- magicalhippo 10mo ago
  > I suppose I was coming in with expectations of a modern Myst and/or Riven, but it was not that. If that was your expectation going in I can definitely understand you feeling underwhelmed. That said, you may still enjoy The Looker...
  - calmbonsai 10mo ago
    I'll give The Looker a shot. I usually pick-up "some puzzle thing" around Christmas time.
- NooneAtAll3 10mo ago
  Sounds like you'll really enjoy the Looker then
  - immibis 10mo ago
    They say The Looker is made for two kinds of people: if you loved The Witness, you'll love The Looker, and if you hated The Witness, you'll love The Looker. It's a pretty short game - a couple of hours, if you don't spend hours and hours stuck on one of the puzzles. (just look up a walkthrough at that point - the game's not so awesome to be worth spending hours stuck)

andersa 10mo ago

I'm always a bit baffled by this project. While it's cool that he can create hundreds of hours of content for his puzzle game, does anyone actually want to play a single puzzle game for this long? Would it not be better to make a few different, shorter, higher quality experiences?

WhyOhWhyQ 10mo ago
I agree. His first and second game are based on deep themes and unique concepts. He explores the medium of video games in new ways. The selling point of this game seems to be "largest puzzle game ever". I'm excited to see if there are deeper ideas once I play it though. One of Blow's favorite games is Steven's Sausage Roll. I personally didn't enjoy it because the intellectual content of that kind of puzzle is, as far as I can tell, exploring a large tree of sausage roll states. And while I had a few aha moments playing it, as far as I can tell the way you do that at the end of the day is just to try all the possible states.
thenoblesunfish 10mo ago
People do the New York Times crossword every day for years..

smileson2 10mo ago

I'm really intersted in giving this game a shot since I'm a big fan of puzzle games personally I've never really meshed with a number of blows opinions but it is interesting to hear his reasoning and where he's comming from which is what opinions are for

viktorcode 10mo ago

I hope the game will be released with the language.

femiagbabiaka 10mo ago
IIRC he’s always said after, but I hope so too.
0x1ceb00da 10mo ago
The programming language will ship with a smaller version of sokoban as demo.

arghandugh 10mo ago

[flagged]

infinite_salt 10mo ago
So true, we should also ignore Picasso and Degas for saying things we find disagreeable
- stopping 10mo ago
  It's worth learning from people even if we deeply disagree with them, but we still have the choice to not offer them our patronage. I see nothing wrong with pointing out how prominent figures choose to exercise their influence. People should be informed about what their spending supports. I would go so far to argue that this is one of the only remaining effective ways for individuals to collectively shift the cultural needle.
- yAak 10mo ago
  That's not what arghandugh was saying at all. But I'm guessing you know that.
jovial_cavalier 10mo ago
Yep. That's exactly what I'm going to do.

s3graham 10mo ago

FWIW, Sean and Alan's contribution to puzzle designs: ref: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@nothings/115704420859870435 https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@nothings/115704420859870435 and: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@draknek/115704125102372454 https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@draknek/115704125102372454

jackling 10mo ago
Damn I thought STB and Jon were friends for a while. I find this indicative on how Jon has changed these past 5 years.
- spicyusername 10mo ago
  What do you mean by that?
  - jackling 10mo ago
    Sean has been on Jon's stream, and there's a good video where briefly Sean states that he have Jon some syntax advice for Jon's language Jai. I assumed they were friends as there are several videos of them conversing. The parent comment pointed out that Sean agree's with the negatives about Jon, which could not mean much, but the fact that Jon's negative as described in the Dreknek are really bad indicates to me that Sean likely doesn't view Jon as a good friend anymore. This is surprising to me because I really did enjoy one of their videos where they try and solve a problem together. The fact that Sean agrees with this critical take of Jon is further evidence of how much Jon has changed since the pandemic. STB Is the intial's for Sean T Barrett, who also created a software library with the same name.
    - hyperbolablabla 10mo ago
      Frankly STB is a bit of a lefty nutjob, those types are known for excommunicating good friends over minor political schisms... Talking from experience.

socalgal2 10mo ago

I hate this kind of headline. No, Jonathan Blow did not spend the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles. A team of developers made 1,400 puzzles and Blow directed them. This headline is like writing "Walt Disney hand drew 60,000 frames of Snow White". (correct me if I'm wrong)

spicyusername 10mo ago
Do you have a source for that? I always got the impression it's been mostly Blow and a partner working on Jai and this new game.
- socalgal2 10mo ago
  there's plenty of comments here referencing other designers on the project.

elcapitan 10mo ago

This is the most HN possible thread about Jonathan Blow, he would love this lol

CyberDildonics 10mo ago

He also spent some of that time yelling at viewers, talking about how much smarter than everyone he is and talking about his language that he'll never release.

nurettin 10mo ago
I didn't see him brag that much, but he says things like don't start with being a web dev, JavaScript kills your prospects of becoming a better programmer, etc. He probably thinks that formal education and books that teach people how a computer works and how to code in different paradigms don't exist, that everyone is a wannabe who only learns on hand at a job like he did. His job recommendation: "there are so many things you can do, go to SpaceX!". Better life advice would be to learn your fundamentals (computer architecture, fp, algos) and be knowledgeable about the direction the industry is going instead of finding some niche and pouting at everything else.
- CyberDildonics 10mo ago
  He mostly says it from the angle that everyone else is dumb instead of himself being smart.
  - spicyusername 10mo ago
    Every time I hear people talk this way I can't help but feel like they're projecting.

eudamoniac 10mo ago

My seemingly unpopular opinion based on this thread: The Witness is the greatest puzzle game of all time. My spouse agrees. You either get it or you don't.

nurettin 10mo ago
Let's dilute the thread. I did half the game and stopped playing. Not really got stuck, just got exhausted. It is a chore, I get what it is doing, the progression and addition of new mechanics while preserving the old ones yeah great whoopdi do. But there are games which are a lot more immersive and have an actual point and have better physics based puzzles and an actual story like portal and talos principle that don't make you feel like you are remotely debugging a crash on saturday night while everyone else is having fun. You either get that or not.
- eudamoniac 10mo ago
  Portal is trivial and Talos Principle is good but a bit contrived. I have never played a puzzle game that I considered a chore. The puzzles are the game. You don't need a story or a point in them. I also play chess and there is certainly no immersion or physics in that. The Witness also has the sublime revelation in it that makes it more memorable than most games. I don't even remember the god's name in TP, but I can envision clearly every Witness locale.
  - nurettin 10mo ago
    > You don't need a story or a point in them. Well, that was pretentious.
    - eudamoniac 10mo ago
      I guess crosswords, chess, sudoku, solitaire, and competitive programming need to add plots and narratives to their next editions, lest they be thought to have pretensions! (Of what?)

reactordev 10mo ago

Jonathan is on another level. I met him once long, long ago at a GDC thing and knew he’s a product of the matrix. He’s like a functioning rain main. What’s cool has been to watch him grow from this young adult who made a game about time to this beast he is today. Hats off my guy. Now finish your programming language!

spicyusername 10mo ago

It's interesting to me how Blow seems to ruffle so many feathers. I don't really get it. He's made two well received games, now a third one and an entire programming language, and anytime I tune in to his content he seems like a competent programmer with the kinds of opinions you'd expect from any kind of craftsman: sharp and borne out of their own personal experience. I never hear anything that strikes me as inflammatory. What's there to fuss about? If you disagree with one of those opinions, great! Maybe this is just what experiencing the world solely through the internet does to people. Makes them prickly and uncalibrated.

kilpikaarna 10mo ago
Apparently he's always had a pretty intense and acerbic personality. There's an article in The Atlantic from 2012 called The Most Dangerous Gamer that goes a bit into his character and history. As far as politics go, in the past he mostly seemed kind of small business owner libertarian (which, fair enough, he's sunk a lot of his personal wealth into running a game studio). He's seemingly been getting increasingly grouchy about the e.g. state of software development and society in general for some time, and over the past year or so he's started expressing explicit Trump support/appreciation. Possibly exacerbated by the development of this game and Jai dragging on, apparently getting burned by what he considers bad hires (bet he's not easy to work for tho...), and such. Though I would say it feels like it's mostly hot takes on streams or X, not necessarily very coherent politics. But the indie game scene and many of his former associates are very left wing, and with the political climate, esp. in the US, also being what it is he's quite the pariah in many places now.
psyopsy 10mo ago
He ruffles the very sensitive Internet dwellers who have all correct beliefs. Many years ago, during the peak growth of internet cancel culture, Jon made the mistake of saying an uncontroversial truth about occupational interests heavily correlating with gender. They took that and twisted it into “he thinks women are inferior.” Since then, they look for any reason to hate on him. It’s political tribe brain rot as usual. Check out The Witness subreddit. For a game those people claim to love, they seemed to have absorbed absolutely none of the narrative philosophy.

smeeger 10mo ago

do any of you remember gamasutra

insane_dreamer 10mo ago

Hadn't heard of The Witness before, but from what I can tell, these are something like enhanced Sokoban puzzles? Has there ever been anything on the level of Myst/Riven published in the last 20 years?

FelipeCortez 10mo ago
you should try The Witness

pengaru 10mo ago

What's the market size for such a sokoban puzzle game? I've watched a few of Blow's programming streams which usually spanned both Jai and sokoban development, this was years ago when the sokoban game was clearly an unpolished development mule for the language. It never seemed like a wise use of resources to try polish that turd of a game concept, certainly not for 9 years. Am I wrong?

user____name 10mo ago

The Billy Corgan of gaming.