From Legendary, Award-Winning Game Designer, Jonathan Blow (The Witness, Braid) Comes the Largest and Greatest Puzzle Game Ever, Ten Years in the Making
Arc Games, a leading publisher of premium and live service games, and Thekla, Inc. are excited to announce Order of the Sinking Star, a massive narrative puzzle adventure featuring more than one thousand hand-crafted puzzles, an unlikely cast of heroes, and hundreds of hours of gameplay designed to put your intellect to the test. In development from Thekla, Inc., led by legendary, award-winning game designer Jonathan Blow behind critically acclaimed puzzle games, The Witness and Braid, Order of the Sinking Star is a huge and innovative puzzle game that’s been in the making for 10 years since the release of The Witness. Millions of gamers got an exclusive first look at this innovative puzzle adventure at The Game Awards, when the team revealed a brand-new announcement trailer. Order of the Sinking Star will launch on PC in 2026. Additional platforms and the release timing for the game will be revealed at a later date.
“Order of the Sinking Star is the biggest game I’ve worked on, and also the most collaborative,” said Jonathan Blow, Founder of Thekla, Inc. and Award-Winning Game Designer behind Braid and The Witness. “It’s a kind of game design supercollider that brings together ideas from many designers to create a puzzle landscape that’s much more intricate and vast than what has come before. We’ve successfully pushed the limits of what is possible in a puzzle adventure. The game is just incredibly complex and deep, and I can’t wait to show more as we move toward launch in 2026. The game showcases design contributions from Alan Hazelden (A Monster’s Expedition), Sean Barrett (Promesst), Jonah Ostroff (Heroes of Sokoban), Zach Polansky (Enigmash), Patrick Traynor (Patrick’s Parabox), Marc ten Bosch (Miegakure), and several others.”
“Announcing Order of the Sinking Star is a major moment for us, for Jonathan and his team – it represents an exciting year ahead for all of us,” said Yoon Im, CEO of Arc Games. “It’s an honor to support Jonathan to make his most ambitious project yet a reality, as we believe Order of the Sinking Star is set to be the premier and innovative puzzle adventure of this generation. This announcement today marks just the beginning of what we have planned for a game-changing year for us next year.”
About Order of the Sinking Star
From legendary director Jonathan Blow (Braid, The Witness) comes Order of the Sinking Star, a massive narrative adventure featuring more than one thousand hand-crafted puzzles designed to put your intellect to the test. You are transported to a realm of curious magic, dangerous contraptions, and vicious monsters. You’ll explore four distinct worlds, each with its own mechanics, characters, and stories, and then watch as they all collide. As the worlds merge, and characters meet one another, puzzle systems intertwine, creating surprising new possibilities. Explore at your own pace, revisit worlds and return to challenges as you see fit. Discover unique playable characters, master evolving gameplay mechanics, and decipher the deep mysteries of a sprawling, interconnected game world. Blending exploration, storytelling, and ever-progressing mechanics, Order of the Sinking Star invites you into a mysterious, living puzzle unlike anything you’ve played.
Game Features:
- Master a Thousand Interwoven Challenges – Embark on an innovative puzzle adventure with dozens of game mechanics and hundreds of hours of unique gameplay. Each puzzle builds on the last, introducing new game mechanics that reward curiosity and persistence.
- Choose Your Path, Roam at Your Pace – Explore four expansive, mysterious game worlds, each with its own characters, rules, dangers, and secrets waiting to be uncovered. Come and go as you like, you are free to take on the puzzles you discover at your own pace.
- Take the Helm of Some Unlikely Heroes – A queen, a thief, a warrior, a wizard, and a talking boat are just some of the heroes of this tale. Each character wields complimentary abilities and has captivating stories to tell.
- Decipher an Epic Tale – As playable characters begin to meet and worlds collide, the mystery untangles. Through gameplay and notes you collect you learn more about this enigmatic realm. Piece by piece and clue by clue, you’ll uncover the secrets of the Order of the Sinking Star.
To learn more about the game, please visit orderofthesinkingstar.com and follow Order of the Sinking Star on Discord, X/Twitter, Facebook, Twitch, and YouTube.
History of Order of the Sinking Star (from Jonathan Blow)
Order of the Sinking Star has been in the making for almost 10 years since the release of The Witness in 2016. The game was conceived as an experiment to build a game design supercollider: usually, when games are designed, they start from a core idea, then the designer adds objects, mechanics, and actions until the interactivity is rich enough for the game to be fun; then, they tune that and ship it. As a result, most games hover around a certain level of complexity. Our goal was to blast through that ceiling of complexity by combining the mechanics of four different games, each of which was already tuned to be fun and interesting. By colliding these games together, we generate a combinatoric explosion as all the objects and mechanics from the different universes interact.
We first looked at these four games that could be considered as starting points for Order of the Sinking Star’s unique worlds: Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes and Mirror Isles by Alan Hazelden, Promesst 1-3 by Sean Barrett, and Heroes of Sokoban by Jonah Ostroff. These games were chosen carefully for their combinatoric potential. We formed partnerships with the talented developers of these games and looked for ways to enhance their gameplay elements. Together, these games comprise and inspire about the first five percent of Order of the Sinking Star‘s gameplay. The other 95 percent explores the seemingly never-ending consequences of smashing these four game-mechanical worlds together.
For Order of the Sinking Star, we also built a new game engine from the ground up. This new engine is programmed in our own newly-created programming language, designed to be a replacement for C++. This has all been a huge technical project and we’re glad it will soon reach the public in the form of this game. Not too long after the game releases, we will give out the engine for free as an open-source project. We’re looking forward to sharing more about the engine and language in game development-focused panels and interview opportunities.
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