Ten years after The Witness, Jonathan Blow’s next play is almost ready for prime time

Most of the big announcements at the Game Awards are completely new projects, some of which are completely surprising (if you have Mine A sequel to your bingo card last year, if you know or you may have used all your luck for the next few years). We often get updates on previously announced games. The trailer for The order of the setting star it’s a little different, because that’s a game The braid Composer Jonathan Blow was clearly working on the release This Witness in 2016.

The trailer revealed new details, including confirmation of the expected title and release window (2026 on Steam, with more platforms to be announced). Ahead of the game’s awards, the beat gave Engadget a preview of the game and explained some of its many customs.

Basically, The order of the setting star is a grid-based puzzle game where you will move blocks around to complete the objective. You might know this as a sokoban game, named after Hiroyuki Imabayashi’s series of boxes that force boxes around a warehouse.

But this is Jonathan Blow’s game, so nothing stays too easy for long. Blow and his team have taken the basic concept of pressing objects around and built on them in myriad ways, with many more locations, machines and characters to get to.

The order of the setting star It starts with you playing as a queen who was taken from another world and transported to a strange place. This turns out to be a lesson. Among other things, you will find the undo button, an active option that you can use to go back to your actions if you get stuck. It’s probably worth noting this button, since hitting it means it’s possible to undo thousands of trips with it. There is an option to reset the level.

The first stage of the game has four different areas with their own characters, stories and gameplay mechanics. One of these Realms has a fantasy theme and a hero character that can push multiple things in a row. His friend, the thief, can only steal things. The Wizard, meanwhile, can swap positions with items or other characters. Sometimes, you will use multiple level characters and switch between them to solve puzzles. There’s a talking boat somewhere, too.

You will do what you learn within the individual levels in the overworld to progress there. Alternatively, the Queen can wear a warrior, wizard or wizard or thief actifit to take her skills and solve puzzles in the northern section of this section.

Further east, there is a world with mirror-based puzzles. By placing the mirrors and where you are standing, you will use the mirror reflection to teleport to the right. If your character (or item) has two mirrors, they can be duplicated, which you may have to do several times if the level requires you to use multiple switches at once.

When you get close to the end of the two worlds of one world, you can enter one of the six gold rooms. In these rooms, which are the areas that go to the second stage of The order of the setting star, Some of your characters meet for the first time. For example, this guy from the islands of the Mirror and the wizard can come across a golden room and you can use their combined skills to solve puzzles. Given that late-game levels incorporate mechanics from early stages, they are inherently complex. The transition to 3D scanning will do things again.

You can tackle the four worlds that make up the first tier in any order. Together, they contain “days worth of gameplay,” Blow said. And yet he put in this first phase five percent of the whole game.

All told, there are nearly 1,400 puzzles, many of which can be chosen. If you are a perfectionist, you will have to dedicate yourself to seeing clearly to see this. The best estimate is that it will take a player 500 hours to complete everything in this game.

Overworld has over 100 screens that you can jump through for individual levels. “Every level is about ideas. It’s not just a random puzzle,” Blow said. “We don’t add puzzles to the game unless we show something cool about how things fit together. Then, when you see something cool, you go back to that screen using the cool mechanic you learned.”

“We” is the key word there, because it’s not like hitting has been doing it The order of the setting star himself for the past ten years. His studio, TheKla, has about 10 people working on the game full-time and another 10 or four part-time contractors. Contributors include puzzle game designers Alan Hazelden and Marc Ten Bosch. Some members of Blow’s Twitch community who “contribute some idea to one of the levels elsewhere” will also receive Design credits.

Blow and his team use custom game engines for their projects. Since 2013, he started by breathing his career in programming language The order of the setting star Written in (Thekla will eventually make the engine freely available as an open source project). “I used to work on this game, it was a good way to show people what the programming language was and so I just worked on streams where we lived and used something,” said Blow. Some of the design work he did in the stream ended up in the final game.

After a long time it has been working The order of the setting star, The end can be seen in the explosion with his team. The main focus for the last year or so has been making sure all the puzzles align with the overworld. Crafting hundreds of levels is a big deal, while beating still makes this story.

“Because there are so many levels and so many characters in the levels, it’s natural for them to talk to each other,” Blow said. “Now what is that conversation and what does it do? Is it just a little joke that doesn’t add up to anything? I think this is obviously better.

Blow had the basic idea of ​​having different worlds with a mechanic that worked on them in the first place, although the method worked in the long run over time. For example, a powerful idea is not set in stone from the beginning. There was an excess in the 2021 area, “but it wasn’t organized the way it was now. It was just a bunch of places slapped together,” Blow said. “At some point, I came up with the idea that it was organized in an almost traditional way or a mathematical way, or whatever way you want to think of it. And since then, it’s just kind of evolved.”

The order of the setting star it was originally supposed to be a very small game that took 10 or 20 hours to play, but “it just blew up,” Blow said. “Part of the development was just dealing with that reality. Like, Oh, my God, this game took a long time to make before it was done.”