For ten years Jonathan Blow has been working with a small team on what he believes is “the biggest puzzle game ever made”.
The American developer is renowned as one of the fathers of the modern indie game movement, having created the genre-defining puzzle-platformer Braid in 2008.
A decade on from his last project, The Witness, The Order of the Sinking Star was released on Thursday: a game with roughly 1,500 puzzles that he estimates could take around 500 hours to complete.
The game, released on PC, Nintendo Switch 2 and PlayStation 5, likens itself in its own blurb to a “game design supercollider”.
The player travels through four worlds, viewed from overhead, which are built on the mechanics of four pre-existing free puzzle games by other designers, used with their permission. Those ideas are then “smashed together” to create hundreds of brand-new brainteasers.
One world's mechanics, based on those of the free 2014 game Mirror Isles by Alan Hazelden, see players use mirror reflections to swap places across islands. Combined with the system of another free Hazelden game, Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes, in which players throw stones into water to create paths, new puzzle opportunities arise.
Blow is open about the commercial logic. “Some people decide what to make based on what's practical or what makes business sense,” he says. “It's never been the way that I think.” He adds: “I sort of make bad business decisions in a sense...because I let the design dominate that process. But then because we did that, we always have something unique.”
He also built his own programming language, Jai, from scratch, and used it with a custom engine rather than a pre-built one such as Unity or Unreal. That let him make something “tuned and authored very specifically” to what he wanted, and is one reason the project took ten years.
“I do want the next project after this to be less on hard mode, or really it was nightmare mode, because we did so many things on hard mode at the same time,” he says. “But it's also been rewarding in a certain way. Because otherwise, what else are you in the industry for?”
The claim to be the biggest puzzle game ever made is a claim about volume, and volume invites measurement.
Five hundred hours is twelve and a half working weeks. A player who approaches The Order of the Sinking Star at the pace of a full-time job, weekends off, and starts on Monday will finish it in the first week of January.
The development ratio is where the real achievement lies. Ten years of work yields 500 hours of play, a return of roughly fifty hours of game per year of labour, or about one puzzle every two and a half days of the decade. By the standards of the industry this is an unhurried rate of manufacture. By the standards of the player it is 1,500 obligations.
This newspaper is drawn to the unattempted remainder. The majority of players may never get even halfway through, on the BBC's account, which means most of the 1,500 puzzles will be solved by nobody at all. A puzzle that is never attempted is never failed, and the game therefore holds the finest completion record in the medium.
The Department of Unnecessary Research has converted the figures into their natural units. Fifteen hundred puzzles across four worlds built on four borrowed systems gives 375 puzzles per world and 375 puzzles per borrowed idea, a rate of return on other people's work that the industry has not previously attempted.
Blow spent a decade building something he describes as having been made on nightmare mode. That setting was never offered to the player.