The Looker is quite possibly the greatest parody ever executed in a video game. It creates the same kind of "ahah" moment that games like The Witness do, but in a way that really pokes fun at the level of pretentiousness those games tend to indulge themselves in.
It's the gaming version of Galaxy Quest: a parody that is not only great when it stands by itself, but is satirical in a way that shows they are genuinely big fans of the source material.
(Though perhaps unsurprisingly, Blow has only once mentioned The Looker, saying he hates how it devalues his art, and now refuses to talk about it ever.)
He was focused on creating a very particular feeling of epiphany as an artistic statement, and I think he succeeded at that. Is the game not especially fun? Is it perhaps overlong? Probably? But I can think of very few, if any, games that provided the very particular feeling that The Witness provided in those moments that I felt it -- the feeling of the world opening up with new possibilities and interpretations.
I thoroughly enjoyed The Witness, but it nearly collapsed under the weight of its own pretentiousness. Especially to your point, what counted as a "narrative".
I did not notice the environmental puzzles, even after the obvious one at the top of the mountain looking down. I didn't get that that wasn't a one off. Someone had to point them out. I've had other friends who also missed that. It's arguably the game's single biggest reveal / surprise. It was pretty amazing!
That said, only found maybe 20 of them and was not compelled to keep looking for all of the rest.
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
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.
I agree, a trailer should focus on emotional reaction, not a simple display of features or quirkiness (1400 puzzles,10 years of dev). Besides, the voices and writing are generic and maybe even AI generated. The witness had a really good promotion canpaign beautiful and intriguing.
> not a simple display of features or quirkiness (1400 puzzles, 10 years of dev)
I think a 'number of features' metric can work but only for players that already know and like your game, where an expansion with 'Five exciting new areas' is understood as something that they'd enjoy, and I agree it feels odd for a new IP.
Similarly, saying how many years it took isn't remotely a selling point for a new player. If you'd been following the development process then you probably wouldn't care, and if you hadn't you also probably wouldn't care.
It does seem awkward to have to design a trailer for a pure puzzle game, something that essentially relies on things going on inside a player's mind for fun, which by definition won't be visible.
Baba Is You did have something you can show potential players, but I'm not sure there's a trailer that could convey The Witness' 'Oh, I wonder if I can...' moment as it's a very internal experience that comes from playing enough to get to that point.
The Witness was, however, visually beautiful (IMO) and its symbol-based language let the trailer keep an element of mystery and intrigue. Order of the Sinking Star, while potentially also a fantastic puzzle game, seems to not be able to hide anything by nature of it being very clearly a Sokoban-like. Even if there are as-yet-unseen depths to how it treats the Sokoban format, the trailer needs something to work with, and while I think it also looks lovely it perhaps doesn't have the The Witness visual appeal or mystery to draw people in.
Blow falls into a classic engineering mistake of marketing the challenge or effort to make something (audio logs everywhere) and not the end experience.
Note that when masters like Steve Jobs do it, they mention it very quickly, or they mention the ideals of craftsmen ship, rather than the actual process.
When I saw the trailer in my YouTube feed I immediately thought it was an ad for those trash mobile games. Watching it didn’t really change my opinion either. I don’t actually want that to come across in a disparaging way - but it was just the vibes it gave off.
He mentioned in a recent interview the trailer ended up getting rushed due to complexities working with the companies who edited it and the conference timeline, and that he is also somewhat unhappy with it.
I'm getting "bring your adventure" vibe, similar to The Witness.
Take Thomas Was Alone for example - seemingly simple platform puzzle game with deep and engaging story where you're more interested about characters than new mechanics and puzzles.
In contrast The Witness could be scraped to core puzzles and released as an iPad game for $5.99, but the whimsical island and scattered pseudo intellectual voice clips make it so much more giving you opportunity to pause and think about life.
This seems very similar. A sokoban puzzle game with an entirely optional plot line that leaves a lot for interpretation by the player.
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.
interactions between the various mechanics in the games likely yield countless surprises, and let you build something considerably more elaborate than thesum of its parts..
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?
>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.
> The funding for underrepresented creators was a condition of my involvement in this project, so doesn't represent his values so much as mine. He was at least willing to do it though, which I'm not sure he would be today. (https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@draknek/115713018435458495)
Seems like this was all sorted out by early 2019 - and nearly 7 years have passed since! Plenty of time for a person to change from somebody you'd be happy to associate with to somebody you might not.
> Some people have mentioned they couldn't tell from this thread whether these games are used with permission. For clarity, yes, we agreed to this in mid 2016 and signed a contract in late 2018/early 2019. (https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@draknek/115707937686651789)
> 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.
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?
I've been watching Blow work on his compiler and game for many years. He has gone the deep end in his sympathies for Trump and Trump adjacents, but misogyny I've never witnessed from him.
I think he is the latest victim of the Notch-Rowling slide into rightism. It happens when a relatively benign conservatives have opinions that get the internet mob riled up, bullies them, cancels them and thus makes them dig deeper into their righitst believes and moving more and more into hating said mob, extending that hate to the people the mob pretends to represent, etc. It's a bit sad really. I hope he'll come out of it some day, but in my experience he doesn't have the humility of accepting when he's wrong.
> What's going on on these platforms? Is there any serious evidence to the strong claims?
The second paragraph in the submitted article has a link to the women claim. I hadn’t seen it before. I have also never personally seen any overt fascist sympathising but then again I don’t follow Blow closely. From what I’ve seen from him, though, doesn’t seem hard to believe. He has very strong opinions on a lot of things he knows little about (and belittles those who disagree with his uninformed opinion), is enamoured with Elon Musk, and is always going on (dismissively, divisively, and dehumanisingly) about “The Left”.
He also has very poor and obvious fallacious arguments filled with bad faith assumptions. He believes in God and (if I recall correctly) his justification was (paraphrasing) “a lot of smart people are not atheists” (weasel words, appeal to authority) then went on to rant about “Reddit atheism” (ad hominem) or whatever. That was on his own stream, by the way, so no chance it was taken out of context when I saw it.
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.
Blow and Muratori gained a following of engineers by bashing existing popular languages and engines, claiming they were all garbage.
They both started this after the Witness came out, 10 years ago.
Since then, guess how many games Muratori has shipped? 0. (He cancelled his announced game.)
Guess how many Blow has shipped? 0 so far, but it sounds close now.
These engineers spent their time ragging on other developers for slinging bad code and doing things horribly, meanwhile those developers were shipping games and apps and all sorts of other stuff.
That's kind of a rediculous assessment. "How many games have you shipped in the last 10 years" is the standard for how good your advice is.
John has made two games + one soon in the last 17 years. Braid started off the indie boom, and the witness was a blockbuster hit. Casey works on game engines and optimization, and has an entire video series about writing a game from scratch.
I agree that some authors don't ship any actual software and engineers should stray away from their advice, but this is not that case.
I give Blow a little benefit of the doubt just because spending all of your money on your small business and seriously facing the risk of failure is pretty stressful. I'd be a lot meaner than he is if I were in his situation.
I think I'll judge that by looking at how convincing their arguments are (some are not, I think), not by raw output. After all they already output a lot.
> Since then, guess how many games Muratori has shipped? 0. (He cancelled his announced game.)
On one hand I'm sympathetic to this view point, on the other, he's done thousands of hours of YouTube videos and inspired a ton of programmers.
> Guess how many Blow has shipped? 0 so far, but it sounds close now.
Not going to lie, it's probably difficult being financially secure and still hustling like you're broke. I imagine it's more by choice (to do other things) than being unable to ship.
Why are they being criticized from the arbitrary metric of the last 10 years, when both had careers far longer than that? Jon's advice for software is the same advice he used when developing Braid and the Witness, which are both great games and for their time, technological feats, especially from an indie.
Jon's production from the last 10 year isn't even due to bad software methodology from what I observe, it's mainly seems to be because his company is creating a new programming language tailored to games. This doesn't seem to be done to make money, but rather, to try and fundamentally fixed issues that he perceives in game development. It's a lofty goal, and the compiler itself uses the same software methodolgy that he argues for, and it's quite good.
So I don't think this critism is fair. We should look at the arguments they present, and their multi-decade long careers as a measure of thir authority on this subject.
I don't much about casey, but jblow seems to have gotten popular partly because of the timing with live streaming becoming mainstream and also because people find his brash "tell-it-like-it-is" opinions refreshing. It's the same reason why people tend to gravitate towards guys like linus or stallman. Having opinions and not being a fence-sitter makes you interesting.
If there's anyone who I think deserves to be able to say "all existing languages/engines suck" it's someone who made his own language from scratch to make an engine with it from scratch to make a game with it from scratch to combat the problem.
Jon can be really interesting to listen to, especially when he's talking about Jai. But he can also be such a fucking tool that I can never listen for long.
I've known plenty of people like him. Clearly smart, but have spent too much of their life being defined by it. And worse, not being told often enough when they're wrong.
Political? The most political I've seen him get was when he spoke out against the idea of accepting technical compromises for the sake of not hurting people's feelings and being PC.
As in, you get to be cranky as long as you're arguing for the highest quality solution
I just wonder how readily people would defend this viewpoint if they belonged to any of those groups whose "feelings" are typically being "hurt".
I don't know about you, but there does not exist any amount of technical achievement that will make me brush off sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, or anything else. If you are going to be disrespectful to me or people I care about, we cannot work together, period.
By "political correctness" people often mean "the basic requirement to treat your fellow humans respectfully", and that's an incredibly low bar.
He gets political.. Just as an example, he claimed that it was obvious that COVID was a lab leak in 2021. This is not obvious at all if you read Michael Worobey's rigorous work instead of rely on Blow's arrogant intuitions.
I will still play Jonathan Blow's next game, but I think he is a bit of a hack outside of game design.
I don’t know any of the context but how could hurting people’s feelings ever be relevant in the context of technical implementation of the game if that’s what we’re taking about?
He's a Trump fan. Is he stupid enough to believe Trump's illogical promises, or does he see through them and is OK with all the unconstitutional and immoral crap he's done? Either way he's political.
If you haven't seen much of his posts or opinions in the past five years maybe, but he's gone pretty far off the deep end recently (see: calling all men under the age of 40 supercucks). He's always been sort of a holier-than-thou asshole and that's driven him to increasingly dumb arguments.
Jonathan Blow is one of my personal heroes, but he does seem to be living 5 years behind politically (he spends a lot of time ranting at the woke crowd, who seem nowhere to be found anymore anyways). That's probably a good thing. I doubt he's as addicted to the internet as the rest of us. He's said some odd things in interviews in the last couple years though.
I wanted to substantiate this, but I couldn't find the clips (which do exist... I just want to get on with programming and close hn for the day.. not succeeding). I did find that Jonathan Blow tweeted "Nature is healing" after Trump won, so you can get an idea for where his politics are from that. (Still love the guy, even if politically he's your angry uncle.)
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.
Right, if you look at say, Blue Prince, one of the most important "out of nowhere" type video game releases of 2025, the actual software engineering is trash. I'd fail code reviews for a lot of what was done, and there are cracks in the façade where a player will hurt themselves as a result - e.g. there's a bug where animations overwrite so you get short changed on the resources you were gathering when you go "too fast". Some of the intended features, especially in the 1.0 release, just don't work for reasons like somebody typo'd a variable name, or they forgot how a function worked.
But the game is amazing and that's what matters. Nobody wants to play six hours of carefully engineering tasteless crap, let alone (as many did with Blue Prince) six weeks. The 1.0 Blue Prince game was already excellent, unless you run into a nasty save corruption bug on PlayStation, whereas a game made Jon's way might be a soulless waste of your life even though perhaps the engineering is "better" in some sense.
>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.
This "not caring", from both coder and end user, is why the end user constantly gets buggy, slow, and resource hungry software, be it games, or other kinds.
> 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.
Both Blow and Muratori would likely advocate for the this type of code to some degree.
> What features in Jai make it superior to C++ for writing games specifically?
Some examples that come to mind from my personal experience.
- Compile times. 1-2 seconds vs the typical build times in a C++/Rust game can be a game changer
- Massive compile time capabilities.. you can have an entire content pipeline executed at compile time, all written in Jai
- Builtin Type reflection.. another gamechanger in games for editors and such
- Very easy to debug, the minimalistic approach means the code is not heavily transformed by the compiler thus really easy for a debugger to follow and still performant. Example: loading the same gltf file in my engines in Rust and C++ debug mode is MUCH slower than debug mode in Jai.. again, game changer.. you hit build/run and you're back in the game in few seconds.
- Very easy to learn
- Very ergonomic in its minimalism
- A lot of small things you instantly miss when jumping to other language.. one thing on the top of my head.. the ability to have struct members "overlay" other specific locations.. so you could have a Matrix4 struct with Vector members "forward" "right" "up" etc
- The builtin "context" based "temp allocator".. perfect for games, anything that is needed for a frame goes in there with close to zero allocation time and it gets reset every frame at zero cost
Jai has a HUGE potential if it can survive Mr. Blow's ego.. which is a big big ask.
> What features in Jai make it superior to C++ for writing games specifically?
I know that Jonathan Blow can be abrasive and one-sided in his talks on programming, but I think we should be open-minded about Jai. Yes, he is making this language because he doesn't like C++, but you make it sound like he is hating on C++ just for the sake of it.
I mean, is it really so hard to imagine that someone might not like something about C++? There are plenty of people who think we could have a better systems language, which is why we have seen languages like Rust, Zig, and Odin pop up.
In Blow's case, he has said that he doesn't like Rust because he feels that satisfying the borrow-checker slows down iteration time[1], which is important especially in the early stages of game development when you are still experimenting with mechanics are where requirements and architecture are still very much subject to change.
As far as what Jai offers, it seems his focus is on making a simple but powerful language (contrary to C++'s ever-growing bag-of-tricks), with fast compile times (less than 3 seconds on a full build of his new game), better build and dependency management (no more cmake), and powerful meta-programming features.
In a talk on the language[2], he demos how he is able to use the language's meta-programming features to develop powerful code-analyzing and memory-analyzing tools.
These tools, in particular, hint at his philosophy: lots of ideas in programming like RAII, garbage collectors, and borrow-checking exist to save the programmer from themselves. He's not interested in this and believes that these features come with hidden costs. Instead of accepting those costs, he would rather have a language that gives him the tools to save himself.
Personally, I don't understand the hate. If Jai is a good language, then it will benefit all of us. If it's not, then his making it still hurts none of us.
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.
Jai is designed for games, it aims to do a few things that can help game developers, as well as developers in general.
- Lower compilation times for debug builds.
- Better debug messages.
- A standard library that comes with a production ready graphics API, so gamedevs don't need to worry about the current state of graphics API and can just dig in.
- Standard input API for cross OS development.
- AOS to SOA automatic conversion to simplify code that needs to be performant, while retaining a clean syntax.
- A context system, which should help with simplifying functions definitions while keeping things strongly typed.
- The ability to rewrite ASTs, to do compile time programming. Ideally simplifying code, while keeping runtime speed performant, and keeping compilation speed fast.
This is just to name a few off the top of my head. The performance and API stuff is directly going to help game devs. I view it similar to Odin, something that is in production software right now, where you can have a clean langugae, with a strong standard library and primitives to help you develop quickly.
A syntax to mark structs to be stored as SOA in arrays is the only one I see that doesn't have a modern C++ analogue (besides things like no header files).
Const expressions, defer (but not sure its significantly different than using destructors), some smart pointer stuff...
I assume you need to compare it to C++ from more than a decade 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.
Except, this complexity isn't saving time and resources. This complexity admiration culture has resulted in slower code thats harder to understand, debug and maintain too. What should be used only for small amount of time is used from get go like complex architecture and deep abstraction. Fetishizing simplicity is bad too for sure but a blip on a radar and not such a trend and far less of an issue compared to fetishizing complexity thats rampant.
Not a game dev or even a gamer, I'm defending attack on simplicity not blow or muratori.
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?
Completable in a timely fashion is not a design goal of this game. Currently being playtested by professional puzzle game designers and they are over 200 hours in without completing it.
It's not trying to be Portal. It's a Sokoban game. If you like playing Sokoban games, here's a package of ~1400 hand-crafted puzzles, probably with a handful of interesting gimmicks/rule alterations to spice things up.
> At one puzzle a minute, that's 24 hours of gameplay.
Unfortunately we're not all as smart as you but in TFA he estimates it'll take 400-500 hours to complete all of them.
Hah! Didn't mean to imply I'm some sort of puzzle-solving genius, point was precisely the opposite — that solving those puzzles at a breakneck pace would still be a crazy amount of time.
I am equal parts daunted and excited about the size of it. On one hand, of course it's a lot of time (he's said it might the average person 500 hours to complete), and I'm liable to binge. On the other, I imagine there will be some incredible depth to it, and maybe a "little and often" strategy might not be too bad (if possible). Despite adoring The Witness and Braid, I'm still not sure if I'll get this one. Would my life be richer from finishing this or a few hundred films? My money is on the latter.
Btw Patrick's Parabox in full is 364 puzzles (I know this off hand because I left it at 363 for a few months before coming back to finish the last one, and it's one off 365).
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]].
> 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?
I'm saying that, if you removed the Parlour, the Billiards Room, all the Mora Jai boxes, and all the other puzzles that aren't directly related to finding room 46 (including everything after the "tutorial"), you'd have a lesser but still memorable game. Inversely, if you took just the boxes, and the parlour puzzles, and the darts puzzles, you'd have a fun but unremarkable little time waster. I really enjoy spending hours on some the more insane sudoku puzzles featured on Cracking the Cryptic (even if I often end up abandoning many of the harder ones), but have zero patience for supermarket sudoku books.
"1400 puzzles" rubs me the wrong way, like soulless open world games that brag about having hundreds of hours of content. A large part of what makes a truly exceptional game isn't volume of content, it's editing and curation.
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.
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
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.
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?
Readit News
I quite enjoyed The Witness but The Looker was just great.
[1]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1985690/The_Looker/
(Though perhaps unsurprisingly, Blow has only once mentioned The Looker, saying he hates how it devalues his art, and now refuses to talk about it ever.)
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.
"All other titles" would be just Braid, no?
If that was your expectation going in I can definitely understand you feeling underwhelmed.
That said, you may still enjoy The Looker...
All the more reason to try the Looker!
* spoiler *
I did not notice the environmental puzzles, even after the obvious one at the top of the mountain looking down. I didn't get that that wasn't a one off. Someone had to point them out. I've had other friends who also missed that. It's arguably the game's single biggest reveal / surprise. It was pretty amazing!
That said, only found maybe 20 of them and was not compelled to keep looking for all of the rest.
I loathed Myst, so had avoided The Witness for the same reason you played it; I'll maybe give it a try now.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amR6LmU6bzg
I think a 'number of features' metric can work but only for players that already know and like your game, where an expansion with 'Five exciting new areas' is understood as something that they'd enjoy, and I agree it feels odd for a new IP.
Similarly, saying how many years it took isn't remotely a selling point for a new player. If you'd been following the development process then you probably wouldn't care, and if you hadn't you also probably wouldn't care.
It does seem awkward to have to design a trailer for a pure puzzle game, something that essentially relies on things going on inside a player's mind for fun, which by definition won't be visible.
Baba Is You did have something you can show potential players, but I'm not sure there's a trailer that could convey The Witness' 'Oh, I wonder if I can...' moment as it's a very internal experience that comes from playing enough to get to that point.
The Witness was, however, visually beautiful (IMO) and its symbol-based language let the trailer keep an element of mystery and intrigue. Order of the Sinking Star, while potentially also a fantastic puzzle game, seems to not be able to hide anything by nature of it being very clearly a Sokoban-like. Even if there are as-yet-unseen depths to how it treats the Sokoban format, the trailer needs something to work with, and while I think it also looks lovely it perhaps doesn't have the The Witness visual appeal or mystery to draw people in.
Note that when masters like Steve Jobs do it, they mention it very quickly, or they mention the ideals of craftsmen ship, rather than the actual process.
I'm getting "bring your adventure" vibe, similar to The Witness.
Take Thomas Was Alone for example - seemingly simple platform puzzle game with deep and engaging story where you're more interested about characters than new mechanics and puzzles.
In contrast The Witness could be scraped to core puzzles and released as an iPad game for $5.99, but the whimsical island and scattered pseudo intellectual voice clips make it so much more giving you opportunity to pause and think about life.
This seems very similar. A sokoban puzzle game with an entirely optional plot line that leaves a lot for interpretation by the player.
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[1] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/12/jonathan-blow-has-spe...
[2] https://bsky.app/profile/draknek.bsky.social/post/3m7qybidq7...
Seems like the puzzles are novel, but the mechanics are not?
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.
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-...
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.
> The funding for underrepresented creators was a condition of my involvement in this project, so doesn't represent his values so much as mine. He was at least willing to do it though, which I'm not sure he would be today. (https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@draknek/115713018435458495)
> ...his company was the public face of that grant, my involvement in it isn't common knowledge. (https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@draknek/115713113473398888)
Seems like this was all sorted out by early 2019 - and nearly 7 years have passed since! Plenty of time for a person to change from somebody you'd be happy to associate with to somebody you might not.
> Some people have mentioned they couldn't tell from this thread whether these games are used with permission. For clarity, yes, we agreed to this in mid 2016 and signed a contract in late 2018/early 2019. (https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@draknek/115707937686651789)
> 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.
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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?
[1]: https://www.redditmedia.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1jh275...
I think he is the latest victim of the Notch-Rowling slide into rightism. It happens when a relatively benign conservatives have opinions that get the internet mob riled up, bullies them, cancels them and thus makes them dig deeper into their righitst believes and moving more and more into hating said mob, extending that hate to the people the mob pretends to represent, etc. It's a bit sad really. I hope he'll come out of it some day, but in my experience he doesn't have the humility of accepting when he's wrong.
The second paragraph in the submitted article has a link to the women claim. I hadn’t seen it before. I have also never personally seen any overt fascist sympathising but then again I don’t follow Blow closely. From what I’ve seen from him, though, doesn’t seem hard to believe. He has very strong opinions on a lot of things he knows little about (and belittles those who disagree with his uninformed opinion), is enamoured with Elon Musk, and is always going on (dismissively, divisively, and dehumanisingly) about “The Left”.
He also has very poor and obvious fallacious arguments filled with bad faith assumptions. He believes in God and (if I recall correctly) his justification was (paraphrasing) “a lot of smart people are not atheists” (weasel words, appeal to authority) then went on to rant about “Reddit atheism” (ad hominem) or whatever. That was on his own stream, by the way, so no chance it was taken out of context when I saw it.
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They both started this after the Witness came out, 10 years ago.
Since then, guess how many games Muratori has shipped? 0. (He cancelled his announced game.)
Guess how many Blow has shipped? 0 so far, but it sounds close now.
These engineers spent their time ragging on other developers for slinging bad code and doing things horribly, meanwhile those developers were shipping games and apps and all sorts of other stuff.
John has made two games + one soon in the last 17 years. Braid started off the indie boom, and the witness was a blockbuster hit. Casey works on game engines and optimization, and has an entire video series about writing a game from scratch.
I agree that some authors don't ship any actual software and engineers should stray away from their advice, but this is not that case.
On one hand I'm sympathetic to this view point, on the other, he's done thousands of hours of YouTube videos and inspired a ton of programmers.
> Guess how many Blow has shipped? 0 so far, but it sounds close now.
Not going to lie, it's probably difficult being financially secure and still hustling like you're broke. I imagine it's more by choice (to do other things) than being unable to ship.
Jon's production from the last 10 year isn't even due to bad software methodology from what I observe, it's mainly seems to be because his company is creating a new programming language tailored to games. This doesn't seem to be done to make money, but rather, to try and fundamentally fixed issues that he perceives in game development. It's a lofty goal, and the compiler itself uses the same software methodolgy that he argues for, and it's quite good.
So I don't think this critism is fair. We should look at the arguments they present, and their multi-decade long careers as a measure of thir authority on this subject.
Pure engineers deliver perfect and fast software somewhere along the Black Hole Era. Not quite heat death of the universe, but almost there.
Impure engineers deliver "working" code in a deadline, for an arbitrary definition of working. Basically, The Worse is Better™.
One, but it was something like three years late:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/499180/Braid_Anniversary_...
its not a claim if you prove it. Tt becomes a fact.
Blow proved his point by making a full blown programming language where he fixed things he complained about like compilation speed etc.
And then made a whole game in his own language.
I've known plenty of people like him. Clearly smart, but have spent too much of their life being defined by it. And worse, not being told often enough when they're wrong.
As in, you get to be cranky as long as you're arguing for the highest quality solution
But what is neutral to someone is not inherently neutral to others. Or even if it’s neutral to them, it’s still a form of political expression.
I don't know about you, but there does not exist any amount of technical achievement that will make me brush off sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, or anything else. If you are going to be disrespectful to me or people I care about, we cannot work together, period.
By "political correctness" people often mean "the basic requirement to treat your fellow humans respectfully", and that's an incredibly low bar.
I will still play Jonathan Blow's next game, but I think he is a bit of a hack outside of game design.
I wanted to substantiate this, but I couldn't find the clips (which do exist... I just want to get on with programming and close hn for the day.. not succeeding). I did find that Jonathan Blow tweeted "Nature is healing" after Trump won, so you can get an idea for where his politics are from that. (Still love the guy, even if politically he's your angry uncle.)
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Compared to the mainstream AAA game cost it's less than minimal, it's pocket change.
And it's not like somebody handed him that money, he made it creating and selling games earlier.
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.
But the game is amazing and that's what matters. Nobody wants to play six hours of carefully engineering tasteless crap, let alone (as many did with Blue Prince) six weeks. The 1.0 Blue Prince game was already excellent, unless you run into a nasty save corruption bug on PlayStation, whereas a game made Jon's way might be a soulless waste of your life even though perhaps the engineering is "better" in some sense.
This "not caring", from both coder and end user, is why the end user constantly gets buggy, slow, and resource hungry software, be it games, or other kinds.
Both Blow and Muratori would likely advocate for the this type of code to some degree.
Typescript exist because people want a type-checked language.
You have a very incorrect view of both of them if you think this is the kind of thing they are arguing against.
Some examples that come to mind from my personal experience.
- Compile times. 1-2 seconds vs the typical build times in a C++/Rust game can be a game changer
- Massive compile time capabilities.. you can have an entire content pipeline executed at compile time, all written in Jai
- Builtin Type reflection.. another gamechanger in games for editors and such
- Very easy to debug, the minimalistic approach means the code is not heavily transformed by the compiler thus really easy for a debugger to follow and still performant. Example: loading the same gltf file in my engines in Rust and C++ debug mode is MUCH slower than debug mode in Jai.. again, game changer.. you hit build/run and you're back in the game in few seconds.
- Very easy to learn
- Very ergonomic in its minimalism
- A lot of small things you instantly miss when jumping to other language.. one thing on the top of my head.. the ability to have struct members "overlay" other specific locations.. so you could have a Matrix4 struct with Vector members "forward" "right" "up" etc
- The builtin "context" based "temp allocator".. perfect for games, anything that is needed for a frame goes in there with close to zero allocation time and it gets reset every frame at zero cost
Jai has a HUGE potential if it can survive Mr. Blow's ego.. which is a big big ask.
I know that Jonathan Blow can be abrasive and one-sided in his talks on programming, but I think we should be open-minded about Jai. Yes, he is making this language because he doesn't like C++, but you make it sound like he is hating on C++ just for the sake of it.
I mean, is it really so hard to imagine that someone might not like something about C++? There are plenty of people who think we could have a better systems language, which is why we have seen languages like Rust, Zig, and Odin pop up.
In Blow's case, he has said that he doesn't like Rust because he feels that satisfying the borrow-checker slows down iteration time[1], which is important especially in the early stages of game development when you are still experimenting with mechanics are where requirements and architecture are still very much subject to change.
As far as what Jai offers, it seems his focus is on making a simple but powerful language (contrary to C++'s ever-growing bag-of-tricks), with fast compile times (less than 3 seconds on a full build of his new game), better build and dependency management (no more cmake), and powerful meta-programming features.
In a talk on the language[2], he demos how he is able to use the language's meta-programming features to develop powerful code-analyzing and memory-analyzing tools.
These tools, in particular, hint at his philosophy: lots of ideas in programming like RAII, garbage collectors, and borrow-checking exist to save the programmer from themselves. He's not interested in this and believes that these features come with hidden costs. Instead of accepting those costs, he would rather have a language that gives him the tools to save himself.
Personally, I don't understand the hate. If Jai is a good language, then it will benefit all of us. If it's not, then his making it still hurts none of us.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4t1K66dMhWk [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdpD5QIVOKQ
- Lower compilation times for debug builds. - Better debug messages. - A standard library that comes with a production ready graphics API, so gamedevs don't need to worry about the current state of graphics API and can just dig in. - Standard input API for cross OS development. - AOS to SOA automatic conversion to simplify code that needs to be performant, while retaining a clean syntax. - A context system, which should help with simplifying functions definitions while keeping things strongly typed. - The ability to rewrite ASTs, to do compile time programming. Ideally simplifying code, while keeping runtime speed performant, and keeping compilation speed fast.
This is just to name a few off the top of my head. The performance and API stuff is directly going to help game devs. I view it similar to Odin, something that is in production software right now, where you can have a clean langugae, with a strong standard library and primitives to help you develop quickly.
You can write games in C or Fortran, so why write games in C++? You can write things in C++, why make Rust? Basic worked, why make Python or Ruby?
Why does it need "features" that make it "superior"? It should be good enough that he didn't want to use C++, so he made a new thing...
A syntax to mark structs to be stored as SOA in arrays is the only one I see that doesn't have a modern C++ analogue (besides things like no header files).
Const expressions, defer (but not sure its significantly different than using destructors), some smart pointer stuff...
I assume you need to compare it to C++ from more than a decade ago.
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?
> At one puzzle a minute, that's 24 hours of gameplay.
Unfortunately we're not all as smart as you but in TFA he estimates it'll take 400-500 hours to complete all of them.
Btw Patrick's Parabox in full is 364 puzzles (I know this off hand because I left it at 363 for a few months before coming back to finish the last one, and it's one off 365).
[[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]].
I'm saying that, if you removed the Parlour, the Billiards Room, all the Mora Jai boxes, and all the other puzzles that aren't directly related to finding room 46 (including everything after the "tutorial"), you'd have a lesser but still memorable game. Inversely, if you took just the boxes, and the parlour puzzles, and the darts puzzles, you'd have a fun but unremarkable little time waster. I really enjoy spending hours on some the more insane sudoku puzzles featured on Cracking the Cryptic (even if I often end up abandoning many of the harder ones), but have zero patience for supermarket sudoku books.
"1400 puzzles" rubs me the wrong way, like soulless open world games that brag about having hundreds of hours of content. A large part of what makes a truly exceptional game isn't volume of content, it's editing and curation.
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.
> now encompasses around 1,400 individual puzzles that could take completionists 400 to 500 hours to fully conquer
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHFvEtIbf5E
[1] https://jacklance.github.io/PuzzleScript/play.html?p=cfdcc6e...
I see many individual games (or even just standalone puzzles, even just puns!) of his and I'm genuinely envious of how clever they are.
It hurts to think about what he could have created if he was still around.