Is today's puzzle game scene interesting? 'No, I don't think it is,' says Jonathan Blow, even though there are 'really good games in the past' devs could look to for inspiration
Jonathan Blow—that fellow who made Braid and The Witness—revealed his new game at last year's Game Awards. Order of the Sinking Star, in the making for nine years, is pitched as a "game design supercollider" that mashes together four separate puzzle games into an enormous puzzle chimaera, throbbing with 500 hours of hot solving content.
Blow sat down with me to chat about the game before its reveal and, what with him being so inextricably associated with puzzle games as a genre, I asked what he thought of the state of the genre in the modern era. Does he think it's in a good place? Does it seem particularly interesting or innovative to him as a space?
"No, I don't think it is," said Blow. "And I'm not sure why, because I do feel like there are quite a few really good games in the past that people could look at, if they're sitting down and making a puzzle game… there's enough games that have done really interesting things that you should be able to look at them and, really, go from there, but I don't feel like people do."
The way Blow sees it, too many puzzle games focus on pure difficulty at the expense of tying their puzzles into something broader—some kind of overarching theme. "One thing that I used to try to tell people is, 'Look, if you're making a puzzle game—if it's just a difficulty challenge that's not really that interesting, you want it to be about something and you want what it's about to be good."
It's a philosophy visible in Blow's previous games, although perhaps one that's not to every player's taste. The Witness was chock-full of musings from philosophers, mathematicians, scientists, and even Buddha. Braid, meanwhile, eventually t-boned players with a quote from Kenneth Bainbridge, one of the developers of the atomic bomb: "Now we are all sons of bitches."
"I just feel like a lot of games are still missing that," continues Blow. "Or, you know, sometimes you can get in this place where the designer sees what they're about, but the player can't really see what what the puzzle is about, because that's a separate design pursuit that you do—designing something is one thing, but then making sure people really see it and get it is a separate dimension of design."
Which isn't to say Blow doesn't have some recent(ish) favourites. "One of the games that very explicitly inspired [Order of the Sinking Star] a little bit, [although] this game isn't like it at all" is none other than Stephen's Sausage Roll. Blow calls it "brutally hard and not very accommodating to the player, but I think it is one of the best puzzle games ever made." He's also spent some time with Trifolium: The Adventures of Gary Pretzelneck. "That was pretty good, because it starts out looking like a normal, boring snake game, but it's actually really interesting." But the odd stand-out aside, it sounds like not much has bowled Blow over recently.
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