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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
That's true, a game like Blue Prince doesn't suffer from bad engineering because of the type of game it is. There are plenty of other games, like Cyberpunk 2077, where the lack of engineering made an otherwise good game unplayable and unenjoyable.
The fact remains that Blue Prince would have been more enjoyable for those people who did see those bugs had some time been spent on better engineering.
The idea you have to pick between reasonable engineering and fun is a false dichotomy. Of course not every game will have the time budget to fix every unintended feature but your example game would have been more enjoyable (especially for the mentioned Playstation users) if the code had been written a bit better.
I think this is one of the first lessons independent developers quickly learn. I think we're initially geared to want to make beautiful, elegant, and technically pleasant code because it's our thing - it's like how e.g. a guitarist is going to want to play a song other guitarists would be impressed by. You spend a million hours perfecting Classical Gas, while Smoke On The Water goes down as one of the most iconic tracks and riffs in history.
I'm not endorsing slop, but rather advising against the equal but opposite.
I hate C++. It’s possibly my least favorite language. Slow compilation, awful mess of ideas scattered around, syntax soup, footguns galore. Typescript has become one of my favorite languages. It’s not perfect, but it’s surprisingly good and pragmatic. JS, on the other hand? No thanks. Static typing is something I never want to do without again.
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.
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.
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.
He hired a level designer who also wrote a Sokoban game. (Can’t remember the name, but it was free and web-based, IIRC.) That game had some really great, unique ideas in it, and I’d be shocked if the new Blow game was bog standard.
> 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.
Does that change how good/bad the game someone releases is? Don't get me wrong, being obviously anti-scientist isn't that great if I absolutely have to judge them, but I'm not sure if that has any impact on how fun a game is.
If I'd stop consuming stuff from people/organizations I disagree with politically, I literally would have to move into a cave and start my own hunter-collector society from scratch. Is this really how others make decisions in their daily lives?
Yes, this is how I make decisions, but it also depends on the category of decision. E.g. in entertainment, there's too much content available to care about one specific author / creator / etc (this also applies to "console exclusive" games and platform-exclusive TV shows). In this particular case, I vaguely recall Blow making some comments (pre-COVID era IIRC) that sounded too asshole-y / high-horse-y that I no longer seek his opinions on things and try to stay away from his content. I still have bazillion technical articles available to read and plenty of video games to play.
It doesn't, but historically a lot of the reasons people consume art is due to fashion, and art is a way to put you in in and out groups.
So naturally if someone has different political beliefs, or has went too "commercial" people suddenly have to change course. Being a good game/book/song won't have anything to do with it
I enjoyed Braid and this revelation doesn't change that, but there's a lot of entertainment and it's easy to not support someone who has views (or at least doesn't express them publicly) that conflict with my own personal values.
I don't particularly go hunting for information about artists, studios, etc, to find out if I agree with them. I just happen to no longer like their stuff when I find out things I don't like.
It's not "how I make decisions" but more just something that affects my taste for things.
Separating the art from the artist is a long and old debate.
I personally can’t watch Roman Polanski’s art, the classic and easy example. You can be a great movie producer, pedophilia and rapes are big no-no to me. But not to everyone apparently.
For the non vocal people believing in pseudoscience and fascist propaganda, I can close my eyes more easily. I don’t want to know. I can guess sometimes but I won’t check. As soon as they become vocal, it kills the art for me. I can’t enjoy art from people against my values, me, and my friends and family.
I don't know why you just handpicked the covid trutherism without quoting the full thing, here the full quote from the link above:
> Additionally, in recent years it has become increasingly clear that Jon’s beliefs/priorities and mine are not aligned. He’s adversarial to people talking about privilege and representation, is dismissive of diversity efforts, has dabbled in covid trutherism, and is pro-MAGA.
Here the post after just for a full picture
> I believe Trump is a self serving authoritarian who's dismantling democracy, trying to make trans people illegal, and wanting to set up concentration camps for immigrants - whereas Jon in February called him "the best President we have had in my entire life".
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?
Ok, I can see the "fascist sympathizer" (though the fascist is Trump, not Mussolini or Hitler, so it's presumably not such a minority opinion in the US overall). But "doesn't seem to think that women have any role to play in his profession" doesn't seem substantiated from those links, unless I'm missing something here? Women being less interested in programming according to him is completely orthogonal to whether he thinks they should play a role
> though the fascist is Trump, not Mussolini or Hitler, so it's presumably not such a minority opinion in the US overall
Does that make a difference? You could levy the exact same argument about the other two in their respective countries in their respective times. Doesn’t make it OK.
Yes it does. When you live in Europe and listened to your late grand parents talk about the war. In Europe, "fascist" actually has still some weight to it and it doesnt get thrown around so casually as the US, yet. Same strory with the word "communist"...
It is OK in the sense that these are not fringe opinions, they are part of the mainstream political discourse that, as a serious person, you can not effectively dismiss by throwing around certain bad words like fascist.
Neither was slavery. Was that OK too? And to clarify (though it’s worrying this point needs to be made), I mean morally.
> throwing around certain bad words like fascist
Fascism has a very clear definition. It describes a particular set of behaviours and actions, all of which you can compare to reality and determine if it’s happening or not. It’s an objective word. If anyone is trying to “dismiss” anything, it’s the people pretending it’s subjective because they support its outcome.
He is "controversial", which is politburo-speak for "not adhering to the dogma of the far left". He must therefore be deplatformed like it's still 2020.
When you support political leaders that push fascist discourse where regular people that happen to have more empathy for their fellow man are presented as the enemy - in Hegseth's book the call to arms against them is literally in the first paragraph - I think it stops being about not far enough left, but about being way too far right.
I said nothing about "half the US", and nazi is just your projection I think. But I'd like to know, are you disagreeing with me that the "us vs. them", where them is minorities, women, liberals is *not* in fact one of the upmost fascist tenets?
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.
> he doesn't have the humility of accepting when he's wrong
Isn't he pretty far on the autistic spectrum? It can be very difficult for that kind of personality to re-evaluate something, once they think they have reached a "logical conclusion".
I'm not making excuses, just agreeing that the chances of him changing seem low.
I don't know, but I doubt it. He's too well adjusted at being social (his hobbies have him interact with people on the regular, and he's streaming on twitch, and doing public speaking at conferences) for me to think that.
I think your general idea is right, it sounds reasonable that the insane cancelation mania can bring some conservatives to dig into deeper holes. It is probably what enabled the recent right shift in politics. As to Blow specifically, I've watched his streams quite a bit. I've always had sympathy for him and have been able to relate to his opinions a lot (about software in particular). But I can see how some other people could take offense from the way he's presented his stances.
I say that as someone who him angry myself when I live-commented once in one of his streams where I had a rare disagreement. He did become quite angry at that time, and I was quite startled by that.
Now, my impression is that he's turned down his abrasiveness and developed a much more well meaning stance on things over the years. Recently I've found him more on the side of "here's how most people are doing this, I don't like this, maybe I don't think it's sustainable or how you get good results, but anyway here's what I like to do instead, make of it what you want".
I'm not talking about his words on technical stuff, I'm talking about him being so pleased with the state of US today. Somehow in Blow's mind what Trump and his handlers do to the country is the best thing ever.
I'm not a US citizen, but being enthusiastic about other people losing their freedom and freedoms is obscene.
> 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.
This claim about women [1]? Calling that "doesn't seem to think that women have any role to play in his profession" seems like a wild misquote bordering on slander. His statement is essentially "women might have the same ability but are for biological reasons on average less interested in programming". Which is a statement I don't agree with at all, but also a statement that doesn't make any claims about the role women should play or could play, and he repeatedly states that he is talking about statistics and averages, not all women.
That is a claim I neither made nor defended, I merely pointed the asker to the information they requested in the article to let them decide for themselves.
I even explicitly said I never encountered that claim before. As such, I’m not going to do very stupid armchair expert thing I’m criticising and comment on it. The points I made are on the things I know and reflected on, not on superficial information received three minutes ago.
That's the same thing as happened to James Damore, who is, in my view, a harmless guy (even nice) and whoever cancelled him or is unable to acknowledge he had a point is actual "fascist". I don't like throwing that term but just to return it.
It _boggles_ my mind that someone might find it controversial that there are on average differences between the sexes in terms of behaviour and interests. And to throw extremely strong accusations like "fascist" for a totally reasonable assumption or observation like that, I don't have words for that, I think those people have been smoking too much pot.
> there are on average differences between the sexes in terms of behaviour and interests. And to throw extremely strong accusations like "fascist" for a totally reasonable assumption or observation like that
That’s not why they’re calling him fascist, but because of things like being a Trump supporter. You’re conflating arguments.
> He has very strong opinions on a lot of things he knows little about (and belittles those who disagree with his uninformed opinion) (...)
I'm impressed with how well you summarized my thoughts about him. I vaguely recall having this impression about him after I read his technical article (can't remember the topic) and decided that I don't think I need to read more from someone that comes through as an asshole. This was around the time The Witness came out, I'm quite happy that I didn't have to witness (hah!) what sounds like his further slide into the madness.
The folks that dismiss JB’s work by saying “this could have been done in <x>” are missing the point of why anything is done.
If you are entirely utilitarian in how you approach making a game (as in this case) then you’ll want to create as little as possible to make the game. An existing game engine, an existing programming language, existing libraries, etc.
If your goal is the economic return that making a game will (hopefully!) provide, this is understandable.
However, how I see JB based on his past work and talks is someone who wants to spend their life bringing things into existence. From all available evidence it appears the art of creating and the art of having created is his work and his legacy. The economic return is rhe by-product, but not the goal.
We are in this earth for a finite amount of years, and he is spending his time creating new things. It’s an admirable use of time, and at least from my perspective holds a universe of meaning that working under the utilitarian approach loses.
I think he has said this in some stream and the majority of the time was spent on the game. He also said many times that the game is way more difficult to make than the compiler.
Sorry, but no. Just because the graphics have some cartoony stylization does not mean that a lot of thought and effort did not go into them, not to mention lots of work from artists. You absolutely could not recreate something that looks like that with python in a few weeks. Not that the language/engine was strictly necessary to do so either, but you’re way off-base in terms of the level of work and effort required for these things.
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.
Puzzle design is his strong point, so it's safe to assume there'll be some good ones there. The sheer quantity make me wonder about how the game will be structured - they can't presumably all be stumpers (aka hard puzzles that you'll have to step back from and think about) - maybe there'll be more of a gentle flow between puzzles, like in the Witness, or maybe there'll be lots of optional levels/branching in the game design. I guess we'll see! I'm curious :)
One of the things I enjoyed most about the Witness were the environment puzzles where you had to align things in the scenery with your viewpoint to complete it. And also definitely the little philosophical voice recordings were great. It's a game that deserves playing with an open mind and spirit in order to fully appreciate everything it offers.
I wish I could have played it, but it made me so violently sick. Only a few games ever have, but none that badly. The other one was Blue Prince which was a tragedy.
The Witness is, in my opinion, simply one of the best games ever made. There are many layers to the game, and moments of insight that the game leads you to, but also trusts for you to make the final connections.
However, I do understand why some consider it a slog. There are many puzzles in the game that people will dislike, indeed many puzzles that I disliked. It seems Jon prioritized finding all of the interesting things that they could say about the puzzles in the game over making sure that all of the puzzles were actually enjoyable to a majority of people. My advice is if you don't like an area, just go somewhere else. You don't need to complete every area to roll credits.
It also may be a matter of expectations. Puzzle games tend to be on the shorter side, but The Witness is lengthy. So jumping in expecting to finish in an afternoon is a way to set yourself up for frustration.
How do you compare it to the Portal games or the Talos principle? I find those superior in puzzle mechanics, sense of achievement and playing dynamics. They can be challenging but you never feel aimlessly going around without a purpose like the Witness. There is good review of the game on youtube by the title "The Witness - A Great Game That You Shouldn't Play", it covers a lot and resonates well with my experience, the panels could've been a standalone mobile/tablet game. Everything else in the game is beautiful but frustrating.
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?
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]].
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.
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's an anti-vaxxer.
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.
>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.
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.
That's true, a game like Blue Prince doesn't suffer from bad engineering because of the type of game it is. There are plenty of other games, like Cyberpunk 2077, where the lack of engineering made an otherwise good game unplayable and unenjoyable.
The fact remains that Blue Prince would have been more enjoyable for those people who did see those bugs had some time been spent on better engineering.
The idea you have to pick between reasonable engineering and fun is a false dichotomy. Of course not every game will have the time budget to fix every unintended feature but your example game would have been more enjoyable (especially for the mentioned Playstation users) if the code had been written a bit better.
I think this is one of the first lessons independent developers quickly learn. I think we're initially geared to want to make beautiful, elegant, and technically pleasant code because it's our thing - it's like how e.g. a guitarist is going to want to play a song other guitarists would be impressed by. You spend a million hours perfecting Classical Gas, while Smoke On The Water goes down as one of the most iconic tracks and riffs in history.
I'm not endorsing slop, but rather advising against the equal but opposite.
> Or does it, like Typescript for JS, only exist because of extreme antipathy towards C++?
Typescript exist because people want a type-checked language.
Yeah, I too was wondering about that comparison...Programming in TS is more pleasant (to me) than JS.
Still, could that be because you're more of a C++ type personality code than a JS one?x
I hate C++. It’s possibly my least favorite language. Slow compilation, awful mess of ideas scattered around, syntax soup, footguns galore. Typescript has become one of my favorite languages. It’s not perfect, but it’s surprisingly good and pragmatic. JS, on the other hand? No thanks. Static typing is something I never want to do without again.
Jonathan Blow makes Jai because he wants to make Jai. It's the same reason he makes his games at all.
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.
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.
Not sure about the „minimal resources“. Didn‘t he come up with his own programming language for thia one? Maybe should have invested more in art.
If a decade worth of cost of living is considered minimal resources, successful indie games wouldn't be so disproportionately Scandinavian
>If a decade worth of cost of living is considered minimal resources
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.
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
Yeah it's a real step backwards from how The Witness was presented: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul7kNFD6noU
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.
I think there’s way less people willing to work with him in 2025 than when the witness was in development
In case you assume novelty, a comment [1] from ArsTechnica reader Jensen404 explains otherwise by linking to [2] a post on Bluesky.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/12/jonathan-blow-has-spe...
[2] https://bsky.app/profile/draknek.bsky.social/post/3m7qybidq7...
> These games are the starting point, but the bulk of the game is new puzzles combining mechanics from different games together
Seems like the puzzles are novel, but the mechanics are not?
The basic mechanics look like very standard type of puzzle mechanics (e.g. Sokoban) that have been in many games over decades.
He hired a level designer who also wrote a Sokoban game. (Can’t remember the name, but it was free and web-based, IIRC.) That game had some really great, unique ideas in it, and I’d be shocked if the new Blow game was bog standard.
Seems like the original puzzles were licensed for this game, in which case why not?
> 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.
Because he occasionally dabbled in COVID trutherism, whatever that means… These bsky people are insufferable.
https://bsky.app/profile/draknek.bsky.social/post/3m7qyfe7b7...
Does that change how good/bad the game someone releases is? Don't get me wrong, being obviously anti-scientist isn't that great if I absolutely have to judge them, but I'm not sure if that has any impact on how fun a game is.
If I'd stop consuming stuff from people/organizations I disagree with politically, I literally would have to move into a cave and start my own hunter-collector society from scratch. Is this really how others make decisions in their daily lives?
Yes, this is how I make decisions, but it also depends on the category of decision. E.g. in entertainment, there's too much content available to care about one specific author / creator / etc (this also applies to "console exclusive" games and platform-exclusive TV shows). In this particular case, I vaguely recall Blow making some comments (pre-COVID era IIRC) that sounded too asshole-y / high-horse-y that I no longer seek his opinions on things and try to stay away from his content. I still have bazillion technical articles available to read and plenty of video games to play.
It doesn't, but historically a lot of the reasons people consume art is due to fashion, and art is a way to put you in in and out groups.
So naturally if someone has different political beliefs, or has went too "commercial" people suddenly have to change course. Being a good game/book/song won't have anything to do with it
I enjoyed Braid and this revelation doesn't change that, but there's a lot of entertainment and it's easy to not support someone who has views (or at least doesn't express them publicly) that conflict with my own personal values.
I don't particularly go hunting for information about artists, studios, etc, to find out if I agree with them. I just happen to no longer like their stuff when I find out things I don't like.
It's not "how I make decisions" but more just something that affects my taste for things.
Separating the art from the artist is a long and old debate.
I personally can’t watch Roman Polanski’s art, the classic and easy example. You can be a great movie producer, pedophilia and rapes are big no-no to me. But not to everyone apparently.
For the non vocal people believing in pseudoscience and fascist propaganda, I can close my eyes more easily. I don’t want to know. I can guess sometimes but I won’t check. As soon as they become vocal, it kills the art for me. I can’t enjoy art from people against my values, me, and my friends and family.
I don't know why you just handpicked the covid trutherism without quoting the full thing, here the full quote from the link above:
> Additionally, in recent years it has become increasingly clear that Jon’s beliefs/priorities and mine are not aligned. He’s adversarial to people talking about privilege and representation, is dismissive of diversity efforts, has dabbled in covid trutherism, and is pro-MAGA.
Here the post after just for a full picture
> I believe Trump is a self serving authoritarian who's dismantling democracy, trying to make trans people illegal, and wanting to set up concentration camps for immigrants - whereas Jon in February called him "the best President we have had in my entire life".
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?
They have a nice collation of his greatest hits over on Reddit[1]
[1]: https://www.redditmedia.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1jh275...
Ok, I can see the "fascist sympathizer" (though the fascist is Trump, not Mussolini or Hitler, so it's presumably not such a minority opinion in the US overall). But "doesn't seem to think that women have any role to play in his profession" doesn't seem substantiated from those links, unless I'm missing something here? Women being less interested in programming according to him is completely orthogonal to whether he thinks they should play a role
He also had a 88 for a long time in his twitch channel name
> though the fascist is Trump, not Mussolini or Hitler, so it's presumably not such a minority opinion in the US overall
Does that make a difference? You could levy the exact same argument about the other two in their respective countries in their respective times. Doesn’t make it OK.
Yes it does. When you live in Europe and listened to your late grand parents talk about the war. In Europe, "fascist" actually has still some weight to it and it doesnt get thrown around so casually as the US, yet. Same strory with the word "communist"...
I do live in Europe, and I’m old enough to have close friends and family who were alive during fascist dictatorships.
It is OK in the sense that these are not fringe opinions, they are part of the mainstream political discourse that, as a serious person, you can not effectively dismiss by throwing around certain bad words like fascist.
> these are not fringe opinions
Neither was slavery. Was that OK too? And to clarify (though it’s worrying this point needs to be made), I mean morally.
> throwing around certain bad words like fascist
Fascism has a very clear definition. It describes a particular set of behaviours and actions, all of which you can compare to reality and determine if it’s happening or not. It’s an objective word. If anyone is trying to “dismiss” anything, it’s the people pretending it’s subjective because they support its outcome.
He is "controversial", which is politburo-speak for "not adhering to the dogma of the far left". He must therefore be deplatformed like it's still 2020.
When you support political leaders that push fascist discourse where regular people that happen to have more empathy for their fellow man are presented as the enemy - in Hegseth's book the call to arms against them is literally in the first paragraph - I think it stops being about not far enough left, but about being way too far right.
Yeah, when you call half the US fascist and nazi there is not much we can talk about.
I said nothing about "half the US", and nazi is just your projection I think. But I'd like to know, are you disagreeing with me that the "us vs. them", where them is minorities, women, liberals is *not* in fact one of the upmost fascist tenets?
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.
> he doesn't have the humility of accepting when he's wrong
Isn't he pretty far on the autistic spectrum? It can be very difficult for that kind of personality to re-evaluate something, once they think they have reached a "logical conclusion".
I'm not making excuses, just agreeing that the chances of him changing seem low.
> Isn't he pretty far on the autistic spectrum?
I don't know, but I doubt it. He's too well adjusted at being social (his hobbies have him interact with people on the regular, and he's streaming on twitch, and doing public speaking at conferences) for me to think that.
I think your general idea is right, it sounds reasonable that the insane cancelation mania can bring some conservatives to dig into deeper holes. It is probably what enabled the recent right shift in politics. As to Blow specifically, I've watched his streams quite a bit. I've always had sympathy for him and have been able to relate to his opinions a lot (about software in particular). But I can see how some other people could take offense from the way he's presented his stances.
I say that as someone who him angry myself when I live-commented once in one of his streams where I had a rare disagreement. He did become quite angry at that time, and I was quite startled by that.
Now, my impression is that he's turned down his abrasiveness and developed a much more well meaning stance on things over the years. Recently I've found him more on the side of "here's how most people are doing this, I don't like this, maybe I don't think it's sustainable or how you get good results, but anyway here's what I like to do instead, make of it what you want".
I'm not talking about his words on technical stuff, I'm talking about him being so pleased with the state of US today. Somehow in Blow's mind what Trump and his handlers do to the country is the best thing ever.
I'm not a US citizen, but being enthusiastic about other people losing their freedom and freedoms is obscene.
> 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.
This claim about women [1]? Calling that "doesn't seem to think that women have any role to play in his profession" seems like a wild misquote bordering on slander. His statement is essentially "women might have the same ability but are for biological reasons on average less interested in programming". Which is a statement I don't agree with at all, but also a statement that doesn't make any claims about the role women should play or could play, and he repeatedly states that he is talking about statistics and averages, not all women.
1: https://www.resetera.com/threads/jonathan-blow-the-witness-b...
That is a claim I neither made nor defended, I merely pointed the asker to the information they requested in the article to let them decide for themselves.
I even explicitly said I never encountered that claim before. As such, I’m not going to do very stupid armchair expert thing I’m criticising and comment on it. The points I made are on the things I know and reflected on, not on superficial information received three minutes ago.
That's the same thing as happened to James Damore, who is, in my view, a harmless guy (even nice) and whoever cancelled him or is unable to acknowledge he had a point is actual "fascist". I don't like throwing that term but just to return it.
It _boggles_ my mind that someone might find it controversial that there are on average differences between the sexes in terms of behaviour and interests. And to throw extremely strong accusations like "fascist" for a totally reasonable assumption or observation like that, I don't have words for that, I think those people have been smoking too much pot.
> there are on average differences between the sexes in terms of behaviour and interests. And to throw extremely strong accusations like "fascist" for a totally reasonable assumption or observation like that
That’s not why they’re calling him fascist, but because of things like being a Trump supporter. You’re conflating arguments.
> He has very strong opinions on a lot of things he knows little about (and belittles those who disagree with his uninformed opinion) (...)
I'm impressed with how well you summarized my thoughts about him. I vaguely recall having this impression about him after I read his technical article (can't remember the topic) and decided that I don't think I need to read more from someone that comes through as an asshole. This was around the time The Witness came out, I'm quite happy that I didn't have to witness (hah!) what sounds like his further slide into the madness.
The folks that dismiss JB’s work by saying “this could have been done in <x>” are missing the point of why anything is done.
If you are entirely utilitarian in how you approach making a game (as in this case) then you’ll want to create as little as possible to make the game. An existing game engine, an existing programming language, existing libraries, etc.
If your goal is the economic return that making a game will (hopefully!) provide, this is understandable.
However, how I see JB based on his past work and talks is someone who wants to spend their life bringing things into existence. From all available evidence it appears the art of creating and the art of having created is his work and his legacy. The economic return is rhe by-product, but not the goal.
We are in this earth for a finite amount of years, and he is spending his time creating new things. It’s an admirable use of time, and at least from my perspective holds a universe of meaning that working under the utilitarian approach loses.
I wonder how much of the 10 years spent making "a programming language, an engine, and a game" were actually spent on each slice.
Hopefully, jai and the engine will help make the next game faster...
I think he has said this in some stream and the majority of the time was spent on the game. He also said many times that the game is way more difficult to make than the compiler.
It's hilarious he had to build a new language just so he could create a sokoban game with graphics of flash era.
I'm sure it builds fast and whatever, but you could make this in python in few weeks.
He didn't have to. He wanted to.
Which is the same motivation as creator of rust, zig, nim, ruby, perl, python had. They all wanted to make a programming language better at something.
So I don't see anything "hilarious" about it.
Sorry, but no. Just because the graphics have some cartoony stylization does not mean that a lot of thought and effort did not go into them, not to mention lots of work from artists. You absolutely could not recreate something that looks like that with python in a few weeks. Not that the language/engine was strictly necessary to do so either, but you’re way off-base in terms of the level of work and effort required for these things.
the game was not the motivation to make the language
Or in one of those game engines people like to use.
> you could make this in python in few weeks
lol
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
Yes, we should have Jonathan's voice ranting about JavaScript instead.
So he spent 10 years making a pseudo-3D version of Sokoban with 2010 era graphics?
I think he must have spent 9 years working on his new programming language and one year working on the game.
[delayed]
Weird that the post above this one in the front page has “Braid” in its title and it’s not about Blow’s famous game.
This interplay between different worlds reminded me of Enigmash, by Jack Lance [1]
[1] https://jacklance.github.io/PuzzleScript/play.html?p=cfdcc6e...
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.
Jack Lance was one of the designers! https://bsky.app/profile/ostroffj.bsky.social/post/3m7wal2qt...
I went back to his website [1] and spent almost an hour of a boring zoom call playing Coin Counter [2]. [1] https://jacklance.github.io/games.html [2] https://www.puzzlescript.net/play.html?p=9ebe1e5ad44ac222593...
I didn't know of Jack Lance before this post. I've just been playing through enigmash and it's very clever! https://jacklance.github.io/PuzzleScript/play.html?p=cfdcc6e...
Okay, but are the puzzles fun?
Puzzle design is his strong point, so it's safe to assume there'll be some good ones there. The sheer quantity make me wonder about how the game will be structured - they can't presumably all be stumpers (aka hard puzzles that you'll have to step back from and think about) - maybe there'll be more of a gentle flow between puzzles, like in the Witness, or maybe there'll be lots of optional levels/branching in the game design. I guess we'll see! I'm curious :)
He'll also be on the Wookash Podcast today [1] (small but nice Gamedev-related podcast)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHFvEtIbf5E
One of the things I enjoyed most about the Witness were the environment puzzles where you had to align things in the scenery with your viewpoint to complete it. And also definitely the little philosophical voice recordings were great. It's a game that deserves playing with an open mind and spirit in order to fully appreciate everything it offers.
[dead]
The Witness was a slog, maybe he's learnt how to make puzzles which are actually fun this time.
That slog led to some of the most satisfying feelings of accomplishment for me. I love the lack of instruction in that game.
Curious, it's probably my favorite video-game experience ever.
I wish I could have played it, but it made me so violently sick. Only a few games ever have, but none that badly. The other one was Blue Prince which was a tragedy.
I was gonna buy it for Christmas!
The Witness is, in my opinion, simply one of the best games ever made. There are many layers to the game, and moments of insight that the game leads you to, but also trusts for you to make the final connections.
However, I do understand why some consider it a slog. There are many puzzles in the game that people will dislike, indeed many puzzles that I disliked. It seems Jon prioritized finding all of the interesting things that they could say about the puzzles in the game over making sure that all of the puzzles were actually enjoyable to a majority of people. My advice is if you don't like an area, just go somewhere else. You don't need to complete every area to roll credits.
It also may be a matter of expectations. Puzzle games tend to be on the shorter side, but The Witness is lengthy. So jumping in expecting to finish in an afternoon is a way to set yourself up for frustration.
How do you compare it to the Portal games or the Talos principle? I find those superior in puzzle mechanics, sense of achievement and playing dynamics. They can be challenging but you never feel aimlessly going around without a purpose like the Witness. There is good review of the game on youtube by the title "The Witness - A Great Game That You Shouldn't Play", it covers a lot and resonates well with my experience, the panels could've been a standalone mobile/tablet game. Everything else in the game is beautiful but frustrating.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZokQov_aH0
An excellent choice sir, you will have a Christmas holiday to remember.
I don't hate it but also it's a deeply flawed game. It walked so that Talos Principle could run.
The Talos Principle came out a few years before The Witness though.
Good tip, thanks, clearly I'm behind more than a decade. :)
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?
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]].