i won't play order of the sinking star.

Let’s get a few things out of the way first:

No one forces you to read this.
No one prevents you from playing a video game.
You won’t be invited to leave a comment at the end.

Some context about the game

Order of the Sinking Star is a puzzle video game that will be released in a few days. It’s been worked on for 10 years by a bunch of different people. It’s been touted as the next big thing in puzzle games. There’s an ongoing marketing campaign for it, which includes several elaborate trailers, collaborations with content creators, and a fair number of interviews. I love puzzle games, and I also happen to play them for a living. But I won’t play Order of the Sinking Star.

The game is developed through Thekla, a studio managed by one Jonathan Blow. Ten years ago, Thekla released one of my favorite games, The Witness. The puzzle design of this game was satisfyingly deep, the art direction was both precise and lovely, and I enjoyed engaging with the philosophical material that was spread around the island world. I have no doubt Sinking Star will be equally inventive. So why wouldn’t I want to play it?

Manufacturing auteurship

Here are excerpts from texts produced for the game's marketing:

[First words from the game’s preview description on Steam]

“From director Jonathan Blow (Braid, The Witness), Order of the Sinking Star is a massive puzzle adventure […]”

[First words from the game’s description on Steam]

“From legendary director Jonathan Blow (Braid, The Witness) comes Order of the Sinking Star […]”

[First words appearing in the game’s announcement trailer]

“From the director of Braid / and The Witness”

[First words from the description of the previous trailer]

“A narrative puzzle game from Jonathan Blow featuring over 1,000 hand-crafted puzzles […]”

Jonathan Blow’s name is a central selling point here. Indeed Mr. Blow is known as an auteur, cultivating that status through social media and marketing efforts for over 20 years. His name carries money and attention. After receiving some concerns about crediting practices, the game’s publisher, Arc Games, ended up mentioning additional puzzle designers down the Steam page for the game. This was a gesture of good will, but it doesn’t come close to offsetting in any significant way how much they’ve been milking the Jonathan Blow brand. So we’re left with Mr. Blow and his supersized auteur reputation, front and center.

There’s a problem with auteurs though. They’re a con. A remarkable con that the art worlds have come up with for bootstrapping their autonomy from “common” production chains and increasing their reach. Most contemporary auteurs emerge from the intentional creation and enforcement of a symbolic frontier between an individual and other workers, empowering that individual so they can sell more of their stuff (and occasionally do shitty things with little to no repercussions). Auteurs often emerge from previous positions of power; that lead in power enables them to be invested as the public face of collective projects and reap way more benefits from these projects than the other workers involved, solidifying their position in the process.

(See also: Art Worlds by Howard S. Becker, Language and Symbolic Power by Pierre Bourdieu.)

In the case of Mr. Blow, his career in video games began thirty years ago. He attended the Game Developers Conference multiple times through the 00’s. After several years of odd contract jobs and a failed first studio, he’d garnered sufficient technical proficiency and personal funds (about $180,000) to get ahead of the curve and release Braid before the saturation of the indie market. His earnings from Braid and his consolidating network lead him to co-create the Indie Fund in 2010, connecting him with even more leading indie studios through the 10’s. In 2012, he was featured in Indie Game: The Movie, a documentary that was both critically and commercially successful. He met with Geoff Keighley back in 2007, allowing his team to secure a spot for Order of the Sinking Star during the biggest video game showcase event of 2025, about twenty years later.

So there’s nothing out of the ordinary about Mr. Blow. He’s a 50-something man who’s had ample time to develop a broad video game expertise, a public reputation, and a professional network. Calling him a “genius” or “legendary” is a manipulative misrepresentation of practical industry facts: he’s a trained individual who had favorable opportunities years ago and pushed on to make a very good career.

Auteurs in the digital age

Disingenuous as it is, the game’s marketing isn’t the only source of unrestrained praise here. Indeed the call to auteurship is inseparable from the devoted community of players that Mr. Blow has built through years of social media usage. His personal accounts on X, Youtube and Twitch boast about 100k followers each, and his posts and uploads elicit numerous passionate reactions. Followers will often call him “Jon” or “Jonathan” and address him personally in their public messages. Countless comments praise him as the sole driving force for the creation and release of Order of the Sinking Star, reinforcing the perception that he’s a genius among this dedicated crowd. This show of support will just as often turn into emotional rebuttals or sealioning whenever an article or a social media post expresses dissenting views about the object of their admiration.

Evidently, a significant part of these reactions qualify as parasocial behavior. These followers develop a non-reciprocal sense of friendship with Mr. Blow that distorts their perception of his work and carelessly erases the involvement of other workers. From my position, it looks like Mr. Blow has only been too happy to let that mindset develop in his community, and because of the misbeliefs (and occasional toxicity) it fosters, I’m neither happy about it nor about its amplification through Sinking Star’s marketing. To be honest, I find it frustrating that so many players who take pride in their problem-solving skills would fall for an unhealthy trick from Digital Marketing 101.

Misinformation and dubious opinions

Beside the problematic auteur paradigm, it is worth considering some of Mr. Blow’s opinions and past statements. He’s disparaged the current puzzle scene as neither interesting nor innovative, going so far as to say that puzzle designers don’t know their classics as they ought to. This is quite a privileged statement from someone who can afford 10-year game development cycles. It is, more importantly, a frankly misleading depiction of the puzzle scene, considering that numerous recent games have received outstanding praise from both diehard puzzleheads and casual gamers. Obviously Mr. Blow is free to hold this opinion, but it should be noted that it is tastelessly self-aggrandizing (all the more so in the context of a marketing campaign), and that most players that actually seek to engage with recent games often end up complaining that they don’t have the time to play all the puzzle gems that various developers grace us with every year.

A better-known point of contention is Mr. Blow’s alignment with various aspects of the MAGA ideology. He’s relayed conspiracy theories about the COVID virus being secretly manufactured by a state entity, and COVID vaccines being unsafe treatments. He’s held unsubstantiated, sexist views about women being biologically less interested in programming. He’s expressed support for both of Donald Trump’s presidencies, calling him the best US president in his life. He hasn’t had a word (that I know of) against the policies that Trump’s governments have carried out against various minorities. He’s been so adamant about his views that some of his previous collaborators have considered it relevant to publicly distance themselves from him.

Regarding MAGA policies, I should disclose that I’m trans, and that a general lack of institutional support during my transition played a major role in eroding my mental health, to the point that I attempted suicide several years ago. I’m much better now that I’ve dealt with most of these transition hurdles, but I want to emphasize that my lived experience, as well as the lived experiences of every trans person I’ve known, (and by extension, any medical report based on clinical observations,) call for acceptance and better support towards trans people. Anything less than that, consciously or not, is a form of reality denial that basically amounts to wishing death on trans people. So while I understand that people may have different opinions about the merits of government spending cuts or increased tariffs, I find it untenable to either support anti-trans policies or gloss over them like they’re an acceptable partisan footnote. (I have deep issues with plenty more aspects of MAGA politics, but that wouldn’t get my point across any further.)

Beliefs that keep echoing

Based on this trail of misinformation, one could say that Mr. Blow suffers from a case of Nobel disease, except his symbolic authority comes not from winning a Nobel prize but from being praised for the games he directed. Because he’s followed by tens of thousands of followers, his statements are not without consequence. His opinions inform other people’s beliefs, and conversely, his followers echo and promote these beliefs in various spaces that are dependent on his success. I’ve seen deranged comments on Youtube and Reddit suggesting that the death of Jack Lance, one of Sinking Star’s puzzle designers, was caused by COVID vaccination. The Sinking Star discord server, while under a no-politics moderation policy, still includes an unhinged thread where numerous users shared edgy right-wing takes.

Speaking of polarized spaces, it’s worth mentioning that I do not enjoy seeing Mr. Blow being made the butt of the joke in various left-wing circles. I believe that mocking him like a worthless target only fosters more distrust between opposite echo chambers. Mr. Blow is knowledgeable about software and games, and he has a number of opinions about these topics that I’ve agreed with (at least in the past). Just like I don’t think he’s a genius worth the praise, I don’t think he’s a horrible person worth the abuse. I simply don’t know the man. What I do know is that he’s made questionable claims, some of them clearly untrue, and that he hasn’t walked back on them.

So-called art and the so-called artist

I’ve split this blog post into chapters so the reading would be easier, but you can probably see how the arguments are connected and how they feed into each other in a circular way. The more support Thekla’s games receive, the more exposure Mr. Blow gets, the more it enables the transmission of his ideas, and the less space there is for acknowledging other games and other workers.

Video games do not exist in a void, and you don’t get to choose which parts of this chain you interact with. If you want to pick up the game, this is the full package you’re supporting. It’s possible you’ve got not problem with any of this, in which case I have nothing more to say to you. But maybe you’re tempted to turn a blind eye to some parts of the chain you don’t like, or maybe you consider your individual support to be insignificant in the grand scheme of things. However, these are only strategies for burying cognitive dissonance.

I don’t blame anyone for struggling with avoidance, since it’s even been formally endorsed by the game’s publisher. The official Discord server for Sinking Star has rules against sexism and bigotry, but these rules also forbid users from engaging in political discussions or addressing anything that’s not directly related to the game. Yoon Im, the CEO of Arc Games, has declared in connection with Mr. Blow that “individual creators may hold personal views on a variety of topics, but those views are their own and do not represent our company”. This is a blatant cop-out meant to appease and rally consumers — again, you don’t get to leave out the troublesome parts of Mr. Blow when you decide to fund a game he directs and to capitalize on his auteur status.

To all of that I say: Face the dissonance, and be resolute in your choices. Tear through the hype and the marketing, and be true to your values. Honor yourself. I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t want to take part in this charade, so I won’t play Order of the Sinking Star.

About the Thinky Awards

The story doesn’t completely stop here, because of my work with Thinky Games. I won’t give you the speech about every way our team tries to promote video games and playful thinking; the relevant part here is that Thinky Games has been hosting the Thinky Awards for a few years, a yearly award event specializing in puzzle games and other problem-solving games. I was the producer for last year’s edition, the third one, and I’m producing this year’s edition too.

Based on the arguments laid out in this post, I’ve been averse to promoting Sinking Star either personally or through Thinky Games, and I was a proponent of barring the game from competing in the upcoming Thinky Awards. Indeed our rules leave us room for keeping the game out of the final nomination lists, should we deem that shortlisting and promoting the game goes against our values and the interests of the Thinky Games community. Some other members of the core team were in support of the ban. In the end though, it was decided that the game would not be barred from entry, and that our ethical objections should not be taken into account when considering the relevancy of the game with regard to the Thinky Awards. (To be clear, I received authorization to mention the outlines of these internal discussions publicly. I'm not going rogue here.)

It is a very disappointing decision, one that goes unequivocally against my personal values, and against the values that I wish Thinky Games would stand for. I believe the motivations behind this decision, which I won’t go into, are questionable. And I have the feeling that it’s letting down a part of our core community that I care deeply about. While I generally agree with the way Thinky Games covers video games, and I’m proud of the work we do as a team, I wish we were able to engage more explicitly, if only occasionally, with the political and socioeconomic aspects of games. But that’s not my call, and it won’t happen this time.

You may wonder what changed between now and the latest edition of the Thinky Awards, when Sinking Star was nominated in the Most Anticipated Game category without a fuss. To be completely candid, the game was announced just a few days before locking in the nominations lists, so back then we didn’t weigh our options and we let the game compete in the category. About a year later, I’ve had time to assess the game’s marketing strategy, to inform myself more about Mr. Blow, to read some of his new interviews, and to engage in deep discussions with colleagues on the topic. So my opinion has changed from the last time we had to make a decision, and (as the length of this post might be indicative of) it is more informed now.

Some puzzle suggestions

If you’re interested in playing other puzzle games but you don’t know where to look, here’s a list of some I really enjoyed last year. Most of them were actually released in 2025, and I’ll be damned if you don’t find anything interesting or innovative in there. (There’s another version of this list with illustrations, but it also includes non-puzzle games, games I replayed, games I didn’t enjoy, etc.)

Disclaimer: I’ve corresponded with various people involved in the production of most of these games as part of my work with Thinky Games. (Similarly, I got in touch with Arc Games about Sinking Star for the latest Thinky Awards; and it is a late note worth adding that the Arc Games workers I interacted with were enthusiastic and helpful professionals.) None of these people were involved in the writing of this post, and I don't plan on asking anyone to endorse it.

For your consideration

Video game ethics are real, whether you choose to engage with them or not.

While you can’t fight every battle, passiveness and avoidance still have consequences.

Educate yourself, question assumptions, and seek facts.

Enact your beliefs.

And burn your idols.