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Many of the big announcements at The Game Awards are for completely new projects, some of which are total surprises (if you had an Okami sequel on your bingo card last year, you're either in the know or probably used up all your luck for the next few years). We'll often get updates on games that were previously announced too. The trailer for Order of the Sinking Star is something a little different, as it's a game that Braid designer Jonathan Blow has been working on fairly openly since releasing The Witness in 2016. The trailer revealed some new details, including confirmation of the expected title and a release window (2026 on Steam, with more platforms to be announced). Ahead of The Game Awards, Blow gave Engadget a preview of the game and explained some of its many complexities.Fundamentally, Order of the Sinking Star is a grid-based puzzle game in which you'll move blocks around to complete an objective. You might know of this as a Sokoban game, named after the series Hiroyuki Imabayashi created about pushing boxes around a warehouse.But this is a Jonathan Blow game, so nothing stays too simple for very long. Blow and his team took the core concept of pushing objects around and built on it in myriad ways, with a wide array of environments, mechanics and characters for you to get to grips with. Order of the Sinking Star starts with you playing as a deposed queen from another world who is transported to a strange place. This turns out to be the tutorial. Among other things, you'll find out about the undo button, a handy option you can use to revert your actions if you get stuck. It's probably worth being careful with this button, as Blow says it's possible to undo thousands of moves with it. There's a level reset option too.The first phase of the game has four distinct territories with their own characters, stories and gameplay mechanics. One of these realms has a fantasy theme with a warrior character who can push multiple objects that are in a row. His friend, the thief, can only pull objects. The wizard, meanwhile, can teleport and swap positions with objects or other characters. Sometimes, you'll use multiple characters in a level and swap between them to solve puzzles. Theres a talking boat somewhere, too.You'll take what you learn within individual levels into the overworld so you can make progress there. For one thing, the queen can wear a warrior, wizard or thief outfit to adopt their abilities and solve puzzles in the north section of this phase. Over in the east, theres a world with mirror-based puzzles. By positioning the mirrors and where you stand, you'll use the mirror's reflection to teleport at a right angle. If your character (or an object) has a reflection in two mirrors, they can be duplicated, which is something you might have to do a few times if a level requires you activate multiple switches at the same time.Once you near the end of two of the phase one worlds, you can enter one of six gold rooms. In these rooms, which are the gateways to the second phase of Order of the Sinking Star, some of your characters meet each other for the first time. For instance, the guy from The Mirror Isles and the wizard might encounter each other in a gold room and then you can use their combined abilities to solve puzzles. Given that later-game levels combine mechanics from the early stages, they are naturally more complex. Shifting to 3D perspectives will ramp things up too.Order of the Sinking StarThekla/Arc GamesYou can tackle the four worlds that make up the first phase in any order. Collectively, they contain "days worth of gameplay," Blow said. And yet he claimed this first phase accounts for about five percent of the entire game. All told, there are about 1,400 puzzles, many of which are optional. If you're a completionist, you'll need to be pretty dedicated to see this through. Blow estimates that it'll take around 500 hours for a player to do absolutely everything in the game. The overworld has more than 100 screens from which you can jump into individual levels. "All the levels are about ideas. They're not just random puzzles," Blow said. "We don't add puzzles to the game unless they show something cool about how the objects interact. Then, once you see the cool thing, you come back to the overworld, and you navigate from that screen using the cool mechanic that you learned.""We" is a key word there, because it's not as if Blow has been making Order of the Sinking Star by himself for the last decade. His studio, Thekla, has around 10 people working on the game full-time along with another 10 or so part-time contractors. Those who contributed include puzzle game designers Alan Hazelden and Marc ten Bosch. Some members of Blow's Twitch community who "contributed some idea to one of the levels somewhere" will receive design credits too.Blow and his team use custom game engines for their projects. Starting in around 2013, he started livestreaming his work on the programming language that Order of the Sinking Star is written in (Thekla will eventually make the engine available for free as an open-source project). "Once I was working on the game, it was a good way to show people what the programming language was about and also how game programming works, and so I would frequently do just streams where we would sit down and implement something," Blow said. Some of the design work he did on stream ended up in the final game.Order of the Sinking StarThekla/Arc GamesAfter such a long time of working on Order of the Sinking Star, the end is in sight for Blow and his team. The main focus for the last year or so has been on making sure all of the puzzles align with the overworld. Making art for many hundeds of levels is a major undertaking too, while Blow is still refining the story. "Because there's a lot of these levels and a lot of characters in the levels, it's just natural for them to talk to each other," Blow said. "And so what is that dialog and what does it do? Is it just little jokes that don't add up to anything? Or do you get little peeks into a larger narrative? I think the latter is obviously better. And so that's my main task between now and release, is making sure that the story is really good."Blow had the core concept of having separate worlds with mechanics that work across them in place from the very beginning, though how that worked in practice evolved a lot over time. For instance, the overworld idea wasn't set in stone from the outset. There was an overworld in place by around 2021, "but it wasn't organized in the way the current one was. It was just sort of areas smushed together," Blow said. "At some point, I came up with this concept that it was spatially organized in an almost ritualistic manner or a mathematical manner, whichever way you want to think about it. And we redesigned the overworld from that point, and from then till now, it's been just sort of a continuous improvement."Order of the Sinking Star was originally supposed to be a much smaller game that took around 10 or 20 hours to play, but "it just blew up," Blow said. "Part of development has just been dealing with that fact. Like, oh, my God, this game took so long to make. It actually feels really good to be here toward the end. We still have a fair bit of work to do before it's done, but we can see the ending from where we are now, and that's great."This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/ten-years-after-the-witness-jonathan-blows-next-massive-puzzle-game-is-almost-ready-for-primetime-015727378.html?src=rss
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Coven of the Chicken Foot has a lot of things going for it already, in my book. It stars a hero rarely seen in video games, an elderly woman, and it has gorgeous storybook-style art in a lush fantasy setting. Its a single-player puzzle platformer, it relies on wordless storytelling and the woman, a witch named Gertie, travels with a creepy-cute companion. Plus, Gertie has chicken feet. I love her little chicken feet.Coven of the Chicken Foot is the first game from Wildflower Interactive, the independent studio founded by Naughty Dog veteran Bruce Straley. The game is coming to Steam and its available to wishlist now, though theres no firm release date. The first trailer for Coven of the Chicken Foot premiered at The Game Awards 2025, showing Gertie and her friend traveling together through caves, forests and temples. Gertie is on a quest to prove herself to the local coven by standing up to the self-appointed, prideful heroes of the land. She doesnt have a sword or a dodgeroll, and instead has to figure out how to work with her strange friend to survive. Her companion develops unique behaviors based on individual play styles, shaping how Gertie gets around.Straley left Naughty Dog in 2017 after almost 20 years with the studio, where he directed The Last of Us and Uncharted 4. He announced Wildflower Interactive in July 2022 with a brief YouTube message, saying, In 2017 I left the industry not sure if I wanted to make games anymore. But the longer I was away, I kept thinking about this medium, and everything yet to be done and everything I wanted to do still. And this idea kept following me. So I grabbed some friends and we started prototyping.This naturally led to the formation of a studio, Straley explained. We have to do it the right way, he said in the video. It has to be inclusive, equitable and collaborative, full of big-hearted people that want to grow both professionally and personally. The culture needs to be as iterative as the way we make games.Coven of the Chicken FootWildflower InteractiveToday Wildflower Interactive has 16 employees from AAA and smaller-scale backgrounds, according to its website. Its mission statement reads as follows:Were making small-ish, creatively-charged, uniquely-stylized games that explore the possibilities of our medium. And were building a small, open-hearted team of creators that want to improve their skills and still lead a good life outside of work. People that want to hone their craft, have a say in the process, feel respected for their contributions, and be a part of the evolution of this awesome medium.Im not going to say the studios direct and repeated emphasis on work-life balance, diversity and compassion is a response to the soulless capitalistic grind built into the AAA development complex, but Im not going to not say that, either.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/coven-of-the-chicken-foot-is-the-debut-game-from-naughty-dog-alum-bruce-straleys-indie-studio-014004553.html?src=rss
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The Game Awards kicked off with a bang, showing the world premiere of Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic. It's a brand new action role-playing game that will be directed by Casey Hudson, who previously headed up several notable BioWare games you probably know like Mass Effect and Star Wars: Knight of the Old Republic.Theres not much to go on in the trailer, but the game simply existing is a pretty great surprise and this cinematic trailer sure looks shiny. Hudson is working with Arcanaut Studios on this project, which is described as an epic interactive adventure across a galaxy on the brink of rebirth where every decision shapes your path towards light or darkness. Which kind of sounds like Star Wars crossed with Mass Effect, and I am personally very excited for that combo. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/star-wars-fate-of-the-old-republic-is-a-new-action-rpg-from-the-director-of-mass-effect-and-kotor-012913046.html?src=rss
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