Image: Gamelab Congreso Videojuegos, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Jonathan Blow has extremely insightful ideas and opinions about game design, the industry, computer technology, and sometimes other things. Many don’t like him because he tends to get into internet arguments, and does weird things with his money and time. Personally I like the guy even when I happen disagree with him, but I don’t really like his games Braid and The Witness. They are the kind of art games I should in theory like, but both feel too pretentious to me.

Blow has an active YouTube channel where he streams his development among other things: https://www.youtube.com/user/jblow888

Started playing The Witness. Ugh, what an opaque game. The 3d navigation feels like an unnecessary wrapper to the puzzles. I think if you want to create a mystery then you need to show more to the player about the world, show glimpse of something that will be reward for the work. Now it feels like I’m exploring an empty world, why do I care?

Thought I would watch an actual mystery island story and started watching Lost. You know, that super popular series from over ten years ago. Filling my expectations pretty squarely with first episode, so I’m not too keen to continue the game.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/12/jonathan-blow-has-spent-the-past-decade-designing-1400-puzzles-for-you/

Even The Witness didn’t have that much play testing, because I always felt like that was a way to make games a little more generic or something, you know? Like playtesters have complaints and then you file down the complaints and then you get a generic game.

[JjDsP5n2kSM] “How to program independent games - CSUA Speech”

I have listened to this before but it’s good enough to listen to again. Around 37:00 he talks about the difficulties of communicating anything, which is something I think is extremely important but almost no one talks about. I don’t know if it’s really something that can be improved upon by talking, but at least I’d like to learn people admit more often that something is most likely just a communication problem. People mean different things with the words they use, or people understand all the individual words but skim over parsing the sentence that strings them together.

https://onthemetal.transistor.fm/episodes/jonathan-blow Great talk.

I’ve been listening to Jonathan Blow’s talks and chats for the past weeks so figured I finally need to give Braid a chance. Installed and started playing. Wow, it’s hostile just like The Witness. I see the experience he is trying to shoot for, but what he actually delivers is constant misery, as I fail to realize what I need to do. Some of the puzzles seem very complex.

But yeah, Jon gets it. This is one of the few games where the author knows what he is doing and it starts from the moment you click the executable. It doesn’t even put you in the main menu in this case. There is also no tutorial in the game. Jon says he hates them, and he’s right.

I think in the end my criticism comes down to I hate 2d platformers, and that many of the puzzles are quite pretentious by going to the absolute limits of the logic. It kind of sounds lika a cool idea to do as a developer, but when it 100% makes the player stuck, I’m not so sure. The puzzles in this game are just too difficult. I’m only(?) able to proceed because I’m a math major with a vested interest to figure out what this developer does.

Also I just hate all those Mario call-outs, such as plants biting up from sewer pipes, and jumping on enemies makes you bounce.