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.

> Or does it, like Typescript for JS, only exist because of extreme antipathy towards C++?

Typescript exist because people want a type-checked language.

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.

Jonathan Blow makes Jai because he wants to make Jai. It's the same reason he makes his games at all.

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.

The basic mechanics look like very standard type of puzzle mechanics (e.g. Sokoban) that have been in many games over decades.

> 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.

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Because he occasionally dabbled in COVID trutherism, whatever that means… These bsky people are insufferable.

https://bsky.app/profile/draknek.bsky.social/post/3m7qyfe7b7...

They have a nice collation of his greatest hits over on Reddit[1]

[1]: https://www.redditmedia.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1jh275...

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.

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.

> 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.

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Or in one of those game engines people like to use.

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.

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.