With Blow the devil is simultaneously in the details and at the meta level.
For example in the Witness, which I consider one of the best puzzle games ever made, you get a fairly simple core mechanic, but the game builds upon it in very interesting ways. It feels like a journey of learning and always challenges you in some novel way at each step. There are also several revelations along the way, where you discover new layers on top of the core puzzles.
I would expect that this new game will feature similarly careful design.
I enjoyed the Witness for a while but I bounced off it pretty hard in the Mountain. It wasn’t until I watched a let’s play on YouTube that I learned there was a film room, a hidden cave complex under the mountain, a time trial, and other optional secrets. I can absolutely understand a certain type of gamer liking this but for me Talos Principle (both 1 and 2) is peak puzzle genre.
That said I’ll probably buy this game if it comes out next year.
I found them quite boring since they are all repetitions on the same theme - just drawing lines on a square. It could have been a mobile game. The world doesn't feel connected to the puzzles, and the exploration aspect of it could have been a completely separate game. It feels like two games glued together, which is IMO not a good design.
It's also not a game that's very demanding from a technical performance perspective, and really has very limited numbers of active entities / animations, so why should I care about his opinions on game architecture or anything else?
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.
It was Jack Lance, who wrote Enigmash. Tragically, he died in 2023 at the age of 25. Jack Lance superlatively creative. I cannot find the words to express how much the world lost. I do not know of a finer puzzle designer.
interactions between the various mechanics in the games likely yield countless surprises, and let you build something considerably more elaborate than thesum of its parts..
The Puzzle Boy / Kwirk series of games is Sokoban-based, but has 3 different mechanics on top of that: turnstiles, pits (that can be filled by blocks), and blocks larger than 1x1. One of the things I love about it is that, each mechanic is interesting on its own, and each combination of mechanics results in levels with very different feels. Lots of puzzles with a bunch of mechanics try to throw tons of them into each level, and each level ends up feeling very samey. But judicious use of combinations can lead to a lot of interesting variety.
For example in the Witness, which I consider one of the best puzzle games ever made, you get a fairly simple core mechanic, but the game builds upon it in very interesting ways. It feels like a journey of learning and always challenges you in some novel way at each step. There are also several revelations along the way, where you discover new layers on top of the core puzzles.
I would expect that this new game will feature similarly careful design.