If you gave me five years to review Order of the Sinking Star, I still don’t think that would be enough time. The enormous new puzzle game from Thekla, a studio led by Braid creator Jonathan Blow, has been proudly touted as a “500-hour” game ahead of its launch. After a month with it, I’m still not confident that eye-popping claim is an exaggeration. I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of a game filled with intertwining secrets and brain-busting puzzles that have haunted my waking hours.
More than 20 hours of on-and-off play has revealed an exceptionally complicated game that eludes firm criticism at every turn. Whether it is a masterpiece or an exercise in exhaustion remains to be seen, but its intricate design is undeniable.
An Intricate Achievement
Order of the Sinking Star essentially remakes and combines mechanics from several indie Sokoban games into an open-world puzzle experience. It aims to be a celebration of world-class puzzle design, built with a spirit of collaboration and reinvention.
The creative vision is brilliant. Thekla builds upon existing games, uniting them into one aesthetically cohesive package that unfolds across a sprawling top-down grid. The early hours are terrific, as players learn the rules of four distinct games.
Navigating east on the map leads to a riff on Alan Hazelden’s Mirror Isles, where players traverse islands by teleporting through mirrors. To the west is a rework of Silver Spaceship Software’s Promesst, centered on collecting gems by activating colored laser beams. North offers a take on Jonah Ostroff’s Heroes of Sokoban, featuring multiple heroes who can push, pull, and switch places with blocks. South is occupied by a realm based on Hazelden’s Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes, reimagining Sokoban as a rock-skipping puzzler. Each of these reworked games functions as a satisfying puzzle campaign on its own.
The twist is that Order of the Sinking Star uses these foundations for new puzzles where the mechanics begin to combine. Exploring the northeast section of the map reveals puzzles that blend mechanics from Mirror Isles and Heroes of Sokoban. The northwest combines the laser beams and gems of Promesst with Heroes of Sokoban’s block-pushing. The puzzle design is strong, with ideas from different games finding harmony, a testament to Thekla’s ability to link them together. Some of the cleverest puzzles possess the reinventive energy of Super Mario Maker levels.
These puzzles are stitched together by a grand overworld that is an intricate puzzle in itself. Unfogging the enormous map by solving puzzles within traditional chambers unlocks new areas. The open-ended nature allows players to unearth numerous paths and switch between them when stumped.
There is significantly more to Order of the Sinking Star than this, though. Despite playing over 20 hours, the review remains in the surface layer of the game, working toward a primary quest that is another puzzle. Much of the game is laid out in abstract terms, requiring players to deduce the meaning of strange symbols or red pedestals. This approach feels like a logical continuation of 2016’s The Witness, Thekla’s genre-defining open-world puzzler that taught players new rules without explicitly stating them.
Trust and Exhaustion
While Order of the Sinking Star is brilliant on a puzzle-to-puzzle level, its grander design ethos presents intersecting critiques. It is an expert-level puzzle game. Unlike the approachable The Witness, the Sokoban format involves significant brain-racking for complicated puzzles built around orders of operations, often requiring an hour to work out the execution of a conceptually understood solution. Eureka moments are present, but many puzzles hinge more on mental endurance.
This compounds with the project’s enormous scope. If the game is truly 500 hours long, much of that time will be spent staring at seemingly impossible puzzles. The reward for completing a difficult puzzle is often an even harder one. Many puzzle games feature an ebb and flow of complexity, dialing back the challenge when introducing a new rule. Order of the Sinking Star, however, feels like it is in constant escalation, offering little mental relief and no clear payoff.
The storytelling stitched into the puzzles offers some reward, but it is not particularly engaging. Intersecting stories within the primary puzzle chambers touch upon the island’s mystery and function as contained fables. The writing has not been terribly engaging, offering little motivation to push through puzzles to discover what happens next. Placeholder voice acting in the build will be replaced, but it adds to the hesitancy in offering a definitive critique.
Unlike The Witness, where a simple revelation can make previously incomprehensible elements understandable, Order of the Sinking Star’s solutions feel more self-contained. Solving puzzles does not necessarily lead to breakthroughs elsewhere. The game does not always make it clear why a player is stuck; it is difficult to ascertain if a solution is simply not yet understood or if a move has rendered the puzzle impossible to solve. While a reset button and step-rewinder help, they are not always sufficient. In the Promesst-inspired segment, for instance, an intersecting series of puzzles set in an underground map led to a realization that a mistake made much earlier had rendered progress impossible, necessitating a restart.
Puzzle games rely on trust: the certainty that a game is meticulously designed, avoiding dead ends or seemingly correct but non-functional solutions. In its pursuit of complexity, Thekla may have traded laser-focused precision for scale. Order of the Sinking Star feels like an enormous puzzle book meant to be tackled over years, rather than in a few sittings. Its appeal as a long-term game is fantastic, but its ultimate success hinges on how well its initial complexities are supported by future updates.
The Elephant in the Room
The issue of trust extends beyond the game’s mechanics. Since its reveal, Order of the Sinking Star has been embroiled in controversy. Several creators whose games were licensed have distanced themselves from the project due to statements made by Jonathan Blow. His social media posts, which have praised Donald Trump and touched on COVID-19 conspiracies, have drawn backlash from developers. Alan Hazelden, one of the featured developers, has confirmed any profits he receives will go towards supporting underprivileged developers.
This behind-the-scenes drama is sure to alienate potential players, but its tangible impact on the game is debatable. Order of the Sinking Star is a collective product of Thekla, a talented studio deserving of credit beyond its lead developer.
However, it is difficult to ignore the situation because it feels inextricable from the project’s potential meta-narrative. The game’s themes are tied to its development story, exploring creativity through collaboration by uniting thinkers whose unique ideas shaped the Sokoban genre. This concept is explicitly present in the Heroes of Sokoban-inspired section, where characters with different powers help each other solve impossible problems.
This message feels hollow when contrasted with Blow’s stated worldview. Blow has criticized the industry’s push for inclusive hiring, arguing it dilutes merit-based structures. This perspective clashes with the core idea of Heroes of Sokoban, which posits value in assembling a team from diverse backgrounds.
Furthermore, the idea of Blow assembling an “Avengers of Sokoban” ties into the meta-layer of mixing games. It raises questions considering that the original creators were not involved in creating the mechanic-mixing puzzles, as Blow confirmed. Their subsequent distancing from the project due to a belief system that appears incompatible with the game adds another layer of complexity.
These points are highlighted not to criticize Blow, but to explain why a final judgment on Order of the Sinking Star is difficult without experiencing its entirety. It is a game designed with meticulous intention, where every puzzle and every step matters. Engaging with it confidently requires solving every puzzle and hearing every word. This fractured trust makes players less likely to grant the benefit of the doubt to a game built on such contradictions.
For many players, these issues may not matter. If the puzzles are well-designed, their off-screen context might be irrelevant. Order of the Sinking Star is an impressive feat for fans of niche puzzle genres. However, Blow’s games often feel like philosophical debates wrapped in metaphorical puzzles. Untangling interconnected challenges and searching for an elusive payoff is a fitting representation of a quest for truth and understanding.
Order of the Sinking Star begs to be challenged as much as it challenges the player. It asks to be interrogated from multiple angles. Whether its fragile ideas stand up to scrutiny is arguably the game itself. The conversation should not end with simple acknowledgment of its “cool puzzles,” a point on which Blow and the reviewer can likely agree.
Order of the Sinking Star will be released Oct. 8 on Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, and Windows PC. The game was reviewed on Steam Deck using a prerelease download code provided by Arc Games.