There’s Something Special About Getting Lost in Order of the Sinking Star

One name in the indie space that carries considerable weight is Jonathan Blow. Many may know him for the 2D platformer Braid, which helped shape the indie space, or The Witness, a wildly popular puzzle adventure known for its unconventionality. However, Order of the Sinking Star is on another scale entirely, boasting an unreal total of over 1,000 puzzles.

Naturally, especially considering Blow’s pedigree from The Witness, Order of the Sinking Star seems like a dream come true for puzzle game aficionados.

But I’m not part of that crowd, so I approached this release with hesitation and skepticism about whether someone not invested in the genre could truly enjoy it. After extensively playing an in-development version of the full game, though, I’ve been splendidly taken aback.

Order of the Sinking Star is not only an ambitious project a decade in the making, but its gameplay identity also sits on the fine boundary between newcomer-friendliness and veteran appeal. Much of the satisfaction I’ve experienced hasn’t necessarily come from solving individual puzzles in isolation, either. Instead, it’s come from gradually realizing I understand something I didn’t an hour earlier.

How Order of the Sinking Star Handles Over 1,000 Puzzles

Order of the Sinking Star boasts a captivating storyline right off the bat, backed by excellent voice direction, but its real strength lies in its gameplay systems. After a few brief introductory screens that establish the core mechanics, you’re thrust into a vast map with player choice at the forefront.

That freedom becomes intensely important as you progress. A puzzle game with more than 1,000 handcrafted challenges sounds intimidating if you don’t regularly play the genre. I initially imagined repeatedly reaching puzzles I couldn’t solve and being unable to progress until I somehow forced myself toward the correct conclusion. However, that’s not really how Order of the Sinking Star operates.

Its progression is nonlinear and largely self-paced. You can often leave, investigate another route, encounter different challenges, and eventually return. Sometimes, the most useful thing you can do with a puzzle you don’t understand is simply stop trying to solve it.

That may sound counterintuitive, but knowledge is essentially one of the most vital avenues of progression. You’re constantly introduced to new ideas, testing their boundaries, and then encountering situations that complicate your assumptions. A puzzle elsewhere may reinforce something you misunderstood or demonstrate a possibility you hadn’t considered.

Blow has described Order of the Sinking Star as a “game design supercollider,” bringing together numerous creatives and inspirations from foundational puzzle games, including Mirror Isles and Heroes of Sokoban. Four distinct worlds introduce different mechanics and puzzle systems before those concepts begin to interact and converge.

Playable Characters Keep Changing the Rules

The constant reinvention is immediately evident through multiple playable characters, each with puzzle-based gimmicks that define their gameplay styles. While some of these mechanics are certainly more intimidating than others, the game makes a real effort to introduce them intuitively so their later complexities can land.

For instance, one character can push multiple entities at once, while another can immediately swap places with something or someone in his line of sight. Then there’s another who creates a duplicate of himself through a mirror, letting you swap places with said duplicate.

When you’re first learning these characters individually, their defining mechanics can seem relatively straightforward. You understand what an ability physically does, complete a few puzzles utilizing it, and naturally start forming assumptions about how that character is supposed to be played. That’s only part of the picture, though.

Order of the Sinking Star repeatedly takes mechanics I thought I understood and places them into circumstances that make me reconsider their innate utility. It derives surprising complexity from asking whether you actually understand the implications of the abilities you already possess.

Very quickly, multiple characters can also inhabit the same space, requiring you to actively swap between them to progress. You’re no longer necessarily thinking about what one character can accomplish. Instead, your focus shifts toward how the rules governing several characters can complement one another.

Order of the Sinking Star excels at taking these grand, intimidating concepts and placing them in compact environments where the number of possibilities remains readable enough that you can gradually work toward a conclusion.

Still, that doesn’t mean those conclusions come easily. Order of the Sinking Star is very, very challenging, so don’t go in expecting to only get mildly stuck on a puzzle here and there. Unless you take your time and analyze what’s actually happening on screen, you can easily find yourself stuck for long stretches. It’s approachable, but it’s absolutely not for the impatient.

What surprised me was how much my own behavior changed as I progressed. Earlier on, I was more inclined to start moving characters around and experimenting until something looked promising. Eventually, I found myself spending considerably more time doing nothing.

I’d look at where everything was positioned, consider which objects could move, and think about which actions would obviously create a dead end. In a sense, it became a game of reading the intention behind the environment.

That shift in perspective is where Order of the Sinking Star really began to click for me. The satisfaction was rooted in recognizing that my approach to solving puzzles had changed.

The nonlinear progression complements this beautifully because being unable to solve something doesn’t necessarily feel like failure. I’ve encountered puzzles where I exhausted what I thought was every reasonable avenue, moved elsewhere, and eventually returned with a completely different thought process. Sometimes, you simply look at an old problem and realize you’re no longer seeing the same problem.

Combat Adds Another Layer to the Puzzle Design

One facet I did not even remotely expect, however, is the implementation of combat elements. Granted, there aren’t combos or anything like that. Instead, enemies function as environmental hazards that activate depending on where you’re standing relative to them. You’ll even encounter circumstances where you may need them to slay each other.

Initially, their presence made me assume I was being introduced to another major gameplay system. In practice, I gradually stopped viewing enemies as something separate from the puzzles themselves. They’re more akin to lifelike hazards.

Where an enemy can attack, when it reacts, and how its presence affects the available space all become pieces of the same problem. Fundamentally, these ideas aren’t a complete departure from standard progression, but their framing makes these situations feel considerably more dynamic.

Needing to bypass foes instead of exclusively dealing with static obstacles also gives these puzzles stronger narrative and gameplay cohesion. Puzzle games can understandably present challenges simply for the sake of providing something interesting to solve, but these more contextualized environments help Order of the Sinking Star’s enormous collection of puzzles feel like parts of a grand adventure.

Given the sheer number of puzzles the game dishes out, there’s obviously an element of doing it for the hell of it for puzzle enjoyers. Still, the broader framing gives the adventure an impressively curated touch.

Can Order of the Sinking Star Appeal to Puzzle Game Newcomers?

I started Order of the Sinking Star wondering whether a puzzle game containing more than 1,000 handcrafted challenges could possibly appeal to someone who doesn’t consider himself a puzzle-game aficionado. After spending substantial time with it, though, the quantity has become far less important to me than how those puzzles communicate with one another.

I certainly haven’t transformed into some puzzle savant. I still get stuck, and some mechanics click for me far more quickly than others. But the open structure means frustration rarely becomes a complete wall. Usually, there’s somewhere else to investigate.

For someone with my paltry background in the genre, the most surprising part has been how naturally the game has changed how I think about solving its challenges.

Order of the Sinking Star is available now on PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC via Steam.