Order of the Sinking Star Can Overdo Its Greatness

Background: A Sokoban Core Built on a 1987 Zelda Shape

Order of the Sinking Star, the latest puzzle game from developer Thekla Interactive and director Jonathan Blow, begins from a very old question: how can a game keep pushing blocks across a grid interesting for a very long time? Thekla touts over 1,000 puzzles, and the player experiences them from a top-down perspective, moving blocks through grid-based rooms. The game's structure borrows a familiar 1987 formula from The Legend of Zelda: an expansive overworld filled with dungeon-like levels. That shape creates both the game's greatest strength and its most visible strain. For readers, the value is in watching how a simple rule set is stretched into a large system, then tested by time, memory, and narrative curiosity.

The opening setup places the player in what appears to be a strange artificial garden facility. The character you first control seems to have been plucked from some kind of battle and wonders whether she has died and entered an afterlife. The game quickly reframes that expectation with humor and logic: one assumes Valhalla or a similar afterlife would offer more drinking and fewer brain teasers. As she explores, audio logs from an earlier visitor reveal his findings. This is the first step in a longer chain: a mystery location, a grid puzzle, and a world that expands outward.

Development Process: Four Regions, Four Puzzle Lineages

Soon after the opening area, the player enters a massive open overworld and can set out in four different directions. Each direction represents a different set of mechanics and is inspired by a smaller puzzle game. The overworld behaves like a game board: points on the ground open puzzle levels, and completing those levels opens new pathways. The regions are also worlds in a multiverse sense, each with characters and abilities that can be combined later.

In the north, levels draw on Heroes of Sokoban and use traditional role-playing characters. The Warrior can push multiple blocks at once, while many puzzle games restrict the player to pushing one block at a time. The Mage can instantly swap places with other characters or objects when facing them. The Thief cannot push objects forward but can drag them behind her. These differences force the player to think about the same grid in different ways.

The east is inspired by Mirror Isles. Mirrors can teleport objects at right angles, adding a spatial puzzle layer to the block-pushing foundation. The south comes from Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes and focuses on skipping stones across water to create pathways and divert currents. The west builds on Promesst and uses special beams that let characters walk through walls, teleport long distances, destroy objects, and perform other actions. The game uses these regional mechanics as upgrades and expansions of their original titles.

The roster of characters also changes how the player navigates the grid. Some characters cannot push objects at all, but they can transform objects or carry them in a pocket. One character wears a bulky contraption that requires empty space around him to turn, which changes the spatial planning needed to move through a level. The game's early development phase is therefore not just about adding more puzzles, but about adding distinct thinking modes.

Mechanics Collide: From 70 Hours to the "Aha" Leap

The strongest part of Order of the Sinking Star appears when the four regional systems begin to mix. The story reason for the multiverse setup becomes a design engine: as the different worlds collide, their mechanics combine in new ways. The game teaches new concepts by building on old ones. The review's timeline shows how this works across nearly 70 hours of play.

One puzzle combines the teleporting beam from the Promesst-inspired west with the teleporting mirrors from the Mirror Isles-inspired east. Under the right conditions, mirrors can create copies of the player's character, and the puzzle can quickly leave the player controlling four characters at once. The level has only one exit spot, so only one character can complete it. The player cannot kill characters and still finish a level. The solution requires finding a way to fuse the four copies back into a single character without using the mirrors. That "a-ha" moment changes the reader's understanding of the systems: the game is not asking the player to simply manage more characters, but to treat character duplication as a puzzle object.

The review notes that the puzzle design is impressively tight. Across nearly 70 hours, only one puzzle was encountered that could be solved in a way that did not seem to match the developers' explicit intention. The game mostly rewards observation, logic, and careful use of every included element. When a player is stumped, the answer usually lies in a missed interaction or an unused part of the puzzle.

But the same breadth creates friction. With four games' worth of mechanics mixed together, the player must keep many rules active at the same time. Some puzzles become complicated not because they require a leap in thinking, but because they overwhelm the player with rules. In one frustrating example, the reviewer used a pushing character, skipping stones, and a pulling character together. The first part of the solution appeared quickly, but the second step took hours to find. Later, the reviewer realized the solution had already been known, but a rule about how the stones worked had been forgotten from puzzles completed earlier. This memory problem is a key part of the game's timeline: the expansion is impressive, but it can become unwieldy when the player's mental model must hold too many moving systems.

Latest Progress: Forgiving Tools, Thin Story, and the First Ending

The game's latest stage is defined less by narrative closure than by player tools and continued puzzle discovery. Order of the Sinking Star is merciful in how it lets players experiment. An instant undo button steps back one action, and an action includes moving a character by one grid square. This makes it easy to recover after accidentally pushing an essential item off a cliff or trapping a character in a corner. A dedicated button restarts a puzzle with no loading. Players can slow down or speed up time, which helps with timing puzzles and skips waiting periods. For readers, this is a concrete design lesson: large puzzle games become less punishing when they make iteration fast and cheap.

Because the game is so large, a stuck player can often wander elsewhere and make progress. There is almost always another puzzle to solve, another room to try, or another combination of mechanics waiting to be tested. This makes the game's sprawl feel less like a wall and more like a very wide playground.

Spoiler Warning: This section discusses the game's ending stage and plot conclusions as reported in the review.

While the puzzle systems keep evolving, the plot elements that should drive exploration feel thin, at least through many tens of hours. Each character has personality, agenda, and motivation, but the story tidbits spread across the worlds rarely satisfy. The northern RPG heroes chase an evil magistrate, but he is little more than a disembodied voice, if he is present at all. The scavenger from the beam world collects gems for research and personal profit, but the review does not clarify why that goal matters. The mirror character's past trials are mentioned, but the game does not make their emotional or mechanical payoff clear.

The story fragments are delivered in tiny, spread-out tidbits and can feel like a veneer that exists to justify new puzzle ideas rather than a narrative that pulls the player forward. That makes the story more confusing than compelling. The larger mystery, what this puzzle place is, why it exists, and who created it, also remains obtuse. The review says answers exist, but finding them requires a larger investment in the game's secrets.

The reviewer reaches the first of the game's endings with more questions and many hanging plot threads. That point is a clear marker in the timeline: the narrative has not yet resolved the central setup, and the motivation to continue must come from the puzzles themselves rather than from story payoff. The reviewer repeatedly found that a lesson learned in one area could unlock a solution in the overworld, then open a new area built on fresh takes on established rules, and those fresh takes did not seem to run out or become boring.

At the current stage described by the review, Order of the Sinking Star works best as an expansive puzzle laboratory. Its 1,000-plus puzzles and four regional systems create a long chain of discovery, from the 1987 Zelda-shaped overworld to multiverse mechanics that combine in unexpected ways. Its greatest achievement is keeping a simple block-pushing grid challenging for hundreds of puzzles. Its greatest risk is that the sprawl can overload the player's memory and make some puzzles feel like rule tests rather than insight tests. The forgiving undo, restart, and time controls soften that risk. The thin story and unresolved ending shift the experience toward pure puzzle play. The review suggests the game might have worked better if it curated its massive puzzle pile more tightly, but the occasional frustration and overcomplication are the price of admission for so many fun ideas. For readers deciding what the game means, the practical takeaway is clear: Order of the Sinking Star is most valuable when approached as a living design experiment, where the pleasure comes from bending the rules you have already learned into something new.