// KOTAKU — GAMING
10 Hours With Jonathan Blow’s New Puzzle Game Order Of The Sinking Star
Order of the Sinking Star, like the puzzles it contains, is a game I have a lot of complex, often conflicting, feelings about. As a collection of sokoban puzzles? It’s excellent. As a narrative, or an overarching mystery like Blue Prince or Animal Well or Void Stranger? Significantly weaker. As a total package, a game that you might want to play yourself? Complicated.
Order of the Sinking Star is a container for reinvented, newly realized versions of four excellent puzzle games/series:
The Heroes of Sokoban by Jonah Ostroff, which has you using a growing/changing party of adventurers, all with different abilities, to interact with the world to solve block-pushing puzzles. One guy can push, one can pull, one can swap places with blocks, and so forth.
Promesst by Sean Barrett, which is all about activating switches in a maze that activate machines outputting colored beams with different effects on you when you stand in them. You use those beams to collect more gems to activate more beams…and so forth.
Mirror Isles by Alan Hazelden, which uses mirrors to reflect the protagonist across the map and later to split him or objects into multiple and use those to cross a series of islands.
Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes, also by Alan Hazelden. Pushing rocks into the water “skips” them across to the next platform of land, and you use interactions between these stones and other objects, such as lilypads, to make your way through.
The world of Order of the Sinking Star is segmented into four parts, and each section is a series of new puzzles built off the premises of each of those four games, licensed and used with permission. All four of these games were excellent before, but perhaps less accessible to a mass audience just by virtue of being very indie, browser-based projects. Order of the Sinking Star is an excellent idea to help these concepts shine.
Jonathan Blow, who shepherded this project, is himself an excellent puzzle designer, as is Patrick Traynor who also spearheaded a lot of these puzzles, as are the team they are surrounded by at Thekla. The Witness was incredible, and so too is this. Thekla not only brings new takes to the existing puzzle designs of all four games, but cleverly mixes and matches all these concepts in ways that very quickly started to make my head spin. It can be overwhelming at times: Order of the Sinking Star is not for the puzzler who shrinks from a challenge. But that moment when everything clicks and you see the chess moves you need to do to get everything lined up where you want it, God, it’s beautiful! There are over one-thousand of these things apparently, and I haven’t even seen half. An incredible endeavor.
And outside the individual puzzles themselves, I think there are some very smart design choices that really help each concept shine. I like the overworld, where a Queen makes her way from puzzle to puzzle, then takes what she learned in those puzzles to solve her own puzzles on the overworld to access the next set of puzzles. It’s puzzles within puzzles within puzzles. There’s also a super neat “fast travel” gimmick of sorts to help you get around if you tire of one set of puzzles and want to visit another. You can back out of the overworld even farther to a bird’s eye view and travel across a much smaller, simpler version of the map, then warp back in and appear where you want to be.
I want to be clear that I think the actual game here is very, very smart and fun and good, and I liked playing it. What I have far more complex feelings on is the entire framework this exists in, and those feelings stem from multiple causes.