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.
Some of it is just design. Much as I like the aforementioned overworld choices, I think the world in general is visually too busy a lot of the time and it’s very hard to parse what the hell I’m looking at, especially if it’s a type of block or environment or thing I’m encountering for the first time. There are lots of bits that glow, or that can/cannot be pushed, or that react to things in certain ways that would be obvious if I could tell what the object actually was. For instance, early on, the Queen finds what I guess is a wardrobe she can walk through that changes the color of her cape and gives her different abilities. It took me far too long to understand that’s what was happening. It didn’t parse as a wardrobe. The color change on the cape (blue) wasn’t distinct enough from her normal color (purple). Everything was too small. I think this is probably less of an issue playing on a PC, up close to my face, or in handheld mode on Switch. But docked on Switch 2, I really struggled to understand and appreciate the environment Order of the Sinking Star takes place in, colorful and lovely as it may be.
Some of my other complex feelings stem from the framing story Thekla has created to house all these characters. There’s a Queen, and she’s exploring some weird…place, a temple or something. As she explores, she finds voice recordings from someone else who’s walked this same path before her, sharing their findings Zampanò-style. And she keeps getting sucked into these worlds with these other characters from the four sokoban games, who each have their own little narratives and mysteries to solve. The Heroes of Hauling are a hauling company of some sort that got into trouble with a king but now are working for him. The Mirror Isles section is about a guy returning to a place from his childhood, convinced he’s going to die soon. And so forth.
Now, I haven’t finished Order of the Sinking Star. I received code later than most other reviewers (this is no one’s fault and certainly not Thekla’s, it’s just how some scheduling worked out). So I want to allow for the possibility that any one of these individual stories could get interesting and cool eventually. Maybe this is like, The Second City doing The Harold and I just need to trust. But right now, ten hours in, I do not find any of these characters interesting at all. A lot of the early dialogue consists of characters making very vague pronouncements about what they see and what’s going on, talking about how mysterious everything is and how they ought to keep moving forward to try to understand their situation. If they’re not doing that, these characters are speaking so specifically about their situation (and sometimes in very overly elaborate dialects) that I lose track of their plot due to a lack of context. While I notoriously don’t like when games overexplain everything to me, the effect all this dialogue is having on me is that I’ve just tuned out to most of it.
This also has the knock-on effect of making me significantly less interested in whatever larger mystery is present in the world of Order of the Sinking Star. There are all these weird signs around, and suggestions of bigger, hidden puzzles in the landscape. I love games like Blue Prince, Void Stranger, Animal Well, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, where I’m constantly hungry to learn more about why I’m here and what it all means. All four of those games have interesting characters, or intriguing worlds, or some sort of big, cool hook that draws me in beyond just the puzzles being fun. Order of the Sinking Star contains mysteries, but those mysteries are doing nothing for me, and I think it’s because of my indifference to its characters and my difficulty visually parsing its world. I don’t care about who these characters are, or why they’re here, or where they are, or about any of their respective conflicts. I am simply here to push blocks.
But even as I push, none of these characters shuts up, which leads me to what I think may be another cause of my tuning out: I am reviewing an incomplete build of the game. Now, this isn’t wholly unusual. It’s pretty normal for developers to alert reviewers to bugs they’re actively working on patching, or little placeholder objects they intend to fix before launch day. Normally, it’s minor enough that these omissions don’t impact anything. But in this case, I spent the entire review period listening to a voice cast of roughly half humans, and half AI voices. Not text-to-speech, to be clear, but AI.
We were warned of this in advance, and were told it won’t be in the final build. You, if you play this game, (probably) won’t have this experience. You will instead be treated to a reasonably stacked cast of voice actors who are all pretty good and probably will do a great job. Heck, the folks I did hear in-game already were great! But my experience was so weird. AI voices just aren’t…good. There were many scenes in which some characters were real and others were AI voices, which gave the whole thing a really bizarre dissonance. And while you could argue that such things are serviceable for early demos (I’d prefer silence, personally, but), I feel as a reviewer that I’ve just completely missed out on a major part of the experience, one that’s being touted in press releases but which I cannot speak to at all. It doesn’t help that the subtitles still have quite a few typos, don’t match the voices in a lot of places, and sometimes don’t seem to make sense.
Again, we were warned of all three of these things. Thekla says that a person playing on launch day (October 8) won’t have to deal with any of it. But the result for this specific article is that I find it challenging to make any kind of pronouncement as to what, exactly, I dislike about Order of the Sinking Star’s story, writing, acting, and plot. I think it’s possible the writing is just weak and many of you will have a similar experience to what I had when you start this game up. I think it’s equally possible we all keep playing, and it either suddenly comes together brilliantly toward the end, or is just tedious throughout. Or maybe a final pass on the script and the addition of a full cast of actors will fix every issue I had. I don’t know! Go with God, everyone!
There’s one more complication: Jonathan Blow himself, head of Thekla and director of this game. Order of the Sinking Star, or at least what I’ve played of it, is about as unpolitical a game as anything I’ve ever played. Nothing is devoid of politics, sure, but ten hours in and I’m struggling to grasp much movement toward a greater message or theme or observation about the world among all these disparate plots (maybe another reason I dislike the story). Maybe, in this case, that’s fine, because I find Blow’s politics abhorrent, personally. I am deeply repulsed by anyone who thinks Trump is a great president, and I think scoffing at pronouns is, at its most generous reading, embarrassing edgelord behavior that’s helping normalize transphobia. I would much rather spend my time playing and supporting games made by people who don’t profess either of those things. Of course, Order of the Sinking Star was in fact made by many people, not just Blow. But I think it’s notable, perhaps, that all three creators of the four games this was based off have distanced themselves from Blow in the time since the licenses were signed, as he began to make his views more publicly apparent.
And, you know, not that it matters, but it’s a bit hard not to imagine that Blow might read this and determine that my criticism of his game is bullshit, because I’m a woman and biologically less interested in such things. Doesn’t change how I feel about the game, good or bad, but I think it means something that he said such things and never retracted them! This shit matters!
So should you play Order of the Sinking Star? It’s hard to say. Regarding Blow’s political views, you’ll have to make your own choices. Taking the game on its face, I think if I were on the fence, I’d wait and see what people had to say, in broad strokes, about the overarching story, plot, characters, and mystery once it was finished. If you’re just here for good sokoban puzzles and literally nothing else, then this is probably a game you’ll like. It’s certainly a collection of some of the best.
Alternatively, though, if puzzles are what I’m after, I might just go play Heroes of Sokoban, Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes, Promesst, and Mirror Isles. All four are free on your browser. The biggest disadvantage they have is not being on my Switch 2, where Order of the Sinking Star is on that and PC. Some might dislike their minimalist designs, but given my complaints about Order of the Sinking Star, it’s all the better for me. My feelings about Order of the Sinking Star may be complex, but I did come out of this with one confident assertion: there are four excellent sokobans out there that I hadn’t heard of before, and I should probably go play them.
