Developed by Thekla, Inc., Order of the Sinking Star delivers over a thousand meticulously crafted puzzles across colliding worlds, earning praise for its mechanical depth alongside critique of its staggering scale. A decade after the release of The Witness, director Jonathan Blow and developer Thekla, Inc. have returned with Order of the Sinking Star. Published by Arc Games, the project represents an extraordinarily ambitious undertaking built in Blow's proprietary programming language, Jai. Pitching players into an intricate realm of magic, contraptions, and layered mystery, the title boasts over one thousand hand-crafted puzzles across multiple expansive worlds. Colliding Rules and Interconnected Design At the heart of Order of the Sinking Star is a structural gamble: the campaign initially divides into distinct campaigns across separate worlds—such as The Hearty Heroes of Hauling, The Mirror Isles, Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes, and Vault of the Beamcasters. Each zone introduces isolated concepts ranging from grid-based Sokoban block manipulation and movement constraints to beam redirection and water-skipping physics. Critical evaluations widely praise the moment these distinct domains collide. Rather than remaining isolated puzzle rooms, the rules and characters begin to interweave, requiring players to bring knowledge gained in one ecosystem to bear on the obstacles of another. In their analysis, Shacknews highlighted this progressive layering, describing the game as featuring an interconnected world and layered mechanics that consistently subvert expectations. The Tension Between Scale and Accessibility While critics admire the sheer technical precision and mechanical elegance of individual stages, consensus across reviews points out that the sheer magnitude can be double-edged. Outlets including GameSpot observed that the enormous volume of puzzles can feel overwhelming, while reviewers on OpenCritic noted that players lacking immense patience may feel the game strains under its own weight before every mechanic reaches its zenith. Unlike the austere, textless presentation of The Witness, Order of the Sinking Star introduces voiced characters and overt narrative dialogue. However, multiple outlets found the writing to be more pedestrian than the world's mechanical genius, serving mostly as connective tissue to frame the next cluster of mind-bending challenges. Critical Verdict Order of the Sinking Star stands as an uncompromising, gargantuan puzzle achievement. For dedicated enthusiasts of strict logic, rule-bending deduction, and sprawling spatial enigmas, Thekla has created one of the most mechanically rigorous puzzle titles of the decade, even if its monumental runtime demands extraordinary endurance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0OBDqGDMYU 77
