If you gave me five years to review Order of the Sinking Star, I still don’t think that would be enough time. The enormous new puzzle game from Thekla, a studio led by Braid creator Jonathan Blow, has been proudly touted as a “500-hour” game ahead of its launch. After a month with it, I’m still not confident that eye-popping claim is an exaggeration.
I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of a game filled with intertwining secrets and brain-busting puzzles that have haunted my waking hours. Usually, that kind of setup would precede a bit of praise for an ambitious game with a tremendous amount of value for any players who think about games in dollars and cents. Truth be told, I don’t know if I mean it as a compliment — but it’s also not not a compliment.
More than 20 hours of on-and-off play, casually poking into my save file every night like I would a book of crossword puzzles, has revealed an exceptionally complicated game that eludes firm criticism at every turn. Is it a masterpiece or an exercise in exhaustion? Ask me again next month and my answer might be different.
Ask me again next year and it certainly will be. Order of the Sinking Star is the open-world puzzle game to end all open-world puzzle games. The gargantuan project essentially remakes several indie Sokoban games (a term used to describe a specific style of box-pushing puzzles), and then combines their mechanics.
It’s meant to be a celebration of world-class puzzle design, one built with a spirit of collaboration and reinvention in mind. The reality of its dramatic development is a different story, but let’s take the game at face value to start, because there’s enough to unpack there as is. The creative vision behind Order of the Sinking Star is brilliant, if not ingenious.
Thekla is building on the bones of some top-notch games and uniting them into one aesthetically cohesive package that unfolds across a sprawling top-down grid. That makes the early hours of the adventure, where you’re simply figuring out the rules of four different games, undeniably terrific. Go east on the clouded open-world map, and you’ll enjoy a riff on designer Alan Hazelden’s Mirror Isles, an indie game that had players traversing islands by teleporting through well-positioned mirrors.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
