Like The Witness before it, Order of the Sinking Star uses a simple puzzle structure as a vehicle for unexpected problem solving. Pushing blocks around a grid to press a button or reach some exit is far from a new concept, but neither was sliding a line around some symbols, and that was hardly “the point” of developer Thekla, Inc.’s previous masterpiece – and while the demo I played didn’t reveal all of its secrets, that certainly seems to be the case here as well.
Order of the Sinking Star is really many block-pushing games in one. There’s an overworld with its own lead character that has to figure out how to even reach each of its self-contained levels, all of which are sorted into different areas of the map representing various stories, characters and mechanics of their own. Those ideas will eventually blend together (though they didn’t yet in the parts I played), and it’s already clear that this is more than just a glorified level-select screen as I saw tantalizing secrets waiting just out of reach.
I started by heading north to play as the Hearty Heroes of Hauling, a fantasy-themed area where I controlled a handful of different characters at once, each with a unique way to interact with the movable blocks and monsters that blocked their path. Swapping between those characters to guide them to the end of each stage was very different from the levels of The Mirror Isles to the east, which instead had me command a single person who could warp through and copy himself with the help of some pushable magic mirrors. And that was different still from The Promise to the west, which was a more futuristic setting that stitched together multiple puzzle screens into a single, infinitely looping level rather than individual stages. (The southern area, Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes, wasn’t available in the demo at all.)
One thing I appreciated across all the areas is how often my usual puzzling instincts didn’t seem to apply. I’ve played so many games like this over the years that I can typically look at a level and pretty quickly intuit what is going to need to happen, even if I don’t necessarily know how to actually do that thing right away. But Order of the Sinking Star kept me on my toes more often than not, making me figure out solutions that weren’t what I was expecting. That’s not to say it’s super challenging, it just felt like its designers never settled for the “first” answer or idea they could come up with.
Any one of these areas likely could have been sold as its own game and still made for a pretty fun evening of puzzle solving, but they add up to something impressively imposing when taken as a whole. I completed all of the available demo levels in about four hours – that’s already larger than some entire puzzle games I’ve played, and I felt like I was barely getting started. Order of the Sinking Star’s open-world map seems huge, too, so it’s hard to even guess at how much I didn’t see (but I’m sure it’s a lot).
Of course, the flipside of having such radically different designs in a single package is that it’s a lot more noticeable when one idea isn’t as fun as another. I really liked quick-swapping between the Heroes of Hauling depending on which of their abilities I needed at any given moment – be that pushing, pulling, or full-on teleportation. So when I got to the blander island setting that followed, its mirror puzzles were noticeably less entertaining – still clever and well-designed, but just not as fundamentally interesting as the areas that came before or after.
That said, it’s hard to tell which ideas will or won’t hold up over a longer playtime, especially because Order of the Sinking Star already did a great job of introducing new ideas and then testing your mastery of those concepts within this demo. It’s also notable that I didn’t get to see what is supposed to be one of the primary pitches of this split-story structure, which is that levels will eventually blur the lines between each world and the unique puzzle mechanics along with them. Like I said, none of the areas I tried felt like half-baked ideas waiting for this twist to occur, so I can see the complexity of even its simplest tricks ramping up substantially in the later levels.
I am also extremely curious about how the overworld and larger story will eventually come into play. Order of the Sinking Star isn’t trying to be as sneaky as The Witness was in terms of hiding additional puzzles in plain sight – that is to say, it’s made quite clear from the jump that the overworld is a bit of a puzzle in itself. But that doesn’t mean I fully understand what might be hidden up its sleeve either, and I am excited for an opportunity to go digging further. If the way I devoured this demo is any indication, the full game is one I’m not going to want to put down.
Tom Marks is IGN’s Associate Reviews Director for games. He loves card games puzzles, platformers, puzzle-platformers, and lots more.
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