Order of The Sinking Star is the next puzzle-narrative game from Jonathan Blow, a legendary game developer at Thekla.
Arc Games is publishing the title for PC on Steam and it will be at the Steam Next Fest in demo form. I also played a demo of the game for 20 minutes on the Nintendo Switch 2 at the Summer Game Fest Play Days event. The game is expected to debut this year.
Order of the Shrinking Star is built for players who crave atmospheric exploration and clever puzzles. I dropped into it without a tutorial, but Blow was there to tell me how to play on the Switch 2 version. Order of the Sinking Star drops you into a sprawling world filled with interconnected puzzles. Here’s a video.
The Steam deme will have enough to challenge, surprise, and even spark theories of the game’s overarching mystery.
“This huge game has been the most ambitious project of my career,” said Jonathan Blow,
Founder of Thekla, Inc. and award-winning game designer behind Braid and The Witness.
“The demo will give a taste of the full game, offering players a sense of its scale and depth of
design. After working on this thing for 10 years, I am very happy that players can finally try it
out.”
The Steam Next Fest demo for Order of the Sinking Star will be available globally from Monday, June 15, at 10 a.m. Pacific Time until Monday, June 22, at 10 a.m. Pacific Time.
The game comes from Blow, who also made the award-winning games Braid and The Witness. Like those games, Order of the Sinking Star is a massive narrative adventure featuring more than one thousand hand-crafted puzzles designed to put your intellect to the test.
You are transported to a realm of curious magic, dangerous contraptions, and vicious monsters. You’ll explore four distinct worlds, each with its own mechanics, characters, and stories, and then watch as they all collide.
As the worlds merge, and characters meet one another, puzzle systems intertwine, creating
surprising new possibilities. Explore at your own pace, revisit worlds and return to challenges as you see fit.
You can discover unique playable characters, master evolving gameplay mechanics, and decipher the deep mysteries of a sprawling, interconnected game world. Blending exploration,
storytelling, and ever-progressing mechanics, Order of the Sinking Star invites you into a
mysterious, living puzzle unlike anything you’ve played.
Game Features
● Master a Thousand Interwoven Challenges – Embark on an innovative puzzle adventure with dozens of game mechanics and hundreds of hours of unique gameplay. Each puzzle builds on the last, introducing new game mechanics that reward curiosity and persistence.
● Choose Your Path, Roam at Your Pace – Explore four expansive, mysterious game worlds, each with its own characters, rules, dangers, and secrets waiting to be uncovered. Come and go as you like; you are free to take on the puzzles you discover at your own pace.
● Take the Helm of Some Unlikely Heroes – A queen, a thief, a warrior, a wizard, and a talking boat are just some of the heroes of this tale. Each character wields complimentary abilities and has captivating stories to tell.
● Decipher an Epic Tale – As playable characters begin to meet and worlds collide, the mystery untangles. Through gameplay and notes you collect, you learn more about this enigmatic realm. Piece by piece and clue by clue, you’ll uncover the secrets of the Order of the Sinking Star.
Thekla, Inc. is an independent video game studio led by Blow, known for creating critically acclaimed titles like The Witness and Braid. Originally established in 2009, the studio is
based in Denver, Colorado., and focuses on making games with high artistic and technical quality.
Impressions
The team said the game is an early in-development version of the game in the version that I saw. The game has placeholder AI voice over narration, but there is going to have human voice narration by the time the demo launches. The demo will be playable with a controller/gamepad or mouse and keyboard.
The team said the Order of the Sinking Star’s most unique feature that sets it apart is how it’s actually four puzzle games into one massive game – and how players have the freedom to choose their own path and how they complete the game.
I’ve never been a great puzzle solver. Under the pressure of playing a 20-minute demo in front of a bunch of folks, I’m even worse at solving puzzles. But I was able to dive in without a tutorial and start moving blocks around on a grid. Blow noted that the easiest way to get into an unsolvable situation is to move blocks that box my character or the block into a corner. And so you have to look at pushing blocks a couple of moves ahead, kind of like playing chess.
And while it was harder to control the game with a Switch 2 controller, I imagine i will be much easier on a PC playing on Steam. Sometimes I moved a block an extra square or two with the Switch 2. It’s an intimidating thought to solve a thousand or more puzzles to finish the full story of the game. I played through a small number of puzzles during my time. But I liked how intuitive it was to do so. And I think the story could be very interesting.
More details
Players will discover they can explore a strange terrain where you can travel into four different worlds. Each world is a separate game with a different story and characters, and with different game mechanics. Unlike other puzzle games where you can easily get “stuck” on a puzzle and can’t make progress as a result, players can explore these worlds and take on puzzles nonlinearly at their own pace – so they can choose to come back to puzzles if they’d like.
By completing all the levels in each of the four worlds, the worlds will collide, the characters meet each other, and the worlds’ different game rules begin interacting, creating crazy situations resulting in whole new game that’ll present itself that combines the various gameplay elements from each world – this is what could be considered as the “end game.”
Order of the Sinking Star is set to launch on Switch 2, PC via Steam and Steam Deck this
year, and the company will be announcing the release date and additional platforms at a later date. The price isn’t set yet, but it won’t be a free-to-play game.
There’ll be a lot of content – well over hundreds of hours’ worth of it. The game has four
expansive, mysterious worlds – each with their own tale to tell – and plan to have over a
thousand puzzles offering hundreds of hours of unique gameplay. There’ll be multiple
endings as well. It will be a single-player game, and it’s possible there will be post-launch content. It will have cross-save options.
In addition to Blow, the developers include Patrick Traynor, game designer of Order of the Sinking Star; and the Arc Games Team.
The Overworld is the game’s main hub. It is here that you can embark on a massive puzzle adventure with dozens of game mechanics and hundreds of hours of unique gameplay! Within the Overworld, the player is free to choose their own path and roam at their own pace, as they have the option to freely explore each of the game’s four expansive and mysterious worlds each with its own characters, rules, dangers and secrets waiting to be uncovered.
There isn’t a “right way” to go, or any pressure to finish a puzzle to progress – it’s up to the player to choose how they’d like to play the game and progress. As the player makes progress in each world, the Overworld will expand drastically, as the fog in the Overworld map will fade away letting the player to see even more of it and be able to take on even more clever puzzles that build upon each other and get more complex than before. There’s more than meets the eye when it comes to the Overworld and the game mechanics that are initially introduced.
For the Overworld, it starts as an anthology of four different games or four different worlds.
To the North: The Hearty Heroes of Hauling – Within this world, a band of fantasy heroes who
started a moving company and ran into trouble. In this world, you can play as a warrior, thief,
wizard, bard, cleric and druid, all of whom have different puzzle abilities.
To the East: The Mirror Isles – It’s here that a wealthy trader is navigating archipelago where in a blink, the mirrors can swap him with his reflection.
To the West: The Promise – There’s an explorer of deep caverns who uses giant gems to power beams of light; the different colored beams allow him to walk through walls, smash boulders or perform 12 different abilities.
To the South: Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes – There’s a marooned sailor in a world of big
stones that skip across the water, lily pads she can ride and rivers she can redirect.