Stored game record
Order of the Sinking Star
From legendary director Jonathan Blow (Braid, The Witness) comes Order of the Sinking Star, a massive narrative adventure featuring more than one thousand hand-crafted puzzles designed to put your intellect to the test. As Queen Effia, you are transported to a realm of curious magic, dangerous contraptions, and vicious monsters. As you make your way, you will 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 gameplay possibilities. Explore at your own pace, revisit worlds and return to challenges as you see fit. 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.
- Thekla, Inc
Platform scores
| Platform | Metascore | Userscore |
|---|---|---|
| Nintendo Switch 2 | 84 | Not stored |
| PC | 83 | 7.8 |
| PlayStation 5 | 86 | 10 |
What players said
Praise
- An inspiration. Achieves exactly what it set out to accomplish. A fantastic demonstration of a new systems programming language. Beautiful visual art, animation, sound design, and music. Phenomenal graphics and systems programming. Wonderful voice acting, direction, and casting. Both the puzzles and the writing made me laugh and gave me pause. A work of art, rampant with ideas, not unlike a Pynchon novel. It runs smoothly on my PlayStation 5 Professional. The true successor to Stephen's Sausage Roll.
- Even only around 20 hrs of play time, I'm confident, having played through every single game in his past oeuvre, that this would be the best indie game in 2026.
- Incredible game and i have yet to discover 90% of it. I cant believe how much work was needed to make this.
Criticism
- Doesn't work with windows 7 and 8, there's no reason for such a simple game not to work on W7/8
- Calling the game a supercollider of games is an absolutely accurate description. But I would add: fun to the description. It’s a blast to play, the graphics and performance are great and the story is unusual in how it works, but interesting and engaging nonetheless. If you were expecting to have an “ah-ha” moment like in The Witness, I have bad news: there’s more like several of them. The big reveal in The Witness was one of most sublime experiences and this game has had three so far. Reaching ending one is absolutely achievable (progress was saved from the demo which helped), but I’m going for completionist, and have no idea how long it will take. And that’s a-ok with me!
- This game will split opinions, either green or red. Let me tell you: If you hit a roadblock and start thinking hard, you will enjoy this game. If you hit the roadblock and are upset that it makes you feel stupid, you will think it's bad design. Basically, skill issue meets low frustration tolerance. For the game might just be the greatest puzzle game I've ever played. The sheer innovation that doesn't stop but just accelerates. So, if you enjoy thinking and can handle being stomped for a bit you are in for a treat.
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What critics said
Praise
- Order of the Sinking Star hands you more than a thousand handcrafted puzzles and no tutorials, and that trust makes it special. Intuitive character abilities, four distinct worlds, and a shared Overworld give every solution a sense of ownership, while undo and restart keep experimentation painless. The same philosophy backfires when progress stalls with no sign of what you missed, and the scale wears thin over long sessions. For patient problem-solvers, it is an excellent fit.
- Order of the Sinking Star’s sprawling world is a triumph of puzzle design, giving its countless mechanics room to develop, intersect, and surprise long after their initial introduction. Yet while its interconnected structure gives the gameplay a genuine sense of depth, the same cannot be said for its narrative. Its verbose dialogue, meandering audio logs, and self-conscious musings on game design seem to reach for the sort of philosophical complexity that defined Blow’s previous works, but rarely offer anything worth reflecting on. The result is a game whose puzzles continually reward curiosity, while its attempts at profundity leave me wishing there was less to read and more to solve.
- An interesting concept gives way to a bloat that squanders the potential pulled from the games on which Order of the Sinking Star is based (and that it recreates). The result is puzzles curiously devoid of fun or reward and a slog of epic proportions.
Criticism
- Order of the Sinking Star demands a lot from its players, but rewards them with plenty of variety through four distinct directions, each with its own mechanics, style and story. The lack of hints and increasing difficulty can be frustrating, especially for casual puzzlers, but the way the different systems come together in the Gold Rooms creates satisfying aha-moments. It is a game that trusts players to think for themselves, making it a rewarding challenge for puzzle enthusiasts.