Order Of The Sinking Star review – the puzzle game of the generation

Order Of The Sinking Star – prepare to be happily confounded (Arc Games) The creator of Braid and The Witness returns with a game that is not only incredibly well made but so full of puzzles it will take you hundreds of hours to complete it. Not for the first time this year, we struggle to understand how a developer ever had the time or capacity to make their game as massive as it is. Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave was incomprehensibly huge and, in that instance, it had only been three years since the creator’s last game. It’s been 10 years since Jonathan Blow’s last major game – puzzle title The Witness – but this manages to make that seem like a trifle by comparison. Blow is best known as the creator of seminal indie title Braid and clearly has a great interest in puzzles. Each game has had a different type, with Braid featuring time-based mechanics and The Witness revolving around very formalised grid-based conundrums. Order Of The Sinking Star features much more variety, with four distinct types of puzzles. Although all of them take place in small, single-screen areas and involve sliding block puzzles to one degree or another. Chip’s Challenge may be the most obvious comparison, for those that remember it, although the game’s also reminiscent of the dungeons in 2D Zelda games. But Link never had to face challenges as tough as this… Sliding block puzzles are almost as old as gaming itself, with one of the earliest examples being 1981 game Sokoban (meaning Warehouse Keeper), which appropriately enough was originally a fan-made indie game. Blow has named that as an inspiration but Order Of The Sinking Star has puzzles within puzzles, starting with what the setting of the game is and who it is you’re controlling. Nothing is explained at first, beyond the basics of the controls, as you take on the role of a cloaked, crown-wearing noble. They seem just as confused as to where they are as you, while audio recordings suggest some sort of interdimensional travel. Want GTA 6 news? Sign up to the GameCentral newsletter for the latest GTA 6 news, reviews of new games you should play and exclusive analysis of the biggest stories of the week. Order Of The Sinking Star has a complex story and many characters, with lots of spoken dialogue, but that’s the one element of the game that’s not wholly successful. The script is very verbose, and it can be a long time before you gain any context for what anyone is talking about. It does become clearer, and the game’s overarching plot deals with some interesting subject matter, but making the story as obscure as the puzzles is unnecessarily distancing. The story elements can be ignored entirely, if you wish, as the only thing you really need to know at first is that the worlds to the West and South are considerably more difficult than those to the North and East. Everything is relative, but the North area is the easiest of the four puzzle types and revolves around pushing blocks (crystals or rocks usually) in order to reach an exit. You start off with access to three characters, each with very different abilities: one can push, one can pull (but is forced to do so automatically if she passes a block) and the other swaps places with anything he looks at. Other characters are added as you progress, one of which is immune to damage and another that can turn plants into rocks, but you never get all at once as they all appear in different combinations. In the East, all the puzzles revolve around mirrors that can teleport and clone you, which very quickly gets extremely difficult. This is especially true as the whole game uses a grid-based map system, so that getting into a position to push an object, by having a space you can stand on and still get some leverage, is a constant problem across all the puzzles. Venturing south, the puzzles revolve around skipping stones across the water and negotiating flows of water. These puzzles have connected maps, rather than using the overworld to access separate puzzles, emphasising that this really is four games in one, each with their own rules and format. Although, actually, it’s even more than that once you get further, as eventually the puzzle types start to cross-pollinate, as the game combines mechanics and characters for even more variety. Almost a game without end (Arc Games) The fourth world, to the West, is almost impossibly difficult from the start, even though it’s the closest to a Zelda dungeon, with moving enemies and devices you can activate to negate them, that let you do things like phase through walls and destroy boulders. At any time you can have dozens of different puzzles to tackle, as you open up the overworld (which also has its own puzzles), so it’s rare to come to a complete impasse. However, and this is the real sticking point, there is no hint system. There are subtle and clever hints of new mechanics, in the overworld and in the puzzles themselves, but at no point can you give up and ask the game for help. We’re sure YouTube will be filled with solutions the second the game is out but we had none of that and frankly we want a medal for getting through it all. We say all that but the game has more than 1,400 puzzles and it’d apparently take more than 500 hours to complete them all. We were sent the game weeks in advance, but we hope you’ll forgive us for saying we didn’t complete everything, although you don’t need to finish anywhere near all of them to get to the end of the story. For some, the complete lack of hand-holding and the pretentious storytelling will be off-putting, but what stands out most about Order Of The Sinking Star is not its size but the sheer quality and variety of the puzzles. We have no idea how Blow and his team designed them all, but it is certainly not a question of quantity over quality. The rush you get from completing a puzzle, and patting yourself on the back for being so incredibly clever, is immensely satisfying. Order Of The Sinking Star could easily have been a quarter of the size and it’d still be one of the best puzzle games of all time. The fact that its pleasures are almost without end just makes it even better and, apart from anything else, the best value game of the year. Order Of The Sinking Star review summary In Short: An incredible achievement in terms of the volume and quality of puzzles, with a huge amount of variety and a reward around every corner. Pros: Extremely well-designed puzzles and an impressive amount of variety, even when using similar mechanics. Subtle visual clues make solving puzzles on your own more rewarding. Huge volume of content. Cons: The lack of any hint system will definitely frustrate some, although it’ll be less of a problem post-launch. The dialogue can seem very pretentious and distracting. Score: 9/10 Formats: Nintendo Switch 2 (reviewed), PlayStation5, and PCPrice: £26.75Publisher: Arc GamesDeveloper: Thekla, Inc.Release Date: 8th October 2026Age Rating: 3 It’s more fun to solve on your own (Arc Games) Email gamecentral@metro.co.uk, leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter. To submit Inbox letters and Reader’s Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here. For more stories like this, check our Gaming page. Arrow MORE: Former Sony exec reveals Nintendo’s sweary response to original PSP reveal Arrow MORE: New PlayStation Portal OLED model coming soon suggests new Sony filing Arrow MORE: Games Inbox: Will there be an official GTA 6 and PS5 console bundle? 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