Order of the Sinking Star Review: A Huge Puzzle Game That Risks Being Too Much
A gigantic puzzle game that transforms Sokoban into something much more ambitious, but its sheer vastness ultimately becomes a limitation.
Order of the Sinking Star starts from a precise conviction: a good idea doesn't necessarily have to be shelved when it seems to have expressed all its potential. It can be modified and re-tested. It is on this principle that Thekla builds an enormous puzzle game, with over 1,400 puzzles and hundreds of hours required for anyone who wants to explore every possibility.
The result is often extraordinary, but quantity doesn't always work in favor of the project. The more Order of the Sinking Star expands its vocabulary, the more it demands an almost encyclopedic memory of previously learned rules from the player. From this ambition arise some of the best moments of the experience, along with a fatigue that ultimately becomes part of the game's very structure.
Order of the Sinking Star takes Sokoban far beyond its origins
At its core remains the tradition of Sokoban. The player moves within environments organized according to a grid and must modify the arrangement of elements to achieve the goal. However, Thekla uses this grammar only as a starting point.
The world is built around four different families of mechanics derived from pre-existing puzzle games. One section works on the different abilities of the characters, while another uses mirrors to modify position and movement. In other areas, ray-based systems come into play. There are also puzzles related to stones to be bounced on water.
Each of these ideas could sustain an autonomous campaign. However, Order of the Sinking Star becomes much more interesting when it stops keeping them separate.
The best puzzles arise when rules begin to blend
The progression gradually leads to the meeting of systems that, in the early hours, seem independent. It is here that Thekla's project finds its identity.
A mirror can interact with a rule learned elsewhere and completely change the way a room is interpreted. The same happens with character abilities, which take on a different meaning when inserted into problems built around other logics.
The level design works primarily because it manages to derive new questions from already known rules. Rarely does the game need to simply make a puzzle bigger: it prefers to modify the relationship between the elements present.
This is why the moment of solution is so effective. Satisfaction does not arise from discovering a hidden object or correctly executing a predetermined sequence. It comes when one understands something that, a few minutes earlier, seemed impossible to see.
The difficulty of Order of the Sinking Star can become exhausting
However, this philosophy comes at a cost. The complexity continues to increase, and the game asks you to remember interactions introduced many hours earlier (even tens of hours earlier). In some cases, the difficulty arises from the need to change perspective. In others, the sheer quantity of rules to keep in mind simultaneously is the main burden.
The difference is significant. A difficult puzzle can be stimulating when it hides an elegant deduction. It becomes more tiresome when the main obstacle is correctly remembering a property learned a long time ago.
The open structure at least partially mitigates the problem. If a puzzle seems insurmountable, it's possible to set it aside and look for another path elsewhere. The rewind system also allows for quick correction of a wrong choice, treating failure as part of the experiment rather than a punishment.
However, a feeling remains difficult to ignore: Order of the Sinking Star doesn't always know when to stop. Its vastness is impressive, but at times it seems to become an end in itself.
The story remains secondary to the puzzles
The narrative component tries to provide context to the game's structure through the mystery surrounding the world and the characters inhabiting it. Other information emerges through audio recordings.
However, the writing struggles to exert the same attraction as the puzzles. The narrative fragments are distributed throughout an enormous experience and risk losing strength when separated by long sequences dedicated to puzzles.
The contrast emerges especially when a successful puzzle naturally encourages progression, while the prospect of discovering a new fragment of the story rarely exerts the same pull. The narrative accompanies the game, but it is not what sustains it.
Order of the Sinking Star is an exceptional, but uncompromising, puzzle game
Order of the Sinking Star is difficult to evaluate according to usual criteria because it takes a very precise conception of the puzzle game to its extreme consequences. It doesn't want to merely propose a long series of puzzles: it builds a language and continuously puts it to the test, verifying how many transformations it can withstand.
When the system works, the result is remarkable. Rules interact with each other, and an apparently exhausted mechanic can suddenly take on a new role. When, however, density takes over, the project's intelligence risks turning into a burden.
What makes Thekla's game special, therefore, is not the quantity of content, but the way it uses its own rules. Precisely for this reason, a more rigorous selection of puzzles could have made it even more impactful.