Jonathan Blow is known as one of the forefathers of the indie gaming scene. What’s particularly surprising is that he managed to cement his reputation in the industry despite being notoriously reserved and having released just two original games since 2008: Braid and The Witness. Order of the Sinking Star is his third title since going independent and, according to earlier presentations, his biggest and most ambitious project yet.

We’re talking more than a thousand puzzles, a custom engine, an entirely new programming language developed specifically to build the game, and contributions from other puzzle developers. After spending what feels like an eternity in the oven, Order of the Sinking Star is finally here. Let’s see if it was worth the wait.

Just one of, like, dozens of hundreds of puzzles this game has to offer.

Defining what kind of game Order of the Sinking Star is ain’t the easiest task in the world. Sure, if you want to be as surface-leveled as possible, this is a puzzle game. It’s clearly inspired by block-and-tile games from the past, such as Sokoban and Chip’s Challenge. That would explain, like… about fifty or so of its puzzles, those which actually feature the same premise of pushing blocks onto switches in order to reach the end goal. That’s about 3% of the total amount of puzzles included in Order of the Sinking Star, and I’m only talking about the initial batch of 2D-based puzzles. Once you progress through the seemingly never-ending amount of stuff the game has to offer, 3D puzzles are also added to the mix.

Again, that is just a portion of the variety of puzzles you are presented with. In another entire section of the game’s hub world, puzzles are comprised of using a mirror to create a reflection of yourself in another area of the map. In essence, you use the mirror as an interdimensional teleporter. So far, so complex, right? But wait, there’s more. If you align two mirrors within the same reflection beam, the dual reflections will result in the creation of an additional clone of your character, so you now have to pay proper attention to both of your avatars’ positions, as you control both at the same time.

The game has a lot of voice acting, as well as a deep plot. Can’t say I cared about it, however.

If I start talking about every single kind of puzzle and playable character in Order of the Sinking Star, this review would be 10,000 words long, and I’d never be able to fully write it. The game has a literal thousand, if not more, puzzles for you to solve, with each new area of the overworld usually unlocking a new character, with a complete backstory and full voice acting to boot. It’s a ridiculous amount of content that will require a monstrous amount of dedication and patience from players, as the game doesn’t do much in terms of teaching you mechanics in a tutorialized way. Considering its emphasis on hardcore puzzle players, that is not an issue, mind you.

For the most part, when you reach a new area full of new puzzles, you are given ONE somewhat simple level to complete. This is when you’re able to learn some new mechanic in a shockingly organic (as in, non-verbal) manner. After the simple (but not easy) puzzle is done, Order of the Sinking Star ramps the complexity up to a billion, with a few more puzzles which will require careful thinking, patience, and an absurd amount of trail and error. The latter, thankfully, is done with a simple press of the Select button.

My usual loop in a new level consists in being greeted by the new puzzle, trying to understand its features, playing a bit with its characters and mechanics, failing over and over again, starting to rant, calling the game stupid, giving up on the puzzle, turning the game off for a while, thinking about ways to beat said puzzle, reverting back to the game, trying some other solution, figuring out how to solve it somehow, considering myself a genius for figuring it out on my own, and repeating the process all over again on the next area. There are times I’d take over half an hour on one puzzle alone. There are more than a thousand. You do the math.

If you stand right next to a goblin, it’ll kill you. But if a goblin stands right next to another goblin, they’ll kill each other.

This is not the kind of game that will be completed quickly, and Jonathan Blow fully undestands and expects that. You don’t need to complete all puzzles in order to reach the game’s ending. In fact, you can reach the end credits with about a quarter of them, maybe two fifths. That, by itself, can already reach the fifty hour mark, depending on your skill level. Order of the Sinking Star is a game that generates discourse, makes people ask colleagues and friends about the solution of a specific puzzle, and will probably make entire Youtube channel owners filthy rich if/when they post videos with the solutions to each of the game’s MANY puzzles. Furthermore, since the game isn’t entirely linear (you have four paths to choose from the getgo), not everyone will have the same experience with it.

For a game focused almost entirely on its gameplay and amount of content, this is worthy of a lot of praise. I didn’t care for a second about Order of the Sinking Star‘s plot or audiologs; I was here for the mind-bending challenges and feeling irritated at myself for not having noticed how easy a solution to a level may have been. This game is very, VERY frustrating, but in a somewhat neat kind of way. The relief you feel when a level that was giving you trouble is finally beaten is indescribable.

The awesome feeling of completing a section of the map… only to be greeted by a new sectiion with, like, thrity new puzzles for you to solve.

But that doesn’t mean this will be remembered as one of the greatest puzzle games of all time. At least not at its current state. You see, as creative and well-designed as this game is, the execution of its ideas is, at the very least, wonky, troublesome.

Jonathan Blow and his development team pride themselves on the fact that Order of the Sinking Star was not only developed in a brand new proprietary engine, but also coded in a brand new coding language of its own. According to them, this brand new language, named Jai, allowed them to write lines of code in a much faster and accessible way than C++, the language used in The Witness, to the point of them even planning on releasing it in the future, in order to help other developers reduce the amount of time needed to tackle programming and more bureaucratic side of game development.

Mirror mirror on the wall, what’s the most neverending game of all?

That’s all fine and dandy, but this also means that, whether they like it or not, Order of the Sinking Star is a test subject of a completely unproven engine and technological platform. And, on Switch 2 at least, this resulted in an atrocious framerate, both during puzzle sections and the game’s hub world. In the case of the latter, the framerate could occasionally tank into the single digits. When it comes to the former, the best framerate I could notice was a mere 30fps, which, sure, ain’t a problem for a tile-based puzzler, but considering the visuals don’t seem to look like the most groundbreaking assets and graphics this console has seen so far, are still a disappointment at the end of the day.

If I had to guess, and this is just my own personal theory, is that Order of the Sinking Star is a CPU-heavy game. It’s not pushing graphical boundaries, but there may be something related to its new engine and programming that might require a lot from the system’s CPU, resulting in this wonky framerate.

You are usually given one “easier” introductory puzzle when you are presented to a new character. Just one.

I was also completely unable to play the game in docked mode, thanks to an atrocious glitch that prevented it from displaying properly on my TV. My assumption is that the game failed to adjust its resolution when switching from handheld to docked mode, displaying only a portion of the image instead of scaling it to fit the screen. I can’t confirm whether that’s actually what happened, but it certainly looked like the game was rendering a 1280×720 image within a 1920×1080 display (or whatever equivalent resolution), leaving much of the screen unusable.

I swear, I have never seen such an issue in a Switch or Switch 2 game, ever. It’s the kind of glitch that frustrated me deeply whilst playing Order of the Sinking Star. Whilst I wanted to tackle it on Switch 2, as this is the perfect place to play a session-based puzzler, its seemingly CPU-intensive nature resulted in the battery getting drained quickly. Furthermore, I really wanted to check if the performance was as bad on docked mode as it was on portable. I’ll only able to assert that if, or when, the game gets patched.

You feel like a genius after completing a puzzle. You also feel like an idiot, in a “how haven’t I thought of this sooner” kind of way.

I feel that I may have sounded overly harsh when talking about Order of the Sinking Star, but I want to clarify, once more, that as a puzzle game, this is outstanding. It’s a compilation of a seemingly neverending amount of finely crafted gauntlets that will test your skill, attention, and patience. I really have no qualms about its design and concept; I laud Jonathan Blow and his team in this regard. My massive gripes lie with how poorly optimized and buggy the game is, at least at launch, and most notably when testing on Switch 2. The combination of poor framerates, crashes, and bizarre aspect ratio glitches frustrated me to no end. Maybe that’s another puzzle meant to test my patience. If so, that’s one of the most meta things I have ever seen in a videogame.

Order of the Sinking Star is available now on PS5, PC and Switch 2.

Reviewed on Switch 2

A copy of Order of the Sinking Star was provided by the publisher.