Order of the Sinking Star [Preview]: One giant map

Hands-on with systems upon systems in the upcoming puzzler

I couldn’t help that while playing Order of the Sinking Star at Nintendo’s Switch 2 space at Summer Game Fest I felt that I was being judged.

Not by the developers sitting on the seat next to me.

Not by the PR reps walking around the area.

Not even by the game itself, which quickly ramps up the challenge in the puzzles we come across.

No, I was being judged by someone much less merciful and much more harsh: myself.

Every decision I made moving my character across the play field forced me to reckon with my actions. Did I move too far by a single step? Did I push that rock up one place too much? Did I walk in front of the mirror at the right spot? And as I play the demo I’m watched by the developer, Jonathan Blow, as he scribbles notes on his paper pad (probably something akin to “this dude is neurotic, he keeps walking in circles”). Yes, I kept walking in circles.

But also, that’s kind of the point. That’s how we DO solve these challenges.

The game focuses on characters within a magical world, portrayed by a map shrouded in a fog of war. As we clear out area after area the fog slowly dissipates and more of the world is revealed. While I never see the cleared world, I’m able to zoom out and see that it’s quite massive, which adds to the idea that I’ll need to keep learning as I play this game, and remembering what I’m learning, and piecing those learnings together.

The game is set from an overhead perspective, and we move around the map on a tile-by-tile basis. There are four major biomes in the game, but for this demo Blow suggests I start with the North or East, since they’re a little easier and helpful in getting the basics of how to manipulate the game’s world. They’re not tutorials, per se, but they deal with puzzle types that we’re already used to from playing decades of games already: we can push stones around, if we’re the Thief character we can pull them, if we’re a sort of strongman we can crush the stones, and if we’re a wizard we can trade places with them. Each of these characters (and there are plenty) are built around traditional RPG archetypes, but here they’re boiled down to a singular ability that greatly changes how we approach the puzzles.

To kick off a series of puzzles we step on a star located in the starting area of a biome, then enter the puzzle room and try to make our way to the goal. That seems simple enough; as I said above, we’ve done puzzles like this before. But I also can’t help staring at the singular rooms and wondering if I could have achieved the puzzle in fewer moves, in less steps, or by using my character’s ability in a different way. This becomes ever more apparent in an area that requires pushing mirrors around islands to teleport to adjacent ones, as I already start telling myself in my head that “I can do this the easy way, but I don’t want to. I want to do this in a more unique way.”

So these are simple puzzle rooms that we can bash through, right? With enough time and effort we’ll get THESE, but the real challenge lies later in the biomes. As I head to the South and West areas on the map, Jonathan Blow notes that these puzzles rely more on how we start to piece together the things we learned in the other areas, using that knowledge to do things like push rocks and carry crystals to activate spaces. The rooms here also span more than one screen, sometimes scrolling for several lengths and requiring that I remember where I placed a crystal and where one might go next.

And yet, that’s really just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. The 20 minute demo didn’t remotely dent the fog on the map, and as I comprehend what the adventure could entail Blow tells me that the game could likely take hundreds of hours for completionists to really “get” everything. It’s built on linking our puzzle ideas together, on pushing and pulling, on teleporting while pushing and pulling, and then on forgetting all of that because it may be holding us back from just walking around in a circle until we get it right.

I have a feeling when this game arrives I’ll probably walk around in circles, until I get it right, and then walk around some more because I’ll be yelling at myself to get it more right.

Order of the Sinking Star from Thekla Inc and Arc Games is planned for a 2026 release on Switch 2 and Steam, with a Next Fest demo available starting on June 15.