Order of the Sinking Star is the first new game from Jonathan Blow and his studio Thekla since The Witness, and it took close to ten years. It came out on October 8 on Steam, PlayStation 5 and Switch 2 for $29.99. It’s a top-down block-pushing puzzle game with more than a thousand handmade puzzles spread over an open map. Two days in, Steam rates it Overwhelmingly Positive, puzzle fans are calling it the best Sokoban game in years, and the people who bounced off it mostly say the same thing: there is just so much of it.
Picture a crossword book where every few pages a new rule shows up, and then the rules start borrowing from each other.
Four games, one map
The game is split into four worlds, and each one began life as someone else’s puzzle game. One is about a party of heroes, each with their own way of moving and pushing. Another fires beams of light across a cavern. A third has you swapping places with your reflection across a string of islands, and the fourth has you throwing stones into water to build a path. You can walk into any of them from the start and leave whenever you get stuck.
Later the worlds run into each other. Characters from one part of the map meet characters from another, and their mechanics start working in the same puzzles. The cast includes a queen, a thief, a warrior, a wizard and a talking boat, all voiced; Emily O’Brien plays the Queen. A story about the Order of the Sinking Star runs underneath, told through dialogue and notes you pick up along the way.
One fan, almost 12 hours in, summed up how unusual that scale is for this kind of game:
“this is maximalist in a genre that's traditionally the opposite. puzzle games (especially niche stuff like sokoban) tend to be stripped down lean things. this is not that.”
Hard, but fair, say the fans
The praise is mostly about the puzzles themselves. People talk about small grids with a clear idea in each one, mechanics that show up, get combined and get dropped before they wear thin, and a ramp in difficulty that teaches without tutorial pop-ups. Undo and reset work instantly, so trying a wild idea costs nothing, and even a self-described non-puzzle person with four and a half hours says that’s what got them hooked. Anyone who played the demo before launch picks up where they left off, since the full game reads the old save.
It still gets hard, and fans of The Witness seem to like it that way. Someone who got stuck one evening says they woke up in the night with the answer. Another, ten hours in, described the usual experience like this:
“You'll think of solutions, only to realize in horror that the designers thought of it too, and have removed the one piece needed to make it work. This will happen 5 times per puzzle.”
The critics mostly agree. PlayStation Universe gave it 10/10, TechRaptor 9/10, and GameSpot 8/10, under a headline calling the game enormous “for better and worse”. It sits at 83 on OpenCritic.
When the size gets in the way
The same scale is the main complaint. A small group of people who quit within the first couple of hours say the endless run of grids wore them down. One with 1.6 hours put it plainly:
“This is like buying a book of sudoku and doing one after another.”
Jump Dash Roll (7/10) says the size sometimes turns discovery into “something resembling homework”, and Push Square’s 6/10 argues the game runs out of steam before it really starts to flex. Even fans have practical gripes. The overworld can be confusing to get around, puzzles have no names or labels, which makes them hard to look up or return to, and there’s no quick way to pick a level. One owner adds that the voice lines can’t be skipped. The story divides people: some find it intriguing, others call the writing cringe or say the voice direction talks to you like a child.
Launch-week fixes
The first days brought crashes, often when opening the map, for a share of PC owners. On October 9 Thekla pushed an update that rolled back the Steam SDK version the game uses, which the studio says caused the incompatibilities, and it now asks for SteamClient021 or Proton 9 and up. The game is Steam Deck Verified, and one owner reports 60 frames per second on default settings. Laptops with integrated graphics have a harder time, though turning the resolution down helps.
The Jonathan Blow question
It’s hard to talk about this game without the man whose name sells it. Blow is a polarising figure online for his politics, and that followed the game from its reveal. In December 2025, Alan Hazelden, whose Mirror Isles and Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes are part of its foundation, praised the game’s concept in a public post but said his beliefs and Blow’s “are not aligned”. Jonah Ostroff and Sean Barrett, the other two designers whose games it builds on, later said they agreed. Publisher Arc Games told Bloomberg that “individual creators may hold personal views on a variety of topics, but those views are their own”.
Credit became a second argument. According to Game File, an early version of the game had an in-game sign naming Hazelden as the “Instigator” of one area, and the June demo removed it. Blow’s only comment was that “contributors to the game will be credited”, and in August a spokesperson told Polygon the full credits would arrive “in a special way in-game”. The Steam page now names all four source games and their designers. On Steam the politics show up at the edges: a few negative scores are about Blow rather than the puzzles, one fan says his views are a shame but the game is worth it anyway, and an owner with seven hours calls the crediting “overly hidden”.
Should you buy it now?
If you loved The Witness, Baba Is You, Stephen’s Sausage Roll or Patrick’s Parabox, the evidence is about as strong as it gets: this is the big one, and early owners already expect to be playing it for months. The October 9 patch has dealt with the worst of the launch crashes, so there’s little reason to wait on PC. If you want a puzzle game you can finish over a weekend, or you came for the story, this one asks a lot more of you. The demo is gone now, but Steam refunds anything played for under two hours, which is about where the people who gave up on it stopped. Steam also has three 10% off bundles: with Mewgenics, with Animal Well, or with the soundtrack.
