14:08
puzzle game should constantly find new ways to challenge you, gradually teach you skills, reward observation, and offer answers that are logical but not too obvious or confusing. Order of the Sinking Star, a new puzzle game from developer Thekla Interactive and director Jonathan Blow, mostly achieves this goal through impressive, clever, and imaginative level design. But even when the game makes mistakes and is frustrating, it tries so hard that it's easy to move on to another level and find a new opportunity to stretch your brain and test your wits. In fact, the best and worst part of Order of the Sinking Star is its scale. Thekla promises over a thousand puzzles spread across a huge world map filled with individual dungeons that follow the formula of
1987's The Legend of Zelda. And, like in the original Zelda, all of these puzzles involve moving blocks around a grid with a top- down view. Finding a way to make the process of moving blocks challenging, exciting, and unpredictable across hundreds of puzzles is Sinking Star's greatest achievement. But this ingenuity can make the game a bit too sprawling and sometimes clunky. All of these puzzles are born from the many clever and complex mechanics that Order of the Sinking Star implements into its simple basic concept. The game begins in a strange artificial garden, where you control a character who, after a battle, initially wonders if she has died and gone to the afterlife. Although one could assume that in Valhalla or elsewhere there would be
more drinking and fewer tasks for the brain. While exploring the area, she finds audio recordings left by someone else who was here before her and recorded his numerous finds. Now she was present from the first moment Shortly after, you're thrust into a vast open world where you can head in four different directions, each presenting its own set of mechanics. These areas are inspired by other small puzzle games , and the creators of these games act as level designers for their specific areas. From the game world, you can access various puzzle levels that are activated from points on the ground, like cells on a game board.
Completing these puzzles opens the way further to continue exploring the world. Over time, you discover that each of these sections of the map, with unique mechanics, represents a specific world in the understanding of the multiverse. Each world has its own characters that you control within each individual puzzle. The idea of different worlds and their inhabitants falling into this strange ethereal place provides a plot justification for including a variety of different mechanics, and Order of the Thinking Stars gets a convenient excuse to combine them in exciting and new ways when these worlds collide. In the north, you come across levels inspired by the "Heroes of Sokoban" series of games, featuring traditional role-playing
characters: warrior, mage, thief, and more. Each of them has their own special abilities. A warrior can push multiple blocks at once, unlike others who only move one. The mage instantly swaps places with other characters or objects if they are facing them, and the thief cannot push objects forward, but can pull them behind her. The East borrows mechanics from the game "Mirror Isles", where mirrors can teleport objects at right angles. Inspired by "Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes," South offers a series of puzzles involving throwing pebbles across water to create paths and change the current.
The event is based on the game "Promise" and focuses on the use of special rays that allow characters to pass through walls, teleport over long distances, destroy objects, and more. These individual zones work well as improvements and expansions of the original games that inspired them, and offer a wide range of ways to think thanks to the diverse characters you control. Some cannot push anything at all, but are able to transform objects or carry them in their pockets. One guy is wearing a bulky device, which means he needs space around him to turn around. So you have to approach how he moves through levels differently compared to other heroes. All of these elements create strong and challenging puzzles in their own right. But Order of the Sinking Star
raises the bar significantly when it starts mixing worlds and their mechanics together. The game unfolds best when it forces you to seek creative approaches to thinking, combining all these different aspects. The game definitely teaches you new concepts based on already known ones, mostly in an, and you can always count on the fact that if you're stuck, it means you've missed something or aren't using all the available elements. In nearly 70 hours of play, I only encountered one puzzle that could be solved in a way that didn't seem to be intended by the developers. "Sinking Star" offers many moments of enlightenment when you understand what each puzzle is trying to show you. And then you make a logical leap that makes you feel extremely smart. One of the puzzles
combined a teleportation beam and teleportation mirrors. Under certain circumstances, mirrors can create copies of your character that you must control simultaneously. And soon I was dealing with four characters. But at this level there was only one exit point. So, only one character could complete it. You can't kill any characters and still complete the level. So I had to find a way to turn these four copies into one without using mirrors. When I finally figured out how to merge all these copies together, like in Muse, it changed my view of all the elements and opened up new ways to solve puzzles that I hadn't thought of before.
The downside of mixing ideas from four games is that you have to keep them all in your head at the same time, and it gets very complicated the further you go. There are some puzzles that are so packed with things their difficulty is due to the number of rules, not the need to stretch your thinking. There were times when I would stare at a puzzle for minutes, even hours, only to realize that the solution was a simple but little-known interplay of rules that I had forgotten due to their sheer number. One particularly annoying puzzle required me to use a pushing character, jumping stones, and a pulling character, and I guessed pretty quickly what the solution was supposed to be. But I sat on this puzzle for several hours, trying to figure out its second
step. Much later, I realized that I had the correct solution, but I had wasted a lot of time because I had misremembered the rule about the movement of the stones from the puzzle I had solved a few hours earlier. To some extent, Thinking Stars' mechanics can work against the game, and it sometimes feels huge just for the sake of feeling huge. On the other hand, the game is so big that you can always just go somewhere else and succeed there, because there will always be something else to solve. Thinking Stars is also generous in how easily it allows you to experiment with different puzzle solutions and correct mistakes. The instant undo button takes you back one action, and an action is moving your character one grid space. It's
incredibly easy to just take a step back in time before you accidentally knocked an important item off a cliff or backed yourself into a corner. There is also a separate button to instantly restart the puzzle without any downloads. You can slow down or speed up time at will, which makes it easier to complete puzzles with tricky timing or allows you to skip boring moments when you're waiting for something to happen. The high permissiveness of Thinking Stars makes the game very convenient for experimenting and testing ideas without wasting more time than you've already lost due to your own inattention.
Other puzzles should adopt this design approach if possible. While The Witness's puzzle design is generally excellent, and the game is full of inventive challenges and interesting interactions, it does get tiresome over time. The plot elements that should give you the main incentive to explore ultimately turn out to be quite weak. At least during the many dozens of hours I spent in the game. Each character has their own personality, goals, and motivations, and they all get into trouble by accidentally finding themselves in this strange world of puzzles. But the snippets of history you find for each of them are never particularly satisfying. RPG heroes from the north are chasing some evil magister, but he is little more than a disembodied voice,
if present at all. A prospector from the bean world wants to collect gems for research and personal gain, and I never understood why. Those mirrors are part of some series of tests, and the mirror character failed them somewhere in their past. So what ? All the stories are presented in tiny, disjointed pieces and mostly seem like just a cover to justify new puzzle ideas, making them more confusing than exciting. And the great mystery of what this puzzle place is, why it exists, and who created it is equally incomprehensible. The answers are there, that much is obvious, but they require even greater effort to understand the mysteries of The Witness.
Having reached the game's first ending, left with only a bunch of questions and unresolved storylines, it became clear that the motivation to continue playing The Witness should be to enjoy discovering new interesting challenges that the developers have prepared, rather than to unravel the plot around them. Often, however, these challenges are enough. I loved realizing I had learned something that would help me find a solution on the world map, only to open up a whole new area with a bunch of puzzles that used a fresh take on what had already been established. And these new approaches never seem to end or get boring. Perhaps The Witness would have worked better if the approach to placing its vast number of puzzles had been
more deliberate, but occasional frustration and over-complexity are an acceptable price to pay for the opportunity to play with so many interesting ideas.
