Thekla took four small puzzle games by other designers and taught them to speak to one another. The size everyone argues about is exactly what makes it belong on a handheld.
Borrowed rules, new sentences
A block-pushing puzzle is the oldest grammar in the genre. You have a grid, a body, a box and a goal, and every rule the designer adds is a new word in a language the player has to learn to read. Most puzzle games teach you one language very well. Order of the Sinking Star teaches you four, then spends the rest of its considerable length asking you to write in all of them at once.
That is the whole design, and it explains both why the game is extraordinary and why it will lose some people along the way. Jonathan Blow’s studio, Thekla, did not invent most of the rules here. It licensed them. The foundations come from Jonah Ostroff’s Heroes of Sokoban trilogy, Alan Hazelden’s Mirror Isles and Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes, and Sean Barrett’s Promesst games, with further design contributions from Patrick Traynor of Patrick’s Parabox fame, Marc ten Bosch of Miegakure and others. What Thekla added is the thing none of those games could have had on their own: a reason for their rules to collide.
The result is a puzzle game built on more than 1,000 hand-made boards, in development for close to a decade since The Witness, and released on October 8, 2026, on Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5 and PC. Arc Games kindly provided the Nintendo Switch 2 code for this review.
I saw its story through, and I kept going long after the credits had stopped being the point. That second part matters, because this is a game whose shape only becomes clear once you have stopped counting puzzles and started noticing how they rhyme.
A realm that keeps the questions to itself
You arrive in a strange, dreamlike plane with no companions and no explanation, calling out for friends who do not answer. The opening refuses the usual courtesy of an NPC who sits you down and lays out the stakes. What you get instead is an audio log from another stranded traveler, which makes the mystery larger rather than smaller, and a hub with roads leading off toward the points of the compass.
Each road leads to a portal, and each portal drops you into a different world with its own heroes, its own rules and its own small history. A queen, a thief, a warrior, a wizard and a talking boat are among the characters who carry those threads. The titular Order is the knot that ties them together, and working out what it did, and why these worlds are bleeding into one another, is the long game underneath the short one.
The structure is open from the first minutes. Stuck in one world, you walk back to the hub and try another, and nothing punishes the detour. That freedom is the single most important decision in the design, and I will come back to it, because it is what turns a frightening number into a manageable one.
Four worlds, four rulebooks
The first world most people will drift toward belongs to the heroes, and it is the cleanest introduction to how Order of the Sinking Star thinks. Each hero manipulates blocks in one specific way. The warrior pushes. The thief pulls a block along behind her. The wizard swaps places with whatever lies in his line of sight, an instant teleport that rewrites the board in a single move. Alone, each verb is simple. Together, with a party you switch between on the same grid, they become a little algebra problem in which the order of operations decides everything. Later heroes arrive with abilities that bend the rules further, and the game is careful to give each new arrival enough boards to become second nature before it starts mixing them.
The Mirror Isles are stranger and, for my money, the most elegant of the four. Here you teleport to the position of your own reflection, so where you stand relative to a mirror determines where you will land on the other side of it. Mirrors can be pushed. Objects can be sent through them. Position things correctly and you can produce copies of yourself, which is the kind of idea that sounds like a gimmick in a sentence and turns into a whole curriculum in practice.
The skipping-stones world takes a verb anyone who has stood near a lake understands. Push a stone toward water and it skims across the surface, and the lily pads it nudges along the way become the stepping paths you need to cross. It is the most visual of the four rulebooks, because so much of the planning happens in your head as an imagined trajectory before you commit a single push.
The cave world, built on Barrett’s ideas, is the densest. Colored beams of light carry their own properties, gems power them, and the boards ask you to carry those gems through a space whose geometry keeps changing as beams switch on and off. It is the world that explains itself least, and the one where the game’s reluctance to teach outright is most noticeable. It is also, once it clicks, the one that produces the deepest satisfaction.
What unites all four is restraint. The boards are small, readable at a glance, and stripped of anything that does not participate in the solution. Nothing is decorative on the grid itself. When you are stuck, you are never stuck because you missed an object hidden in the corner. You are stuck because you have not yet understood something about the rules you already have, which is the only honest way for a puzzle to be hard.
When the rulebooks collide
The individual worlds would each sustain a small, excellent game. The reason Order of the Sinking Star exists is what happens when they stop being separate.
As you push outward, the map begins to fold together. Regions open between the cardinal worlds where characters meet, and suddenly the heroes are standing on the same board as the mirrors, or a skipping stone is the only way to ferry a gem to where a beam needs it. These are not novelty crossovers. They work because each original ruleset was already rigorous, so combining two of them produces interactions that are surprising yet entirely fair. A thief pulling a block through a mirror, a wizard swapping with a stone mid-skim: the game finds dozens of these, and every one of them feels like a sentence that could only be written in a shared language.
This is also where the game’s size stops being a statistic and becomes a method. You need those hundreds of single-language boards earlier on, because without them the combined puzzles would be unreadable. The early worlds are the vocabulary lessons. The intersections are the essays. Anyone who judges the opening hours as repetitive is judging the grammar drills without having reached the literature, and the payoff, when it comes, is the best argument for the whole approach.
The overworld participates too. The map is itself built from puzzle logic, so moving between areas often asks you to apply what you have learned rather than simply walk. It never quite becomes the living, investigable place that the island of The Witness was, and the long walks between stars can feel like corridors between exam rooms. But it is a smart frame, and it makes the world feel like one object rather than a menu of levels.
The story, and the talking
The narrative is told in fragments: audio logs found in the world, and conversations between characters that bookend many of the stages. It is a slow build. For a good stretch it is content to be atmospheric, and only once you have spent real time in several worlds do the threads start to tie, with characters behaving differently depending on who they are standing beside and the shape of the Order coming into focus.
I will be honest about where it slips. The writing is too verbose for the rhythm of the game around it. A puzzle you have just cracked after a long stare is a moment of release, and being handed a page of dialogue at exactly that point is an interruption rather than a reward. The delivery is uneven too, with some exchanges landing warmly and others feeling as though they were written for a different, slower medium. And revisiting what you have heard is needlessly awkward. A story told in scattered pieces across four worlds badly needs a simple archive of logs and conversations, and the absence of one means details slip away precisely when the plot starts to depend on them.
None of this sinks the game, because the story is optional in every practical sense. You can engage with it closely or let it wash past while you focus on the boards, and the puzzles lose nothing either way. It is a missed opportunity in a game where almost everything else is considered to the last tile.
One answer per board
The sharper criticism concerns the puzzles themselves, and it is worth stating plainly because it defines who this game is for.
Order of the Sinking Star almost always has one intended solution, and it holds you to it. The genre is at its giddiest when you feel you have outfoxed the designer, arranging the pieces in some unlikely way that still reaches the exit. That feeling is rare here. The mirror world in particular invites creative abuse, letting you duplicate yourself in ways that seem as if they ought to break a board open, and the game will sometimes simply decline to count a solution that technically reaches the goal by a route it did not intend. It is a deliberate choice, consistent with Blow’s career-long insistence that a puzzle should teach one specific idea, but it costs the game some of the anarchic joy that its own mechanics keep promising.
There is a second consequence. Because the boards are compact, a determined player can brute-force a fair number of them, cycling through pushes and rewinding until something works. The game cannot prevent that, and on the weaker boards it can make the experience feel more like elimination than insight. The best boards, and there are hundreds of them, resist it entirely; they are too deep for trial and error to stumble through.
There is also no hint system. The game trusts you to learn each new mechanic by experiment, and the openness of the map is its substitute for help: if a world has stalled you, go somewhere else and come back with a fresher head. That works most of the time. It does not work when a new rule is introduced too obliquely, and the cave world in particular has moments where a single demonstrative board would have saved a great deal of fruitless pushing.
Graphics and performance on Switch 2
Visually, the game is quietly gorgeous. The top-down 3D worlds are full of bright, saturated color, soft lighting and fantasy detail that has no bearing on the puzzles but gives each realm a strong identity at a glance. The boards themselves stay clean and legible, which matters enormously on a 7.9in handheld screen where a misread tile is a wasted five minutes. I never once lost a puzzle to visual clutter, in handheld or docked.
The Switch 2 version does have a performance caveat. The frame rate dips in the larger, interconnected areas, both on and off the dock, and it generally runs below the smoothness the PC version offers. In almost any other genre that would be a serious complaint. In a turn-based, grid-based puzzle game, where nothing is happening while you think and every move resolves instantly, it is a cosmetic one. It is most visible on the overworld and in the biggest combined boards, rarely inside the small puzzle rooms where the actual work happens, and it never once affected an input. A patch to tidy it would be welcome; its absence is no reason to choose another platform.
What the Switch 2 does offer is the best possible relationship with this particular game. Reset and rewind are instant, so retrying a board from scratch costs nothing. The console’s quick suspend and resume means a puzzle can be picked up for a minute on a train, set down mid-thought and resumed hours later exactly where you left it. For a game built from more than 1,000 self-contained problems, that is not a convenience. It is the ideal format.
Soundtrack and sound design
The music is sparse by design, and it is one of the game’s smartest decisions. The score sits low and contemplative, sometimes whimsical, sometimes faintly haunting, and almost never asserts itself over your concentration. On a hard board it becomes a kind of focus aid, the aural equivalent of a quiet library, and it rarely drifts into the repetition that ruins long puzzle sessions in lesser games.
Sound design does a great deal of quiet functional work as well. Pushes, pulls, swaps and skims each have distinct, satisfying audio cues, so you can follow the consequences of a move by ear while your eyes are already planning the next one. It is the kind of craft you notice only when you return to a game that lacks it.
Length, difficulty and the size question
The argument everyone is having about this game is whether it is simply too big, and it is the right argument to have, because the answer depends on how you intend to play it.
The full experience runs to hundreds of hours. Seeing the story through demands a good deal less than every board, but still includes plenty of essential puzzles that will stop you cold. Approached as a game to be finished in a few weekends, it will wear you down; the early worlds pace themselves deliberately, and the payoff of the intersections comes later than an impatient player will want. If you treat its size as a mountain to be conquered, the game will win.
Approached the way its structure clearly intends, it is something else: a place to return to. A handful of boards with your morning coffee. A single brutal one turned over in your head on a walk, where the solution arrives unbidden hours later and you go back to the console to confirm it. The open map means you are never genuinely blocked, only redirected, and the volume of material means there is always another thread to pull. Seen like that, the size is not excess. It is a promise that the game will still have something new for you in spring.
Difficulty is high and uneven in the way all serious puzzle games are uneven: a run of boards that fall in minutes, then one that occupies an entire evening. It makes you feel brilliant, then hopeless, then brilliant again, often within the same quarter hour. That oscillation is the genre at its purest, and Order of the Sinking Star delivers more of it than any puzzle game I can name.
Accessibility in the conventional sense is mostly about clarity here, and the game does well by it. Clean boards, distinct sound cues, an unobtrusive score and instant undo all reduce friction. What it will not do is lower the intellectual bar, and the lack of hints means newcomers to the genre should expect to lean on patience more than on the game itself.
Verdict
Order of the Sinking Star is the most ambitious puzzle game in years, and the ambition is earned rather than declared. Its rules are borrowed, but the conversation between them is entirely its own, and the moment four rulebooks finally meet on one board is the most rewarding thing the genre has produced in a long time. Its weaknesses are real: dialogue that talks too much at the wrong moments, no archive for a story that needs one, a rigid insistence on intended solutions, no hints for its most oblique rules, and a Switch 2 frame rate that wobbles in the biggest areas. None of them touches the core, which is a vast, rigorous and beautifully made machine for making you think.
Play it if you love puzzle games and want one that will still be teaching you something months from now, and play it on Switch 2 if you want to live with it a few boards at a time, which is how it is meant to be lived with. Skip it if you need a story to pull you forward, or if a thousand problems sounds like a chore list rather than an invitation.
