Order of the Sinking Star, like the puzzles it contains, is a game I have a lot of complex, often conflicting, feelings about. As a collection of sokoban puzzles? It’s excellent. As a narrative, or an overarching mystery like Blue Prince or Animal Well or Void Stranger? Significantly weaker. As a total package, a game that you might want to play yourself? Complicated.

Order of the Sinking Star is a container for reinvented, newly realized versions of four excellent puzzle games/series:

The Heroes of Sokoban by Jonah Ostroff, which has you using a growing/changing party of adventurers, all with different abilities, to interact with the world to solve block-pushing puzzles. One guy can push, one can pull, one can swap places with blocks, and so forth.

Promesst by Sean Barrett, which is all about activating switches in a maze that activate machines outputting colored beams with different effects on you when you stand in them. You use those beams to collect more gems to activate more beams…and so forth.

Mirror Isles by Alan Hazelden, which uses mirrors to reflect the protagonist across the map and later to split him or objects into multiple and use those to cross a series of islands.

Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes, also by Alan Hazelden. Pushing rocks into the water “skips” them across to the next platform of land, and you use interactions between these stones and other objects, such as lilypads, to make your way through.

The world of Order of the Sinking Star is segmented into four parts, and each section is a series of new puzzles built off the premises of each of those four games, licensed and used with permission.

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