'500-hour' Order of the Sinking Star is as complex and exhausting as it sounds

Order of the Sinking Star is a gargantuan open-world puzzle game from Thekla that remixes and unites mechanics from several indie Sokoban-style games into a cohesive top-down grid. Promised as a "500-hour" experience, its map is divided into cardinal regions that each riff on different designs - mirror teleportation, laser-and-gem beams, multi-hero block-pushing, and rock-skipping - then layers those systems together in hybrid puzzles. Many individual chambers and combination puzzles are elegantly constructed, producing inventive set pieces (a timed dragon-and-mirror rescue, teleporting monsters that kill one another) and an overworld that itself functions as an unlockable puzzle through fog-clearing progression reminiscent of The Witness.

That brilliance is paired with significant drawbacks: the game is explicitly expert-level and relentlessly escalates in complexity, making sessions mentally exhausting rather than refreshingly varied. Puzzles often demand long stretches of precise, endurance-heavy execution; reset and rewind tools help but do not always clarify whether a situation is unsolvable or simply difficult to see through. Story threads and in-chamber fables provide little motivational payoff so far, and placeholder voice work undermines narrative hooks. The result is a masterpiece of design on a micro level that risks alienating players with its constant difficulty and sparse rewards, a work that impresses and drains in equal measure.