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Order Of The Sinking Star Sometimes Has Too Much Of A Great Thing
A good puzzle game needs to constantly find new ways to challenge you, to walk you through skills and reward your observations, and to contain answers that make logical sense without being too obvious, or too obtuse.
Order of the Sinking Star, the latest puzzler from developer Thekla Interactive and director Jonathan Blow, mostly hits those marks with impressive, cunning, and devious puzzle design. But even when it misses and gets frustrating, the game takes so many swings that it's easy to head to another level and find another opportunity to bend your brain and stretch your smarts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMaW-V42Xwg
In fact, the best and worst part of Order of the Sinking Star is how expansive it is. Thekla touts over 1,000 puzzles to solve spread across an expansive overworld map that's full of discreet dungeon-like levels, mimicking the formula of 1987's The Legend of Zelda. And like the original Zelda, all of those puzzles involve pushing blocks around a grid, seen from a top-down perspective. Finding ways to keep the act of pushing blocks challenging, compelling, and unpredictable for hundreds of puzzles is Sinking Star's greatest feat, but that ingenuity can also make the game a little too sprawling and, at times, unwieldy.
All those puzzles are born of the many smart and intricate mechanics Order of the Sinking Star brings to bear on its simple underlying concept. The game finds you in what appears to be some kind of strange artificial garden facility, and you start by controlling a character who, after being plucked from some kind of battle, at first wonders if she's died and is now in the afterlife. But one assumes Valhalla or whatever would have more drinking and fewer brain teasers. As she sets about exploring, she discovers audio logs left behind by some other person who explored the place ahead of her and recorded his many findings.
Soon after, you enter a massive open overworld, where you can set out in four different directions, each representing a different set of mechanics. Those areas are each inspired by other, smaller puzzle games, and here those games' creators serve as level designers for their specific areas. From the overworld, you can enter different puzzle levels, activated from points on the ground like spaces on a game board. Completing those puzzles opens pathways forward to keep exploring the overworld.
What you soon discover is that each of these sections of the map, with its unique mechanics, represents a specific world in the multiverse sense. Each world has its own characters, whom you control within individual puzzle levels. The idea of different worlds and their denizens being pulled into this strange, ethereal place provides a story reason to include a ton of different mechanics, and then gives Order of the Sinking Star a handy excuse to combine them in fascinating and novel ways as the different worlds collide.
In the north, you run across levels inspired by the Heroes of Sokoban games, sporting traditional role-playing characters, like a Warrior, Mage, Thief, and so on. Each has their own capability: The Warrior can push multiple blocks at once as opposed to just one at a time, the Mage instantly swaps places with other characters or objects when he faces them, and the Thief can't push objects forward but can drag them behind her. The east draws its mechanics from the game Mirror Isles, where mirrors can teleport objects at right angles. The south, inspired by Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes, carries a series of puzzles that have to do with skipping stones across water to create pathways and divert currents, while the west builds on Promesst and is all about using special beams that let characters walk through walls, teleport long distances, destroy objects, and more.
Those individual areas work well as upgrades to and expansions on the original titles that inspired them, and present a wide array of different modes of thinking as you explore, thanks to the array of characters you control as you go. Several can't push things at all but can transform objects or carry them in a pocket. One guy wears a bulky contraption that means he needs empty space around him to turn, so you have to think differently about how he navigates levels than you do with other characters. All those elements make for strong, tough puzzles in their own right, but Order of the Sinking Star raises the bar significantly as it starts to mash the worlds and their mechanics together.
Sinking Star hits best when it's pushing you toward creative ways of thinking with combinations of all those different aspects, and the game deftly teaches you new concepts that build on old ones in mostly intuitive ways. The puzzle design all the way through is impressively tight, and you can always rely on the idea that if you're stumped, it's because you're missing something or you're not using all the included elements. Through my nearly 70 hours with the game, I encountered only one puzzle that could be solved in a way that didn't seem to be what the developers explicitly intended. Sinking Star produces a ton of "ah-ha!" moments as you realize what each puzzle is trying to show you, and you then extrapolate a leap that makes you feel extra smart.
One puzzle featured both a teleporting beam and the teleporting mirrors. Under the right circumstances, the mirrors can create copies of your character that you have to control all at once, and I quickly wound up with four characters to deal with--but this level had only one exit spot, so only one character could complete it. You can't kill any characters and still finish a level, so I had to find a way to zap these four copies back into a single guy, without using the mirrors. When I finally figured out how to fuse all those copies together like Brundlefly, it changed how I thought about all the elements and opened up new lines of thinking for puzzles I hadn't considered.
The drawback of four games' worth of good ideas mixing together is that you have to keep them all in your head at the same time, and things get very complicated the deeper you go. There are a few puzzles that cram so many things together that their challenge is derived from overwhelming you with rules and complexity, rather than forcing you to expand your thinking.
There were also times when I stared at a puzzle for minutes or maybe hours, only to realize the solution was some simple but esoteric interaction of rules that I'd forgotten because there are so many to keep in mind. In one particularly vexing puzzle, I needed to use a pushing character, skipping stones, and the pulling character together, and figured out what I thought was the solution fairly quickly. But I found myself staring at the puzzle for hours, trying to figure out its second step. I realized much later that I did have the solution, but I'd wasted a bunch of time because I was misremembering a past rule about how the stones worked from puzzles I'd completed hours earlier.
So to some degree, the breadth of Sinking Star's mechanics can work against it, and the game can seem enormous for the sake of enormity. On the other hand, the game is so large that you can always just wander off and make headway elsewhere, because there's always something else to solve.
Sinking Star is also merciful in how easy it makes experimenting with different solutions to a puzzle and undoing your mistakes. An instant undo button dials you back one action, and an action includes moving a character by one grid square. It's extremely easy to just zap back in time to one step before you accidentally shoved some essential item off a cliff or trapped yourself in a corner. There's also a dedicated button for instantly restarting a puzzle with no loading. You can slow down and speed up time at a whim, making it easier to complete puzzles with tricky timing, or to skip the boring parts when you're stuck waiting for something to happen. Sinking Star's highly forgiving nature makes it very convenient to mess around and test ideas, without wasting any more of your time than you already are by being a little dense. More puzzlers should take a page from that design approach when they're able.
While overall, Sinking Star's puzzle design is great and the game is full of inventive challenges and fascinating interactions, it does wear on. The plot elements that are meant to provide you with an overarching drive to explore wind up being pretty thin--at least through the many tens of hours that I played.
Each character has their own personality, agenda, and motivations, and all get waylaid by stumbling into this strange puzzle world. But the tidbits of story you find for each are never particularly satisfying. The RPG heroes from the north are chasing some evil magistrate, but he's little more than a disembodied voice, if he's present at all. The scavenger from the beam world wants to collect gems for research and personal profit, and I didn't really get what that would be good for. Those mirrors are part of some kind of series of trials and the mirror character failed them at some point in his past; so what?
All the stories are told in tiny, spread-out tidbits, and mostly feel like they exist as a veneer to justify new puzzle ideas, which makes them more confusing than compelling. And the larger mystery of uncovering what this puzzle place is, why it exists, and who created it, is just as obtuse. There are answers here, that much is obvious, but they require an even bigger investment in plumbing Sinking Star's secrets. After hitting the first of the game's endings with little but more questions and a lot of hanging plot threads, it became clear that the motivation for continuing on in Sinking Star has to come from enjoying the discovery of what new and interesting challenges the developers have in store for you, and not uncovering the narrative that surrounds them.
Often, though, the challenges are enough. I loved realizing I'd learned something that could help me uncover a solution on the overworld, only to open up a whole new area with a bunch of puzzles working with fresh takes on what had already been established--and those takes never seem to run out or get stale. Order of the Sinking Star might work better had it been a bit more curated in deploying its massive pile of puzzles, but the occasional frustration and overcomplication is an affordable price of admission to play around with so many fun ideas.
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