Quick Review: Order of the Sinking Star

Reviewed on: Switch 2
Code provided by the publisher.

I’ve got to get this out of the way straight out the gate: Jonathan Blow's games have never really been for me. I respect the craft, I understand why people revere them, and I've bounced off more than one of them. So I went into Order of the Sinking Star with low expectations and got hooked faster than I'd care to admit.

The story is genuinely unusual, and the music does a lot of quiet work in the background, keeping you in the right headspace. The production values here are high enough that they'd stand on their own even without the puzzles. Even the voice acting grabs you immediately, which is not a sentence I expected to write about a puzzle game.

And the puzzles. There are so many! Nothing prepares you for the sheer volume of them, or for how wide the difficulty spread runs. Some are quick and satisfying, a little nudge forward; others will have you walking away from the console and thinking about them during dinner. The game trusts you to figure things out on your own, which is exactly right for this kind of thing, even when that trust feels misplaced at two in the morning. For me, my brain hurt way too many times.

The Switch 2 version runs at a lower frame rate than I'd like, which is worth noting, even though it matters less here than in almost any other genre. Puzzle games don't really need 60 FPS, and most people probably won't notice or care. Still, a patch would be welcome down the line.

Verdict

If puzzle games are your thing, Order of the Sinking Star is an easy recommendation regardless of where you land on Blow's previous work. It could provide dozens if not 100+ hours of brain-teasing gameplay. Puzzle fans, rejoice. In a year chock full of action titles, this one’s for you.