Order of the Sinking Star Review: Who Should Buy It Now

What Order of the Sinking Star is

Thekla built it as a "supercollider" of Sokoban-style puzzle games, the push-blocks-on-a-grid genre. You move across one big overworld split into four realms, and each realm runs on the rules of an older browser puzzler whose designer helped make the levels.

Once you've solved enough, the realms start bleeding into each other and the puzzles combine their rules. Later ones leave the flat grid and go 3D. The Steam page promises more than 1000 puzzles; Blow has said it's over 1,400 and that seeing everything can run past 500 hours. You don't need all of that to reach the ending, which is the most important thing to know before you buy.

Screenshot: Order of the Sinking Star Steam store page (Thekla, Inc.)

The 55-second launch trailer on Steam sells the scale better than any number. At 0:03 it opens on the Hearty Heroes of Hauling plaza, with the name laid into the tiles. At 0:39 the screen splits between two island puzzles running side by side, and at 0:45 it pulls back to the whole overworld: a map so dense with little puzzle rooms that it reads like a circuit board.

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What works

The mixing is the point. Each realm teaches one idea, then the game asks what happens when two ideas share a room. A player in the subreddit summed up the payoff: "I have almost 70 hours in this game and I'm still not bored" (r/OrderOfTheSinkingStar). That's a player chasing the platinum.

It's also kind to experimenting. You can reset a level or rewind every move, so trying a dumb idea costs nothing. If you liked poking at systems in Tactical Breach Wizards or the perspective tricks of Frogblock, that loop of try, undo, think will feel familiar.

Screenshot: Order of the Sinking Star Steam store page (Thekla, Inc.)

The audience showed up, too. In its first week it sold 45% more copies on Steam than The Witness did over the same stretch, and its peak player count beat The Witness's by a third, according to the studio's own launch post.

What doesn't

Three things show up again and again in the negative reviews, and none of them are about puzzle quality.

Color. Rules are often carried by color, and that hurts. "An EXTREME reliance on color-coding for mechanical information makes this game near-impossible for the Color-blind," one Steam reviewer wrote (review). There's a community workaround for spotting unfinished puzzles (they shimmer on the full map, and speeding up time makes it happen about every 4 seconds, per this tip), but nothing fixes the puzzles themselves yet.

Bugs. Thekla has patched every day or two since launch, which is good, but look at what it fixed. A Proton crash that hit Steam Deck and Linux. Crashes and giant save files from resetting too often. A patch on October 15 that wiped partial progress on the first Skipping Stones level, and an October 17 known issue where reset stops working (undo still gets you back). One reviewer's map "causes it to crash once it got large enough" (review).

Screenshot: Order of the Sinking Star Steam store page (Thekla, Inc.)

The talking. The voice cast divides people. "The dialogue just completely drags down what is an otherwise pretty decent seeming Sokoban game," reads one review (review). Pure puzzle fans won't care. If you came for a story, set expectations low.

Then there's the size. "275 puzzles in. But sometimes I open one up and I just... Don't wanna," wrote one player who still likes it (Reddit). That's a fair warning for anyone who buys games to finish them.

Platform notes

On PC it runs on modest hardware: the minimum is a GTX 1050 Ti or RX 580 with 8 GB of RAM and 14 GB free, and an October 12 fix targets the Proton crash that hit Steam Deck. It's also on PS5 and Switch 2. Switch 2 owners are the ones to worry about. One player says that version "is missing some dialogues" and is still waiting on fixes PC already has (Reddit). Steam also sold it in a launch bundle with Mewgenics, so if you were already eyeing that one, our Mewgenics class tier list and breeding guide cover it.

Verdict

Who it suits: puzzle people. If you've played Sokoban games or The Witness, or you liked the logic of Shapez 2, buy it on PC now. Steam's 97% positive score and a Metacritic 83 are earned, and at this size the price is easy to justify.

Who should wait: color-blind players, until Thekla says something about accessibility. Switch 2 owners, until the patch that brings the missing dialogue lands. And anyone who wants a 10-hour puzzle game to finish on a weekend: this isn't that, and a sale like the Steam Autumn Sale is a better time to find out, and our best indie games under $20 list has cheaper ways to fill a weekend. For a story-led puzzle you can actually finish, The Mermaid Mask is the gentler pick.

How we checked this

We haven't played Order of the Sinking Star, so there's no score and no hands-on claim here. On October 22, 2026 we read the Steam page, the review totals and the most helpful negative reviews, every patch note from launch to October 17, the Wikipedia entry and the week's top r/OrderOfTheSinkingStar posts, and stepped through the Steam launch trailer frame by frame (the timestamps above). 26 sources in total.

References

• Order of the Sinking Star on Steam
• Official site
• Launch trailer, official channel
• Order of the Sinking Star on Wikipedia
• r/OrderOfTheSinkingStar