Order Of The Sinking Star’s Biggest Villain Is Its Own Creator

The demo’s humor feels deliberately cheeky, almost as if it’s poking fun at the very idea of replacing human voice with synthetic speech. This playful stance is consistent with director Jonathan Blow’s reputation for self‑aware storytelling, suggesting that the game will weave meta‑textual elements into its core experience.

Blow’s return to the scene after 2016’s The Witness brings a new puzzle adventure that stitches together a variety of indie titles he’s licensed. Early trailers hinted at a Sokoban‑style challenge reminiscent of Stephen’s Sausage Roll, but the demo leans more toward the whimsical puzzle mechanics seen in Busytown’s Banana Gorilla segments.

The setting is a chain of islands divided into four distinct regions, each brimming with hundreds of puzzles that generally revolve around reaching an exit point—a task that seems simple on paper but proves tricky in practice.

In the first region, players control a trio of heroes, each with a unique rock‑moving ability: one pushes, another pulls, and the third swaps places with whatever he looks at. While these powers complement each other, coordinating them requires careful planning to avoid stepping on each other’s toes. The Mirror Isles introduce a magical looking glass that can swap items or the player with their reflection, or even clone them under the right conditions.

As the challenge curve steepens, I’m impressed that none of the puzzles feel like they’re simply playing with the mechanics in a predictable way. Each new test cleverly intertwines your footing, your exit strategy, and the massive stone blocks, creating fresh dynamics that keep the gameplay engaging.

While the puzzle variety is strong, the sheer volume of mind‑bending tasks can become more draining than frustrating. This fatigue isn’t a problem in the Sinking Star demo—except for one mirror puzzle that felt oddly repetitive. The sense of weariness, however, surfaces elsewhere in the experience.

When the main character first steps onto the world map, she immediately sets out to uncover the secrets of the Order of the Sinking Star. Along the way, she stumbles upon seemingly unrelated codices, coordinates, runes, and audio logs. Each puzzle is framed by dialogue that feels as if you’ve been dropped into the middle of a conversation, and with the AI placeholders disabled, only a handful of scenes rely on subtitles—showing that the developer went to great lengths to emphasize narrative immersion.

I was captivated by the atmospheric design and environmental storytelling of The Witness, though I recognized that much of the surrounding script and grandeur served more as decorative flourish than substantive content. The abundance of dialogue can feel overwhelming, yet it also encourages players to pause and absorb the world’s lore. Many of The Witness’s most enigmatic threads culminate in a self‑referential, almost meta‑finale, and based on the demo, I suspect that the meticulous unraveling of Sinking Star may yield a similarly ambitious, if polarizing, conclusion.