Order of the Sinking Star offers more than a thousand puzzles. That sounds generous until the thought of solving another one starts to feel exhausting. For this review, that is the central problem. The scale does not create excitement. It turns the prospect of progress into a long, joyless obligation.
The underlying ideas are easy to appreciate in isolation. Characters push, pull and exchange positions. Mirrors redirect movement. Stones interact with water, and crystals introduce another set of relationships to track. There is clearly design work here. But recognising the construction of a puzzle and wanting to spend an evening inside it are very different things. This game makes that gap feel enormous.
Too much of a thing I don't enjoy
The basic Sokoban structure is built around precise movement and consequences. A small decision can ruin a larger sequence, so planning matters. In a sharply paced puzzle game, that creates satisfying concentration. Here, the continued accumulation of rules and combinations feels suffocating. The question stops being how a system might surprise you and becomes how much mental administration the next room is going to demand.
That is what makes the experience so tedious. A solution may demonstrate that the design is clever, yet offer very little emotional reward. Relief takes the place of delight. The next puzzle arrives, the workload resets, and the cycle begins again. Calling that an abundance of content does nothing to make it more appealing.
The game has four routes that begin separately and gradually intertwine. On paper, switching between them should be an escape from frustration. In practice, it can scatter your attention across too many unfinished problems. Walking away from a difficult room is less refreshing when it means reopening another collection of rules and remembering where an entirely different chain of reasoning stopped. Freedom becomes another demand on your memory.
An exhausting sense of progress
The larger puzzle spaces make the problem worse. Being able to pull the camera back is useful, and undo is essential, but neither gives these sequences a satisfying pace. Unwinding a long attempt is still unwinding a long attempt. There is only so much patience a reset can rescue when the activity itself has already become a slog.
The difficulty curve also undermines the sense of a deliberate journey. Moving from a demanding, extended challenge into a much simpler room can feel oddly deflating. Easier puzzles are welcome, but the sequence needs to build a rhythm rather than leave the player wondering why one stretch swallowed so much attention and the next barely asked for any.
Nor does the narrative provide a compelling reason to keep pushing. Dialogue and recordings are spread across a structure that is already pulling your concentration elsewhere. The fragments arrive too slowly to give the characters much momentum. Instead of curiosity sustaining the puzzle solving, the story becomes another unfinished thread competing for space in your head.
Enough already
There is a particular irritation in a game that keeps presenting greater scale as its own justification. More rooms, more interactions and more possible combinations can be impressive achievements. They can also make an unpleasant experience longer. Order of the Sinking Star lands firmly in the second category for me. Its cleverness does not excuse its lack of restraint, and the growing burden of the whole overwhelms any pleasure in an individual idea.
This judgment is about the experience, not a claim that the developers lack skill. The puzzle construction has evident intent. It simply produces a game I find boring, overextended and almost unbearable in its insistence on asking for more patience. The strongest reaction it inspires is the desire to stop.
Verdict
A colossal puzzle collection that turns thought into drudgery. The fragmented storytelling, uneven momentum and relentless accumulation of tasks make it an exhausting recommendation. I would rather spend that time with a shorter game that knows when an idea has made its point. For me, this is a miserable slog.
Score: 1/10
Review written and game played by Andrew Louis.
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