If you only want one question answered before spending $29.99 and possibly hundreds of hours: Order of the Sinking Star is for players who treat Sokoban like a craft, not a snack. It is not a soft landing after The Witness, and it is not a short campaign with a tidy ending weekend.
Thekla's October 8, 2026 launch on PC via Steam, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch 2 put Jonathan Blow's long-gestating puzzle adventure into the wild with a blunt promise: more than a thousand handcrafted puzzles, four colliding rule sets, and a top-down overworld you can leave half-solved for weeks. Launch marketing floated eye-watering time claims; Blow and Thekla have described a sprawling, multi-session project rather than a single binge.
A supercollider of four Sokobans
Official materials and reviews describe the same architecture. Four licensed foundations sit on the compass points: Jonah Ostroff's Heroes of Sokoban (party abilities that push, pull, swap, and protect), Sean Barrett's Promesst (colored beams and gems), and Alan Hazelden's Mirror Isles and Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes (reflections and rock-skipping paths). Thekla remakes those systems, then starts hybridizing them where the map regions meet.
That design pitch is the game's real hook. Kotaku's Rebekah Valentine, after about ten hours, called the puzzle collection excellent while separating that praise from weaker feelings about narrative and mystery. Polygon's Giovanni Colantonio, deeper in after more than twenty hours, still framed early cardinal campaigns as terrific before the constant escalation started to feel exhausting.
Compared with The Witness
The Witness comparison is unavoidable and only half useful. Both are Thekla flagships about teaching rules without a traditional tutorial. The Witness stayed first-person, line-drawing, and relatively approachable for curious travelers. Order of the Sinking Star is top-down, combinatorial, and often about precise execution after you already understand the idea.
PCGamesN's Ken Allsop found the tutorial-free stepping-stone teaching familiarly slick and eventually preferred this project's character-led puzzle-book feel over his early longing for Witness-style wandering. Polygon argued the opposite comfort curve: Witness taught with tactile clarity, while Order frequently asks for mental endurance even when the concept is clear. Neither write-up treats the new game as a remake of the island.
What the scores and players are saying
Aggregators landed in the mid-80s: Metacritic shows a generally favorable 84 Metascore, and OpenCritic also lists an 84 average with a high recommend rate across dozens of critics. Steam user reviews sit at Overwhelmingly Positive (about 96% positive across roughly 1,800-1,900 English reviews at the time of writing). Individual outlets stretch from masterpiece language (Shacknews' 10/10 blurb appears on the Steam page) to exhaustion-minded middling scores such as Push Square's 6/10.
YouTube critic Boss Door went further on craft, calling Order not only the cleverest puzzle game they had played but among the cleverest game designs period, while still warning that the sprawl is genuinely bottomless and that some campaigns (Skipping Stones especially) are an acquired taste. GameSpot's video review framed the same tension in the title alone: enormous, for better and worse.
Where critics push back
- Scale fatigue: many outlets love the ideas but tire of constant escalation and hours spent staring at a single grid.
- Story as weak glue: Kotaku and several scored reviews find characters and mystery less compelling than the puzzles; some reviewers were also assessing incomplete or placeholder VO builds before launch.
- Readability: Valentine struggled to parse busy visuals on a docked Switch 2; others praise the art density while admitting screens can get noisy.
- Trust and softlocks: Polygon described moments where undo/reset help only after you realize you soft-broke a multi-room sequence earlier.
A separate buyer note, raised by both Kotaku and Polygon rather than by score aggregates: some of the original freeware designers whose games were licensed have publicly distanced themselves from Blow over his political statements since those deals were signed. The game itself is widely described as lightly plotted and not a campaign sermon; whether that off-screen context affects a purchase is a personal call the coverage keeps putting on the table.
Launch heat, with context
A week after launch, Thekla and Arc Games said Order sold 45% more Steam units in week one than The Witness did, and beat Witness's Steam peak concurrent players by 33%. Blow noted the new game launched at $29.99 versus Witness's $39.99, so higher unit volume does not automatically mean higher revenue. Absolute unit counts were not published.
So... worth playing?
Buy it if you already know you can live inside hard Sokoban variants, you like non-linear maps that let you abandon a stuck chamber for another biome, and you want a years-long puzzle book more than a narrative mystery tour. Wait (or skip) if you wanted another contemplative Witness walk, you need frequent story payoffs to justify grinding, or a thousand-plus puzzle count sounds like a threat instead of a feature.
Practical middle path: the Steam page still points buyers at the storefront bundle ecosystem and prior demo messaging from the run-up to launch, and post-launch patches have been frequent. If you are on the fence, try the demo if it remains available in your region, watch a long-form clear like Boss Door's, and decide whether the frustration/eureka loop looks fun or punishing.
GameClue takeaway from the coverage, not a hands-on score: the puzzle craft is the consensus high point; the commitment cost and uneven narrative motivation are the consensus caveats. For a thinky-first audience, that is usually enough to recommend - with eyes open.