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Comments (103)

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  danpalmer
  I'm really enjoying Order of the Sinking Star, but I'm in two minds about the length. It is long, I'm 20 hours in and still feel like I'm scratching the surface, and any story pay-off feels a very long way away, which isn't a great motivator.However, so far I can't point to anything substantial that should have been skipped. Almost every level is teaching me something, and those things keep coming up later.Ultimately, Order of the Sinking Star applies the same formula as The Witness (although hopefully with a little more story, but probably not a lot more), and dials it up to 11. I loved The Witness, so really it's exactly what I asked for, and I think the feeling of the distance left to go is an artifact of a desire for instant gratification.I think the game is deeply rewarding and fantastic, as long as you understand you're signing up for a slow burn. That's not for everyone, and that's ok.
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  dwroberts
  This is the first of Blow’s games that I’m just not very interested in playing, and the fixation on its length and size is why. Being really long or having a huge completion time for the sake of it seems like a big step backwards compared to Braid and The Witness, and also philosophically literally the opposite of what he claimed made his games interesting. So I find this game and how it’s being marketed etc pretty odd
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  __alexs
  Blow's game design philosophy seems to be mostly about repeating variations of the same idea as many times as possible regardless of whether those variations are actually that fun or interesting.In theory I should love this, I'll happily play repetitive games like Tetris for hours. The way he does it though just feels so boring because he doesn't do it in a way that makes you feel like you're learning anything until the very end and the bits in the middle are just the same idea with some gimmick that isn't that interesting.I'm not spending 450 hours smashing my head into a wall before I get to the good bit.
• the__alchemist
  I loved The Witness; wasn't really looking forward to Sokoban...I'm addicted. Send help. Very polished game, and fun. Filling the void in my soul from finishing KCD2? (As off of a comparison as that is)
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  xpct
  My favorite thing about puzzle games is meta, cognition stuff. What mindset can I put myself in, so that I can solve this faster? What should I think about, and how, to reduce complexity of the problem?I tried the same last summer with Baba Is You and had an absolute blast. Playing through OotSS now, and momentum has been solid for the past ~20 hours. Skipping Stones has been my favorite!
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  knuckleheads
  I am generally not a fan of Sokoban puzzles, but I told myself that Order was the best chance to fix that so I’ve been forcing myself to play it. I don’t find myself actively wanting to sit down and play it, the puzzles don’t attract me that way, but once I do, I’ll play for about five hours at once. Great game.
• throwaway81523
  Try lichess.org. Supposedly it takes 10,000 of intentional practice to reach true expertise.
• androng
  I played this game for like 5 hours and just did not find it fun. I played the Witness and found it much more engaging and liked the discovery. but this sokoban game just felt like i had to try a lot harder to solve the mirror puzzles and it was not very rewarding. I got stuck in the advanced area too and had to quit. i think The Witness was just easier overall which made it more fun
• Fraterkes
  Honestly thought this was a very competent way of talking about the more controversial stuff "outside" the game. Blow's a smart guy who genuinly believes that games can be vehicles for exploring some heady themes. Reducing a review to "is it fun" does him and us a disservice.
• kouru225
  This game has an absolute hold on me. I played through 8 hours like it was nothing
• ball_of_lint
  Order has been great for me so far. I can understand it being difficult/tiring for some, but for those who don't find it so the puzzle design is simply amazing.I'm about 20h in and agree the story is pretty meh, but that's no surprise coming from Blow.
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  androng
  that article was weird and was some giant hit piece on Jonathan Blow as a person
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  coolThingsFirst
  Yeah, interesting game. Some puzzles are hard. I am interested in the programming of it.How are the crystals made translucent like that? They almost feel alive. Is this shaders or just assets?The game looks top down, but is 2.5 dimensional. How is this made? Is it just the assets or something more complicated is done in terms of programming.
• artemonster
  What are you sinking about
• Claudus
  I’ve solved about 250 puzzles (only exploring North and East so far), and haven’t seen any repetition. The game is great, and so far much more doable without spoilers than The Witness (the obelisk puzzles required massive amounts of time and effort to solve).I haven’t had to use any random trial and error / guessing, just logic and thinking through game mechanics and discovering new interactions, and the satisfaction so far is much higher than 90% of puzzle games, with a smooth progression.The dialog is the only area where I have meaningful criticism so far, but that seems like more of a budget reality, and the puzzles are what really matters.This is a game for people who like puzzles, spend 5 or 10 minutes and solve a few when you need a break. Compare this to Patrick’s Parabox which has over 350 great puzzles, but you can cruise through in around 20 hours (barely a snack), or another great game with over 750 puzzles, A Monster’s Expedition that will run about 80 hours of play time.Complaining about being exhausted after 20 hours of play time seems like it is coming from a reviewer in the wrong genre trying to make a deadline, and is probably better off sticking to something like Candy Crush Saga.Hate to see his thoughts on some of the more “exhausting” puzzle games like Baba is You, Blue Prince, The Golem, Understand... Or heaven forbid, something like Raitlin’s Challenge.
• baal80spam
  Haters gonna hate, meanwhile the game is awesome and has "Overwhelmingly positive" reviews on Steam.
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  bowsamic
  I think it’s absolutely incredible. Sure maybe it’s exhausting but that’s a good thing, it means the puzzles are challenging
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  everyone
  The Witness was like a bad joke imo. It looked like Myst but it was the antithesis of Myst.What Cyan were trying to do with Myst and Riven (more successfully with Riven) was make a puzzle game with no "puzzles"; avoid the 7th Guest trope of "a madman has created a labyrinth filled with devious puzzles and you must solve them to escape" and instead just put the player in a weird alien world with culture and tech they are not familiar with, which they explore and eventually understand, and once you understand, there are no puzzles, its trivial. Like if an alien were teleported to new york city and had to figure out what the subway was and how it worked. (btw a great modern example of this, which surpasses the Cyan games and fixes flaws they had, turning them into strengths is "Outer wilds")The witness on the other hand was just a sequence of grid based puzzles, it was fine, but it wanted to be a mobile game, just puzzle after puzzle. For no reason the puzzles were set in a nice looking 3d world reminiscent of Myst. There's practically zero connection between the two. That's why it seems like a joke to me.Braid was good tho lol. Perfectly cromulent puzzle platformer, and a fairly early entrant in the genre.
• anon
  undefined
• marsven_422
  [dead]
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  tbojanin
  I clicked on this expecting an interesting article about the complexity of the game, but instead it devolved into a hit piece on its creator. I'm not interested in the creator's background or personal beliefs! I came here to read about the puzzle game itself!
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  bena
  Like the Witness, Order of the Sinking Star descends into tedium.You just repeat the same type of puzzle over and over. The Witness is a bit more tedious considering the real “puzzle” is rule-discovery rather than the flow-style puzzles that make up the majority of the game’s interactions.Like the best I can say about Order is “yeah, it’s ok”.
• yyaakkqq
  wow. 500h of sokoban and the tired trope finding audio diaries of people who couldn't possible have been in the area, telling an overly convoluted story and opening up more than in a drug induced therapy session.