Nine years on from The Witness, Jonathan Blow would, once again, quite like you to solve his puzzles. He’d like you to solve quite a lot of them, actually. Revealed during The Game Awards, Order of the Sinking Star is a big box of proper stumpers that’s deep enough to drown in.
Blow and the devs at his studio, Thekla, have been working on it for 10 years, they created a new engine and new programming language, he reckons you could put 500+ hours into its 1000+ “handcrafted” puzzles, and the sell-it-to-me-in-a-sentence elevator pitch is that it’s a “game design supercollider.” Oh, and yes, there will absolutely be philosophy scattered throughout.
Which is just about the most Jonathan Blow sequence of words it’s possible to put to paper, and if—like me—you felt just a touch of fatigue at some of The Witness’ more ponderous diversions, might have you tempted to punch out here and now. But wait! I’ve seen Order of the Sinking Star: Blow walked me through a short, hands-off demo just a couple of weeks before its TGA debut, and I confess my interest is piqued.
Trine something new
“You know, most games, when you’re making a game,” says Blow, “You work on the mechanics, you work on the core ideas until you get something fun. Then you hammer on it, you tune it until you feel like it’s reached its potential, and then people ship that game.
“With this one, we wanted to go past that. So we started with four things that are fully self-contained games and then we mashed them together so that the objects in all the different worlds interacted with each other, and it generates this huge amount of possibilities of what could happen in the game.” That’s the “game design supercollider” part, if you were wondering.
Those four games manifest in Order of the Sinking Star as an enormous overworld (though that overworld is made up, confusingly enough, of six worlds in total). Imagine a Sokoban the size of the Indian subcontinent and, congratulations, you have more or less approximated a mental image of Jonathan Blow’s latest game. The worlds are home to different kinds of puzzles. Blow kicked us off with the most straightforward: block-pushing conundrums. Just your character, a room, and a bunch of crystals to move around so you can reach the end.
Move the crystals correctly and you’ll satisfyingly, neatly engineer yourself an exit. Ham-hand it and prepare to ensconce yourself in a corner of the room, imprisoned by crystals you can no longer reposition (though you have unlimited undos with which to un-muck yourself).
Simple enough, but the small figures you have to free from these crystal prisons change. In my demo, Blow showed off several playable characters, starting with the most humdrum. “You start out [with this character], he can just push things. But he can push a bunch of stuff, and the idea of his gameplay mechanic is, ‘Well, he could push a bunch of stuff, but it’s easy to get a little stuck.’ The puzzles at this point are not super hard, right? We’re introing characters.”
Things quickly got weirder. The next character Blow demoed was a thief. Rather than push blocks, she pulled them, and to make matters a little more complex, she couldn’t not pull them. Her kleptomania compelled her to drag blocks whenever she moved directly away from them, whether the player wanted to or not.
A little later on, we got a wizard. He doesn’t push or pull blocks, he swaps places with them via teleportation magic, obsessively. “He walks around normally if there’s nothing special going on, but if there’s a moveable object, he obsessively teleports [and] swaps with it. He cannot walk toward an object that he is able to move.”
Other brands of puzzle are available. Blow also whipped us over to an entirely different world, filled with puzzles that revolve around different coloured beams. Enter one beam and get a power—the ability to traverse through walls like a ghost, say—but replace it with another when you enter a different beam.
Solving puzzles and clearing stages will gradually clear the fog of war obscuring the game’s sprawling overworld, which spreads out in four directions at the start and invites you to tackle it in whatever order you prefer. The beginning of the game, says Blow, focuses on the characters as they try to meet up with one another (and being joined by others that I didn’t see in my demo).
Once they do? More weirdness, more complex puzzles, more voluminous world to unlock. I get the feeling the bulk of Order of the Sinking Star won’t be about the isolated puzzles I’ve described thus far, but the puzzle admixtures that happen when the worlds start to collide. Block-pushing meets beams meets a mirror world: that kind of thing.
“This is not a promise of any kind, but we estimate that, for a typical player, if they were to be a completionist, it might be around 500 hours of gameplay,” says Blow.
“The goal of the game, as I’ve said mechanically, is to bring these things together and explore this large possibility space that results.” To get players asking themselves, “‘Why do I think that that’s important to do? Why do I think that’s interesting?’ as opposed to anything else you could do.
“I have reasons for that,” says Blow, “and there’s somewhat philosophical and even somewhat spiritual reasons, and the fiction of the game is about all that.”
500 hours of puzzles either fills you with sick glee or sheer terror, but the good news is—if you’re the latter type—the game will not compel you to trawl through every inch of its overworld. You should be able to complete enough puzzles to fill your endgame meter and blow the joint before you hit the 500-hour mark.
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