Thekla's 500-hour Order of the Sinking Star is a brilliant, exhausting puzzle epic
'500-hour' Order of the Sinking Star is as complex and exhausting as it sounds
Polygon's Giovanni Colantonio spent over 20 hours with Thekla's follow-up to The Witness, a game the studio bills as 500 hours long. It remakes several indie Sokoban puzzlers, then fuses their mechanics across a sprawling open world. The puzzle design is ingenious, but the difficulty never lets up, and the storytelling and placeholder voice acting offer little relief. Is it a masterpiece or an exercise in exhaustion?
If Order of the Sinking Star really is 500 hours long, know that much of that time will be spent staring at puzzles that seem impossible to solve for hours. And your reward for finally completing a hard puzzle? An even harder puzzle!