Is Order of the Sinking Star Worth It? Critics vs Players

Evidence-based review · scores read on 14 October 2026

Yes, if you love hard puzzles: Order of the Sinking Star earns an 8.7 (Great) on our formula, with an OpenCritic Top Critic Average of 82 and 97.2% positive Steam reviews. Players are noticeably warmer than critics, who keep returning to the same caveat: this is an enormous, exhausting game with a thin story and no hand-holding.

This review is a synthesis, not a hands-on test: it is built on OpenCritic, Metacritic and Steam data read on 14 October 2026, seven published critic reviews and Steam user reviews. Jonathan Blow's studio Thekla, Inc. released the game on 8 October 2026 on PC, PS5 and Switch 2 for $29.99.

What do critics agree on?

Combining four puzzle games is the masterstroke

Each of the four worlds reworks an existing indie puzzle game. Push Square lists them as Heroes of Sokoban (Jonah Ostroff) to the north, The Mirror Isles and Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes (Alan Hazelden) to the east and south, and Promesst (Sean Barrett) to the west. The praise lands when those rules start overlapping: Polygon calls the puzzle design strong enough that ideas from different games sit in harmony, and GameSpot (8/10) singles out the inventive challenges that come from combining mechanics.

The scale impresses, then wears people down

More than 1,000 puzzles is the selling point and the most common complaint. GameSpot says the game can feel big for its own sake and would have benefited from more curation; Push Square (6/10) felt it loses momentum through sheer size; GamingBolt (8/10) calls the pacing tedious at times. Polygon, more than 20 hours in and still near the surface, says no game has left its writer more tired after each session.

The story is the weak link

GameSpot found the narrative thin and more confusing than compelling. Hardcore Gamer (8/10) names the story as the only real downside, with the four storylines feeling disconnected even when they intersect. Polygon is blunter: the stories stitched into the puzzles are not much of a reward. GamingBolt is the main dissenter, finding the characters personable.

It is hard, and it will not help you

Polygon calls it an expert-level puzzle game that keeps escalating rather than easing off after new rules. Nintendo Life (8/10) wonders whether it is too hard for broad appeal, and GamingBolt notes there are no hints at all, even after repeated failures. Instant undo and reset soften the blow: GameSpot and Nintendo Life both credit them with cutting wasted time.

Where do critics split?

Scores on the first page of OpenCritic's review list run from 6 to 10. The real disagreement is about whether the puzzles produce genuine insight. CGMagazine (7/10) argues that enough trial and error can brute-force most puzzles and that real "aha" moments were rare. GameSpot reports the opposite kind of rigour, finding only one unintended solution in roughly 70 hours, and Nintendo Life says the game usually accepts only the intended answer.

What do Steam players say?

Players like it more than critics do. On 14 October 2026 at 09:12 UTC, Steam user reviews stood at 1,963 positive out of 2,019 (97.2%, Overwhelmingly Positive), and 96 of the 100 most recent reviews were positive. The median reviewer in that recent sample had played about 12 hours, so this is still an early-game verdict for a game this size. Steam reported 3,793 players in-game at the same moment.

The English-language negative reviews are few (29 of 1,224), but they cluster around the same themes critics raise. Ten criticise the writing or voice direction, eight the difficulty, five the tedium of the puzzle volume and five the price or value. Smaller groups mention crashes, sluggish movement controls and, in at least one review, a heavy reliance on colour-coding that makes some puzzles hard for colour-blind players.

Steam already filters off-topic review bombs from its score, and we read the counts from Steam's public review endpoint rather than from a third-party tracker.

How long is Order of the Sinking Star?

Nobody has published a reliable completion time yet, and Thekla has not given one. The Steam page promises more than 1,000 hand-crafted puzzles and hundreds of hours of gameplay, and the studio's launch announcement calls the game a decade in the making. Reviewers' own playtimes give a sense of scale: GameSpot played for nearly 70 hours, while Polygon was still working through the surface layer after more than 20.

You do not have to solve everything. Nintendo Life notes that not every puzzle is needed to see the story, and Hardcore Gamer says being stuck rarely blocks progress, because you can switch to a different region and its very different set of rules. That freedom matters in a game with no hints: when one world stalls, another one usually opens up.

For context, the median Steam reviewer in the latest 100 reviews had about 12 hours on record, a fraction of what the game contains. Treat the 97% figure as a verdict on the opening stretch; the 30-day recheck will show whether enthusiasm holds as players reach the merged, harder puzzles critics describe.

How does it run on PC, PS5 and Switch 2?

Console performance is the one technical complaint with more than one source. GamingBolt reports significant frame-rate drops on PS5 across the overworld, more often than in the PC demo, while noting that puzzles themselves mostly run fine. CGMagazine saw frame drops on Switch 2, docked and handheld, mainly in bigger interconnected areas. Nintendo Life's Switch 2 review does not discuss performance.

On PC, Thekla has shipped three updates since launch. The 9 October update downgraded the Steam SDK to fix widespread compatibility problems, and the 12 October updates fixed an end-level unlock bug, missing achievements for demo players and an "E_INVALIDARG" crash under Proton on Steam Deck and Linux. Steam lists minimum PC specs of a GTX 1050 Ti or RX 580, 8 GB of RAM and 14 GB of storage, with 32 achievements and Steam Cloud saves.

How we got to 8.7

Our formula weights critics at 70% and Steam players at 30%. The critic input is OpenCritic's Top Critic Average divided by 10; the player input is Steam's all-time positive share divided by 10, used only because the sample is above 500 reviews.

We considered a downward adjustment for console frame drops, which two independent reviews document. We did not apply one: both describe the drops on the overworld rather than in puzzles, GamingBolt says puzzles mostly run fine, and nothing suggests the game is broken. If later patches or player reports show the problem is worse, the 30-day recheck will revisit it.

Should you buy Order of the Sinking Star?

• Puzzle devotees: buy it. Even the lowest-scoring reviews credit the puzzles' clever ideas, and $29.99 for more than 1,000 puzzles is hard to argue with.
• Fans of The Witness or Braid who came for the mystery: go in knowing the story is the most criticised part, and the game is less tactile and approachable than The Witness, according to Polygon.
• Casual puzzle players: be cautious. Nintendo Life, Polygon and several Steam reviewers warn that the difficulty ramps up fast and there are no hints.
• Console players sensitive to frame rate: PC looks like the safer version for now. It has had its own crash fixes, but none of the reviews we read report frame drops there.

Order of the Sinking Star launched on 8 October, the same day as two other games we have reviewed: Silver Pines, which scored 8.9, and the Kingdom Hearts Collection [I-III]. Any guides we publish as patches arrive will appear on our Order of the Sinking Star hub.