The creator of Braid and The Witness upended players’ expectations about what kind of stories platformer and puzzle games could tell, thanks to their creative reinterpretations of well-worn genres. Developer Jonathan Blow’s next game, Order of the Sinking Star, will once again reframe a familiar genre of puzzle game with new layers of complexity and creativity.
On Thursday, Thekla Inc. revealed Order of the Sinking Star at The Game Awards. The long-in-development follow-up to The Witness takes the puzzle genre known as Sokoban and applies massive breadth and depth to it. Order of the Sinking Star combines block-pushing (and block-pulling) game mechanics, infuses them with Dungeons & Dragons fantasy archetypes, and fuses together numerous puzzle play styles in fascinating new ways. It also looks voluminous: Order of the Sinking Star promises more than a thousand Sokoban-style puzzles to solve over the course of the game.
Order of the Sinking Star will transport players to a magical realm filled with dangerous contraptions and vicious monsters, the developer and publisher Arc Games announced Thursday. Across four interconnected worlds, each with their own mechanics and stories, players will dive into puzzles as various characters — including a queen, a thief, a druid, and even a talking boat — each with their own movement and block-pushing abilities, and understandings of the worlds they share.
If you aren’t familiar with the concept of Sokoban, you’ve probably played a Sokoban game, or even a game with Sokoban elements. The genre is named after the 1981 game Sokoban which tasked players with moving wooden boxes around a warehouse, pushing them into specific spots. Sokoban mechanics have been featured in games like The Legend of Zelda and Resident Evil franchises, and in more meta takes on the genre like Patrick’s Parabox and Baba Is You.
Order of the Sinking Star is built on the foundation of other Sokoban-style games, including Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes and Mirror Isles by Alan Hazelden, Promesst 1-3 by Sean Barrett, and Heroes of Sokoban by Jonah Ostroff. Those game creators and others collaborated to bring mechanics from their games — and combine them — in Order of the Sinking Star. The end result should be a multilayered, increasingly complex, and highly challenging series of puzzles that weave a narrative over the course of hundreds of hours.
Like The Witness, maybe some of those mechanics are best left revealed by players themselves. But after a nearly 10-year development cycle, Order of the Sinking Star will arrive on Windows PC in 2026, with additional platforms to follow.
