'500-hour' Order of the Sinking Star is as complex and exhausting as it sounds | Hacker News Reader

'500-hour' Order of the Sinking Star is as complex and exhausting as it sounds

polygon.com

199 pointscvoss176 comments

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.

> I loved The Witness, so really it's exactly what I asked for

General problem in criticism/critique: we are different audiences. Different people want genuinely incompatible things. I wouldn't put that length of time into a puzzle game .. but I have into factorio, which is just a different kind of puzzle. Some people like extremely long RPGs. A lot of people play extremely short games, especially the kind of mobile games which give you about 30 seconds between adverts.

Can be hard to get people (critics and punters alike) to separate "this is not for me" from "this is bad".

Exactly - 500 hours for a "story game"? Seems long to me.

Factorio: Play Time: FE_OVERFLOW

I felt this was true until 30 hours in, but after that, it starts feeling much more repetitive. Smaller ideas are stretched much further and IMO they're not nearly as exciting as the beginning ones.

Fair enough, it has definitely evened out now that I've completed the 4 base stories. Reaching the Antipode though has certainly ignited some motivation, I want to figure out the red areas, and getting into the deeper AxB areas is still interesting and I suspect I've got another 20 hours of that to go at least.

I felt like that in the demo. It's waaaay too slow to do anything difficult. Basically everything in the hour or so that I played was trivially easy.

Compared to Baba Is You which gets difficult and interesting after like 10 minutes.

So one thing I've been wondering is: The Witness had one aspect in it (which I won't spoil) that I thought was mindblowing and was a large part of what I felt made the game great. So far I've not seen any suggestions that OotSS has anything like that. Have you seen anything in the game that goes beyond "I'm signing up for 500 hours of Sokoban"?

There are large mechanical surprises similar to typical grid-based puzzle games on the market nowadays, but no, nothing "like that".

That said -- like The Witness, OotSS also reaches for a message beyond just its mechanics. In this case, it focuses on how a small number of mechanics interacting can produce a combinatorial explosion of situations; the role of the puzzle designer in surfacing "interesting" situations; the relationship between designer and player; and the way we pass an understanding of design on to the next generation.

I appreciate the attempt, but I thought it fell far short of The Witness; it didn't really saying anything insightful about the themes and also didn't even hint at them until you're 30+ hours in.

Answering it here is not possible without undermining the purpose of the question. I'm afraid this is a Catch-22.

I feel like “it’s more than just 500 hours of sokoban” (if true) would be a valid, satisfying and non-spoily answer

Ah got it! The 5v5 FPS zones in the mid-late-gate areas mix up the pace at the right times IMO. The King of the Hill maps can drag + stalemate, and the netcode needs work. (Upcoming patch?)

My only problem with it is I feel like if I stop playing for more than a couple of days I'll forget half the stuff I learned and I'll be stuck when I return to levels that assume I know everything from before.

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

Another poster here said the first thirty hours were great, but after 40 it started feeling repetitive.

If you change your perspective from “I’m not gonna spend 500 hours on this” to “30 hours of great gameplay for 30 bucks” maybe it isn’t so bad.

Makes sense to me…

I tend to "graze" on games by regularly(ish) playing for usually not more than an hour. I often swap between games and don't finish many of them. That's never really seemed like the point[0] any more than the idea of "completing" chess or skiing[1]. A tedious, unskippable tutorial level or spending hours early on grinding or subsisting with basic tools/weapons/mechanics before you get the good stuff is what kills a game for me.

So the question for me is how much boredom before it gets fun rather than whether I will eventually lose interest before I finish it. That's a given (I predictably didn't finish Braid or The Witness, I like both).

[0] And besides, like TV series, it just seems like such a lot of time! A game has to be very short or _really_ good, which means both engaging and fun mechanics and a great story, for me to make it to the end.

[1] Ok that's a lie, I definitely intend to complete skiing

I assume it’s in part a consequence of Blow’s newer self-definition as a game-programming iron man: after all the work on the custom engine you probably feel the need to get as much mileage as you can out of it. But as others have said https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50115215 , presumably they could have applied some razzle-dazzle like staged releases in “seasons” to make the large amount of content feel more like ongoing fun than a huge homework assignment.

Short games can be the best experiences. There are a lot of horror titles that barely crack 1 hour and still feel worth the purchase.

There is also an argument that this is why PvP multiplayer is so compelling. The game is adaptive in its complexity, and every round of play is a relatively brief, self-contained experience not quite like the others. If you are going for bang-for-buck, it's really hard to beat the emergent properties of a MOBA, BR or RTS.

I think those who reject multiplayer games on principle are missing the forest for the dead tree. There is an incredible amount of upside if you can tolerate the occasional bad mood. The dream is when the entire team comes together without any explicit communication and executes perfectly. Nothing beats that sensation. Especially when you can tell that the enemy team is also executing well. I have to seek it out in video games because I can't find it in a real business anymore. Games like League of Legends and CS2 are eternal experiences. I fired up LoL classic the other day and I could easily see myself putting another 5k hours into lux. WoW forever is also looking compelling with its PvP ruleset and unified realm architecture.

On short horror titles: iron lung was just a great little gaming snack

Well... it's more about how many interesting permutations there are, not really just about length or quantity for the sake of big numbers. In other words: it's not about "look how many puzzles there are" it's "look how many INTERESTING puzzles there are"... which may seem like a small distinction, but when the claim of the puzzles being "interesting" is true, and being said in a genuine non-marketing way, it means a lot.

> a big step backwards compared to Braid and The Witness

It was already there in the Witness. One secret challenge involves you watching a movie and slowly tracing a light for 56min straight.

I realized there was a puzzle about halfway through the movie. But there is no way I'm spending another 56min just to complete the challenge.

It's a good movie, though. For anyone who's interested: https://maraoz.com/the-secret-of-psalm-46-transcript/

At least your game didn't crash forcing you to redo the section.

The point I'm making the game doesn't respect my time. Why should I respect it back?

The question this puzzle is asking you is "why do you feel the need to complete this game?" In this sense it is a sand mandala. If you don't have time to make one, that's totally fine, but saying that "sand mandalas don't respect my time" misses the point entirely.

Tbe sand mandala is free. I (presumably) paid money for The Witness.

You don’t have to complete that puzzle to get a satisfying ending to the game

Long and complex games are good if you can choose how much of them you want to play. Crimson Desert is the most extreme version, but Skyrim and Elden Ring are better examples because you can do a couple boss fights and get straight to the end without exploits skipping most of the story.

Haven't played this one so I don't know if it's like that too. If it forces you to get through the whole 500 hours then it's really bad.

I didn’t either until i started playing but its length and size isn’t just for the sake of it. It’s that size because it’s that complex. It’s like The Witness dialed up to 11

> The Witness dialed up to 11

Can't wait for 11hr unskippable cutscene that contains a hidden puzzle. And if game dies during that time... Restart from the beginning.

See, that's not a good puzzle. It's not good game design. It's antagonistic to the player in the worst possible way.

The moments of player-antagonism are the most interesting parts of Braid/Witness, imo.

For the most part, most games are antagonistic. And that's fine, that's the fun. Goombas are player-antagonism. Dark Souls is antagonistic. But they are engaging you and testing your ability to execute game mechanics with increasing amounts of precision.

Having to sit through a full hour of video to slowly trace a line is pointlessly antagonistic. It only tests a player's desire to sit through your bullshit. Being able to do it does not make you better at any other part of the game. It doesn't even make you better at that part of the game.

You don’t have to sit through it. It just asks the player to slow down and listen for just an hour. If something, it makes you better in general by just listening to a fantastic talk by Brian Moriarty, that’s the achievement.

You don't have to do it though. There is no reward, no achievement, nothing unlocks. It's functionally equivalent to "if you stand in one spot for an hour a special sound effect plays and some lights flash for 2 seconds." I think it's psychologically interesting how many people get angry that this sound effect is programmed into the game.

I consider the witness one of my favorite games, and I fully completed it, but I did not do that because it's dumb. The existence of the thing really has nothing to do with the game.

You realize you’re agreeing with me, right?

I said that bit was bad puzzle/game design. You say it’s dumb. Which is another way of saying you didn’t think it was a good design.

I think it’s psychologically interesting how many people feel the need to defend Blow and his games to the hilt when he’s produced so very little.

It's bad game design if it were the game, but it's not the game. You said "that's not a good puzzle. It's not good game design. It's antagonistic to the player in the worst possible way."

But it's not really a puzzle, or the game, or antagonizing you, because there's no purpose in doing it. Like I said, it's just something that exists in the game. It's not the game; it doesn't reflect upon the puzzle design or the game design because it's irrelevant to the actual puzzles and the actual game.

I'll repeat myself: if you stand in one spot for an hour a special sound effect plays and some lights flash for 2 seconds. If that happened in Call of Duty, it would be strange, but it also would have nothing to do with the game design quality of Call of Duty. It would not make sense to say Call of Duty has bad game design due to the presence of this thing.

I'm defending the witness because it's a good game, and this comment thread implies that doing that dumb thing is required to play or finish the game, when it is not. It is a misleading comment that gives an uninformed reader an incorrect impression of the product.

Technically, there's no purpose in any of it. Playing the game and not playing it are the same.

It's a puzzle in that it's a line you have to draw to complete all the puzzles. What's that worth to anyone is what it is. There are lots of games with post-game content that's not technically required to "finish" the game.

But the goal of the Witness is to find and draw these lines. If you didn't find and draw that line, Blow would say you didn't find and draw all the lines.

So, it is a puzzle in the game. It is. It's a puzzle. It's in the game. You don't know whether it's pointless or not until after you complete it. So you can't look at it and say, "Well, this is not needed, I can skip it".

And the overall product is kind of bad. It's overly tedious and mistakes hiding necessary information with being clever.

Haven't played it yet, but from what I know my impression was that this game was as much a test bed for his new programming language as it is an artistic expression. I wouldn't be surprised if some puzzles made it in because they were a good test of some novel comp time feature (i.e. the real puzzle game was making the language, not playing the game).

And I bought it day one without reading reviews. Whether or not the game is good, personally I'm happy to support someone who's completely self-funded working on PL design. Not that many people are in position to do that kind of work, and even fewer with a documented history of finishing things.

I played the demo and it blew my mind how cool the puzzles felt. I'll definitely get the full game later, though I doubt I'll invest 500 hours into it.

I sort of feel the same. I also don't understand why - it seems quite natural to make it smaller and cool and they for example release new level packs, maybe free even (or for a small price). I've also never understood why he didn't make a sequel for Braid. Such a cool game. You're not milking it if you make a sequel it deserves.

> I've also never understood why he didn't make a sequel for Braid. Such a cool game.

Perhaps it's such a cool game because it doesn't need milking or sequels? Perhaps he never made a sequel because he doesn't want to repeat the same things ad infinitum?

I'm with you on this boat, but I believe I see the point in the way it's marketed. An average person who makes regular game purchases likes long games. They want value for their money, and the number of hours is a big factor. This game has a big piblisher behind it, and I believe they know exactly what they're doing with the marketing!

The regular game buyer has more games than they can possibly play. Some people are focused on maximizing enjoyment-dollars/hour, but I would posit that an excessively long playtime is a detriment to most gamers.

I have been turned off from a few JRPGs with such high playtimes that they have no respect for the player.

Exactly, until my 20s I enjoyed long games. Now, I have a family, I have other things competing with my time, I want something that is tight with barely any fillers that deliver a good story. My most memorable recent games all delivered on that: Forgotten City (8 hours to finish it completely), Carto, A Juggler's Tale, There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension, ...

While I do enjoy longer games like Yakuza, etc, I really enjoy being able to play through a game in 1 to 2 evenings.

I don't mind longer games at all, even though I juggle dayjob, university, family, and quite time-consuming woodworking hobby at once.

Currently I'm playing through Cyberpunk 2077 and as usually I do almost all side content. I play it for months already, just an hour here and there. I don't mind it at all.

What's important for me the game doesn't waste my time on senseless, boring, repetitive activities. That way, even 30min of playthrough scratches the itch and feels fulfilling.

Oh yes, didn't try cyberpunk yet but Witcher was great because even if long, it was rather tight. Problem is that when I stop playing for 2-3 months due to work, it's hard to remember where I was.

> An average person who makes regular game purchases likes long games. They want value for their money, and the number of hours is a big factor.

Is that the case? Or do they want short games, so they can complete it and move on to the next game. If you’re buying games regularly, either they’re shorter games, or you’re not completing them all—in which case, the length doesn’t really matter. Or looking at it the other way, if you like long games, and you’re completing them, you’re not buying games regularly.

Regular buyers are gamers who spend a lot of time playing games. That's who you want to target, since that's the group who are actively looking for new games, and they also want their games to last. It's not about completionism, it's about spending hours and hours playing games.

> Regular buyers are gamers who spend a lot of time playing games.

Sadly, like most things, Buying Games and Playing Games are 2 different hobbies.

It's not for the sake of it; they cut hundreds of puzzles. It just has that many unique ideas!

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!

Check out Supraworld. David Münnich is building the most peak 3D puzzle platformer you will ever play.

I have to say, I would love to tap into those thought processes. If they are tappable-into?

I remember the feeling of playing Baba is You. The wonder and the sense of… a sort of abyssal depth of the mechanics, once you start to get a feeling for how they expand. And then how that yields to intuition. Hadn't come to such a lovely crack in the metacognitive vessel!, to deliberately pry at. Thanks!

The perspective you offer here makes me want to find or bring about a venue for… this.

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.

I remember seeing a clip of him describing Hollow Knight as "wow, I am in a different room now, cool" and saying such games weren't for him. I understand what he meant in the sense that I know he is very mechanics-focused and is far more interested in plumbing a small number those to their deepest depths, where HK has many comparatively shallow mechanics but with a rich space of interesting interactions -- generally this is what you want in a game where exploration and world building are more central.

I still found it really strange though for an indie hero to be so reductive in how he described such games, particularly when one could more easily produce similarly reductive readings of his games without even being too uncharitable

What's especially funny about his dislike for Hollow Knight is that it was partially funded by the Indie Fund, which Blow is a founding member of.

I found that there's Blow the Twitch streamer and Blow the interviewee/presenter.

On Twitch he would often give short "hot takes". However, when he takes time to actually enunciate his thoughts, suddenly it makes sense what he means.

E.g. IIRC he came off as very critical of Blue Prince, but then on Wookash Podcast (?) he talked about how he would probably do the same decisions within same constraints, and how it was a great achievement for a small team even if the game wasn't for him

It is the opposite: he wants the variations to be different and interesting. There are no repetitive puzzles in The Witness or Braid. There are themes, but each puzzle is unique.

I think you're probably right that's what he thinks, he's just failed to convince me to think the same way.

> There are no repetitive puzzles in The Witness or Braid.

I'm sorry, I really like both games, but this is unbelievably false.

Lots of sequences of puzzles in The Witness are just “the same thing, in gradually increasing space, with no new mechanics in between“.

I feel a lot of this comes down to player expectations of what counts as a "repetitive" puzzle, and perhaps how players interpreted The Witness.

Counting purely "raw mechanics" introduced in new panels then yes, you could argue The Witness did have a lot of repetitive puzzles. Once a new puzzle grammar was introduced then essentially entire areas were dedicated to expanding the complexity of how you could interpret that set of rules.

And yet I don't think there were many puzzles that you could say were the exact combination of ideas from another puzzle.

A significant part of the design idea in The Witness was in not showing you, the player, any set of rules but instead having you infer them from simple and deliberately restricted examples of those rules in use, and then testing your inference against larger and more complex versions of that same shape of puzzle.

Those later versions of the same puzzle shape would sometimes force you to rethink what you inferred and refine your understanding of a rule or sometimes show you what felt like an emergent property of that set of rules. "I didn't know I could trace the inverse of a shape too", "I didn't know pairs cancelled out", "I didn't know the shape could be rotated", etc.

This approach almost necessitates having a lot of puzzles that start from the simplest possible example, and gradually increasing in scope and complexity over a set of panels, which can end up looking like "a lot of the same kind of puzzle".

It's not a game you play for the story. And it's not a game you play end-to-end in a few sittings. It's a game you pick up and do a few puzzles, and put down. At least, that's how I see it. I've thoroughly enjoyed it so far. I did get hard-stuck on a few puzzles in the skipping stones area, and I ended up cheating by finding YouTube videos showing the solutions. I play games for fun, not for frustration, so after enough time being hard-stuck, I have 0 problems "cheating". I imagine I'll still be casually playing this game in a year, and that's a great thing.

So, that's my context. If you relate to that, I think you'll enjoy the game and find it is excellent value for $40.

I don't really relate to the "must binge" mindset. I can enjoy binging a 20 hour game over a few weeks, but I'm also happy with things you chip away at here and there.

I've been slowly reading One Piece for over 2 years now. Where other people find the idea of such a long series daunting, I'm happy that there's always more I haven't read yet. If I never finish, it will still have been worth it.

I usually draw the line for myself by setting a timer. "Okay, I'm starting to get frustrated, if 20 minutes pass with no progress I'm going to look online for clues."

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.

That is so bizarre to me. I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself, I guess, but why was not liking sokoban puzzles something that “needed fixing” and why would you force yourself to play?

It reminded me of when I read a post from someone on some game subreddit, saying they had invested something like sixty hours into it and asking how much longer to get good and start enjoying the game.

It’s a video game. Its primary purpose is to entertain. There are dozens of them released each day. If you don’t enjoy something, move on.

If others find beauty in something, should I not want to also try and see it?

Some things take time to learn to enjoy. I've bounced off things in the past several times before I started to really enjoy them later on. I'd like to think my experience with media is not just a random walk through whatever is in front of me and that I can direct that experience, at least a bit.

Alright, fair. That was a better explanation than your previous wording. The “forcing myself” to me implies doing something unpleasant. Like the example I gave. I think it’s fine to try things out and try to see the beauty in them, but at a certain point (like before sixty hours into one game) you should already have a sense of understanding if the thing jives with you or not.

I also don’t think not appreciating something is a flaw which “needs fixing”.

But all good, you do you, and I’m glad you’re enjoying the experience. Have a nice weekend, and remember to look away from the screen periodically! I’m going to follow that advice myself right now.

Try Patrick’s Parabox, best Sokoban game I’ve played, by far.

Have you played Baba Is You? Parabox is great, but Baba is just so amazing.

I’ve tried both! Both fun in their own ways but they never caught me long term. Sausage rolls was fun but it just got too hard.

Agreed on the Sausage. It’s elegant but sooo hard.

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.

It's built as a full 3D game, and has extensive use of nice shaders for transparency effects like the crystals, water effects, particle effects, and more. This is all pretty standard game development stuff, you'd be able to do this pretty quickly with an off the shelf engine like Godot, Unity, or Unreal. Godot is a good place to start if you want to learn some of this stuff!

However Order of the Sinking Star is also made in a custom programming language and custom engine. This is not at all normal for game development. There also doesn't appear to be a scripting system. Normally you have an engine built in C++ or something fast, and then a scripting system where you write a higher level language to script how the game runs. Engine development is more separate from scripting development. With Order of the Sinking Star, the game engine appears to be much more just like a library, and the same codebase runs the engine and game logic, with no scripting layer, as far as I can figure out from public hints.

Yeah, Blow has a generally unfavorable opinion of scripting in game engines. Jai (the language) gets around that by being very fast to compile debug builds, about 150 kloc/s, which he says he intends to optimize up to 1 mloc/s. Order of the sinking star compiles in about 2 seconds for a clean build, so iteration can be basically as fast as what you'd expect from scripting.

I am a little curious if there any interplays between Global Illumination, rastering and shaders that they are exploiting on account of having complete engine control. Techniques that something special about their engine might be allowing.

I only wonder because I recall the reason they built an engine from scratch for The Witness was to achieve certain lighting goals, and that specific feel and style I have never encountered quite like that in any other game.

A lot of that is down to art and direction, but there's a raw quality of the lighting that just feels different to any game I have played. You can often feel a game's engine out if it's one of the big ones, through the feeling of its lighting. I suspect since all engines have certain default approaches and settings in their lighting setups and devs only move the knobs as far as they need to meet their artistic goals, leaving much alone.

> I recall the reason they built an engine from scratch for The Witness was to achieve certain lighting goals

I don’t buy that. Even back then, as an indie developer, the only reason you build your own engine is because you want to build your own engine.

You have to be doing something truly technically impressive to need a new engine and The Witness wasn’t pushing the envelope.

I am pretty certain it was Global Illumination issues with their large always loaded world and the different indoor/outdoor transitions. They wouldn't have been using Unity or Unreal so it was probably trading off between one code only game library or writing their own, and yeah they probably just wanted to rather than fix the library.

He had help from another developer specifically for that issue.

Yeah, writing the engine was the point I think. They could have created a GI plugin or modified an existing engine’s renderer. He also created a whole new programming language to write the engine in, which is certainly the displacement activity.

Speaking of the custom programming language (Jai), thought it was supposed to be released (beta goes public) with the game.

He has said after the game. They wanted to get the game launched, early bugfixes, etc, and then follow it up soon with the language/engine, initially closed source, but eventually open source.

Just a guess based on the way he's spoken about it, but I'd expect an open beta in December-February. I'm not expecting that to be open source though (maybe the engine will be but not the language, unclear).

It’ll be a few months further down the line. The developer has said their first obligation is to fix any bugs found by the people who bought the game, so they wanted to leave space for that process.

He said that he foresees the effort to deal with open source community will be huge so I think he’s apprehensive of that effort

This game is also on consoles, can't imagine how much time it took to port the engine to all the proprietary SDKs

For how much Blow complains about modern software performance and bloat I was disappointed to hear a lot of reports that the performance is apparently bad, even for a type of game popular in the 8-bit era

I mean, Blow writes single-user software that doesn't have to interop with anything else, persist any meaningful state, or be modified after release.

He has a very limited view of what is required of software.

The problem is that he's not entirely wrong. The JavaScript-ification of everything is kind of a problem. Electron apps everywhere is an issue.

But a lot of issues are also just trying to deal with bad actors. Doing authentication or authorization wrong can have real consequences. And it is incredibly difficult. Because security is in opposition to access. And trying to make security invisible is even more difficult.

> doesn’t have to … persist any meaningful state

What is a game save file if not persisted state?

It's not meaningful however. If your save gets corrupted, you have to start over. Nothing of value was lost.

Except the 500 hours you've invested into the game, of course, but who ever valued their time and played games...

Or maybe a better way of putting it... a corrupted save annoys one user who has already paid you the $30 they're ever going to pay.

Compared to if you run a cloud storage company, a corrupted file might annoy a user that pays $1m every month, to store data that they themselves make money on, etc.

The stakes for a game save are a lot lower.

How did he program the [redacted]s to be so... adorable? They way they flail their little feetsies and tails. The animations. Or the animations of characters becoming uh, immobilized.

Reminds me of the buns in Braid.

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)

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.

Try lichess.org. Supposedly it takes 10,000 of intentional practice to reach true expertise.

This game has an absolute hold on me. I played through 8 hours like it was nothing

that article was weird and was some giant hit piece on Jonathan Blow as a person

It’s on Polygon, which writes cultural and political essays on games - they’re not really reviews focusing on game mechanics, player experience etc ( well they do talk about it but it’s usually drowned under other concerns ).

Whether you agree with them or not is not my point ( and yes in this particular case they visibly dislike the game designer’s politics and this eats up a large part of the article) - just that it’s expected .

The fact they look like reviews is very confusing though ( I looked around the website this one is under ‘impressions’ not ‘reviews’ though ) unless you consider politics should be an integral part of reviews but that’s a complicated discussion.

I wish they were a bit more self reflective about this. The author says, “I’m not raising these points to get a dig in on Blow for a perspective I personally disagree with,” but come on, let’s be real. You absolutely are raising these points to get in a dig at him, if only because you know your audience will complain if you don’t. Like, I find Blow to be a huge blowhard (nominative determinism at work) but having played the Witness, you can absolutely write a review of that game without mentioning his politics and I seriously doubt that Order of the Sinking Star is different. If you want to write about his politics, that’s great, there’s a lot of grist there to discuss. But stop pretending you’re doing something other than opinion journalism

Given Blow likes to smear everyone and everything that's not him or his twin I don't feel particularly sorry for him.

It reads as balanced and reflective

Art != Artist

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.

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.

I'm positively surprised with the price, most just-released games these days are pushing $100 USD.

And for the amount of work they seem to have put into it, it's probably a more than fair deal.

My kind of game, just I wish it wasn't fantasy. For some weird psychological reason I don't understand, I can't really tolerate fantasy themes for more than a few seconds.

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

I liked the Witness, but so far, I love Order of the Sinking Star. I'm treating it as a casual game that I pick up and play a bit at a time, so the length is a plus-- I'll get lots of entertainment value from it a little bit at a time, for a long time.

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.

The Witness absolutely has a reason for all of its puzzles. There are several independent layers to it. Myst is cool but is ultimately an adventure game, in comparison.

If you prefer Myst then, besides Outer Wilds, I’d recommend Blue Prince.

> I’ve found very little mental relief so far as I constantly bash my head through walls with no clear payoff in sight.

Isn't solving a puzzle a pretty clear payoff in a puzzle game?

Man, I'm not 16 anymore, give me 5€ / 10h games

Have you played Öoo?

Nope, noting the name for when my compulsion to buy a game will overcome again the shame of not playing my backlog

Yaaaaasssss. It's one of games that's both delightful, and short.

I think it’s absolutely incredible. Sure maybe it’s exhausting but that’s a good thing, it means the puzzles are challenging

Solving 600 10x10 jigsaw puzzles in a row would easily exhaust you without posing any challenge at all.

In this case it’s more like 600 sudoku that introduce and teach new methods without needing an external guide, and that is great for me

What are you sinking about

I think a significant percentage of puzzle game players, including me, are just predisposed to see Sokoban games as exhausting. The Witness (and Taiji) has a fairly limited search space so it can't be exhausting, but some Sokobans can involve running around the board for a dozen laps. It's the Rubik's Cube of puzzle games. I blame Stephen's Sausage Roll.

I never liked Sokoban games, but so far quite enjoy the Witness. I expect the later stages will give me that Sokoban frustration feeling, though we'll see. So far, the puzzles are each small enough that there's not that many possibilities, but are still quite challenging in an enjoyable way.

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.

The game is not for me... but god damn it's polished

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!

That seems a little unfair, there are like... ~1700 words about the gameplay complexity before anything about the creator's personal life starts getting mentioned.

A pivot perhaps, but not a shallow or immediate one.

Agreed. Quite sad that some people are not able to put away their personal feelings about creator when judging the creation. For instance an author wouldn't play a role when choosing whether to use ReiserFS either.

> Quite sad that some people are not able to put away their personal feelings about creator when judging the creation.

A piece of art is informed by the artist, and it is incorrect to believe the two can be wholly separate. None of us are impartial robots, what we experience and believe informs what we do and how we do it to different degrees. That’s one of the major points of art, the expression of the author’s views, and videogames are art.

Furthermore, the author of this piece clearly has complicated feelings regarding the game and they themselves make it explicit that they don’t feel it’s fair to pass judgement until experiencing all of it.

What is sad to me is that so many people on this thread fail to see the nuance in the author’s piece, instead jumping to judge any discussion of existing controversy as full on agreement and support. The world isn’t black and white, you don’t have to pick sides and actively fight everything.

> A piece of art is informed by the artist, and it is incorrect to believe the two can be wholly separate.

It's not incorrect in the least. I adore art made by some people who are insufferable. Blow himself, for example, is so pretentious I wonder how he can hold a conversation with us lesser creatures. But Braid is one of the best puzzle games ever made. The art is not the same as the artist, and I am perfectly capable of divorcing them in my mind.

> I'm not interested in the creator's background or personal beliefs!

That’s your prerogative, but the world doesn’t revolve around your preferences. Other people are interested in those details, including the writer of the piece and the authors of the games that this game is based on.

> devolved into a hit piece

That is profoundly unfair. Any amount of criticism doesn’t immediately become a “hit piece”. Most of the article is about the game and the reviewer’s thoughts on it. Any mentions to the creator are thoughtful and well-weaved into the larger review, adding to the layers of complex feelings the writer has about the game. They add to it rather than detract, and you’d do well to appreciate the review as a thing in itself instead of assigning agendas.

I mean it's part of the marketing play. Drama always is. This article will get more views because it throws some shade. More copies of Order of the Sinking Star will sell as a result.

I sort of agree, but I can see their point. The author seems concerned that they strongly disagree with Blow, and have a piece of his writing that, if it echoes his world view, might end in a way they don't support, and they haven't got to the end yet.

I'm personally less concerned. Partly because I attribute Blow's social opinions to naivety and ignorance rather than malice – e.g. I think he holds misogynistic views not because he is trying to be misogynistic, but because he's naive about the systemic bias in society, a criticism that can be levelled at many people.

But otherwise, I'm less concerned about Order of the Sinking Star because he has said in interviews that the story is supposed to be interesting to a wide audience and not intended to be based on his world view in any way. The Witness also wasn't some right wing think piece, it was just pretentious.

I get why a journalist would be concerned, but I think they're being overly cautious.

There is a place for stories we don't agree with or that illustrate aspects of our world we might not be happy about, and the creator isn't necessarily complicit just for telling it. I feel we shouldn't hit the writers of those stories for telling them, as not everyone tells a story because they personally support it's message or the status quo it illustrates.

I also think the enlightened have a habit of underestimating how much of an audience the status quo has, and I think that's an ignorance of its own.

And because it's the internet I feel the need to subtext that this is by no means a supportive comment toward Blows personal beliefs. I don't know what they are!

> Blows personal beliefs. I don't know what they are!

From his tweets and streams I learned that he believes Trump is by far (his characterisation) the best president of his life time, and that he makes fallacious arguments such as defending a belief in God because (paraphrasing) “many physicists believe in it” (appeal to authority).

I can’t tell you much more because I personally got tired of what I saw first hand and decided I shouldn’t spend my time on it. Things like the COVID conspiracies mentioned in the article are not something I can personally attest to.

For better and worse there is a cult of personality around Blow. He puts his views out there and is constantly on stream, all of which is his choice. For sure it’ll lead to many more sales of the game from the fans, but it also opens the door to criticism. He’s very aggressive in sharing his opinion so there shouldn’t be any surprise there is pushback.

Should that affect your purchase of the game? Only you can answer that. I can’t fault people for deciding to not monetarily support those whose beliefs harm their lives, and it seems worth considering that designers responsible for the game have disavowed the creator to the point they’ll be donating their part of the proceeds.

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”.

The Witness was repetitive? Every puzzle set had a lesson, and every set of sets had a gag / out of the box puzzle at the end where something was fundamentally different (a crack or flicker, or an interaction with the environment, or a reference back to something else on the island.)

What I suppose was repetitive though — and where you might be coming from — is the formula itself. The entire island was the same episode format, even if the plot was different each time. Like Knight Rider — formulaic, but I loved the formula!

Like you get presented with a series of grids that uses the rule of the area. You solve the 5 or 6. Which leads you to another series of grids using the same rule. You solve those. Etc.

Finding the puzzles and discovering the rules are the most involved part of the game. Once you know that, the actual puzzles are just ok. But they're line drawing puzzles, there's a ceiling.

Even the environment puzzles are kinda meh. "Oh, that looks like it could be a line. Yep. It's a line."

I still haven’t tried the new game, but I did feel like that about The Witness.

I loved the beginning, the art style, the Myst vibes, discovering new areas and a specific “WTF” moment.

But I really didn’t understand the need of piling up similar puzzles with minimal variation.

You could have slashed 2/3 of the puzzles and the game would have been tighter and more satisfying imho.

Brevity is be the soul of wit (not of the Witness).

Reading that is a “500 hours game” instantly drains any interest I might have for Order of the Sinking Star, heck, there are not many pleasant activities I can think of I would like to do for 500 hours.

Animal well could be called, perhaps, a 500 hour game in that many people will never find all of the secrets by themselves, it took a community effort. Is OotSS a 500-hour game in that the main storyline takes 500 hours, or 100%ing it takes 500 hours?

> You could have slashed 2/3 of the puzzles and the game would have been tighter and more satisfying imho.

That's a large part of my problem. You go "Oh, ok, I get it", then have to solve another dozen puzzles.

I agree. There's variety in all the new elements being added to each of the core puzzle types, but it doesn't remain satisfying or engaging for very long, it just becomes repetitive. I was expecting more in the way of a meta-puzzle experience.

Maybe that was never promised and I made up the expectation myself when I heard "500 hours." But it feels like there's never a reward for finishing a puzzle other than, okay, here's the next one.

It seems like because there's just so much of it that people just haven't got to the "meta puzzles" yet.

I'm 20 hours in and starting to see examples of mechanics being generalised in a way I wasn't expecting, i.e. an early games thing turns out works in a way more general way that elevates the mechanic in complexity and feels like a very satisfying moment.

I have a suspicion about another that would completely change my perception of the game if it turns out to be true, so... meta puzzles? Not sure, but certainly there's something more than just the 4 initial rulesets colliding.

Just be careful; if you find the coin then you’ll have to write the next one!

I think the other big issue is that you can't get really clever with block manipulation.

Either they present you with exactly what you need to solve the area or they give you more. Giving you more, in most cases, will just break the puzzle and make it too easy. So you know in a general sense what you have to do just by what tools you have available. Then it's just a matter of doing them in the right order.

And, yeah, it's fine. But that's the best I can muster for it.

And I see it's $30, which feels an ok price point. I was feeling more like $20, but $30 is fine.

This is just not true. One of the great things about the game is how each set of puzzles is a new emergent idea. You are required to make a leap of reasoning. You often do not know in a general sense what to do, because once you do the puzzles are quite easy. The difficulty, and the fun, is in discovering emergent behavior of systems. There are puzzles with just two pieces on a simple screen that boggle the mind initially.

You can feel that way, but that’s not what I perceived when I was playing through the demo. It was “leaps” and more “steps”.

The demo is barely more than a tutorial...

If the demo is not enough to engage someone to buy the full product, it is not a good demo.

If a game needs to be played for 30 to 40 hours before it gets truly engaging, it is not a good game.

Entertainment's goal is to engage. There are many ways to achieve that, but no one should have to slog through tedium in order to get to "the good stuff".

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