Last updated on December 12, 2025
Order of the Sinking Star is Jonathan Blow’s massive narrative puzzle adventure from Thekla, Inc., published by Arc Games, and unveiled at The Game Awards 2025 after nearly a decade of development. It features over 1,000 handcrafted Sokoban-style puzzles across four interconnected realms that merge into combinatorial challenges, with multiple playable characters like a queen, thief, druid, wizard, and sentient boat each bringing unique movement and block manipulation rules.
Players explore a branching overworld blending exploration, evolving mechanics, and overlapping timelines where characters’ stories intersect, delivering 200-250 hours for a standard playthrough and up to 500 hours for completionists focused on insight-driven puzzles without grind or obscurity. Puzzles start simple then recombine systems from collaborators like Alan Hazelden and Jonah Ostroff, creating a “combinatorial explosion” in a custom engine Blow plans to open-source post-launch.
The game targets PC via Steam in 2026, with consoles to follow; no exact date yet, but the announcement trailer showcases its isometric grid-based world of magic, monsters, and contraptions.
