Order of the Sinking Star explained before you start

Six days after it went on sale, Order of the Sinking Star had four sets of patch notes on its Steam page, with 59 bulleted fixes between them. Ten of those items mention an exploit or a "cheesy" solution, seven deal with checkpoints, and one post exists only to fix a crash on Steam Deck and Linux. That is a normal first week for a large game, but for a puzzle game it says something specific: the levels are still being tightened, so a shortcut found this week may be gone next week. This page is for someone deciding whether to start now, start later, or try the four free games it was built from first.

What it is

Order of the Sinking Star is a puzzle adventure from Thekla, Inc., the studio that made The Witness, directed by Jonathan Blow. Arc Games publishes it; Steam also lists Gamirror Games, which the publisher's 4 August post names as the co-publisher for China, and the 10 September post says PLAYISM (Active Gaming Media Inc.) handles the Japanese digital releases on Nintendo Switch 2 and PlayStation 5. The game came out on 8 October 2026 on Steam (with Steam Deck), Nintendo Switch 2 and PlayStation 5, and the launch post adds NVIDIA GeForce NOW.

The Steam description promises "more than one thousand hand-crafted puzzles" across four worlds, "each with its own mechanics, characters, and stories", which later "collide" so that their puzzle rules combine. The heroes are, in the store's words, "a queen, a thief, a warrior, a wizard, and a talking boat", among others. You move between worlds freely; the release-date post of 18 August says that "hitting a challenging roadblock in one realm simply means you can pivot to another world".

For context on the studio, Steam's own records date The Witness (Thekla, Inc.) to 26 January 2016 and Braid (Number None) to 10 April 2009 on Steam. The announcement of 12 December 2025 says the new game had "been in the making for 10 years since the release of The Witness", and the 1 September "Making of" post says it began as an experiment in game design and in "a custom game programming language", Jai.

datasets/games.csv records the game with Thekla, Inc. as developer, Arc Games as publisher (with Gamirror Games and PLAYISM noted as the regional co-publishers), a first release of 2026-10-08, the platforms Windows PC, PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch 2, the genre puzzle and the era current: the thirty-seventh row.

The four games it grew from

The unusual thing about this game is where its rules come from. Thekla calls it a "game design supercollider": instead of one core idea, it takes the mechanics of several existing puzzle games by other designers and makes them meet. The official site's FAQ names four foundations, and all four are still online, free, from their own designers.

Hazelden's pages now carry a line that says each game "is one of the games used as the inspiration and starting point for Order of the Sinking Star". The FAQ says "Promesst 1-3"; we found the first two on Barrett's site and no third, so the third is not in the table. The official FAQ also credits design work from Zach Polansky (Enigmash), Patrick Traynor (Patrick's Parabox) and Marc ten Bosch (Miegakure), and the Steam description adds "design contributions from Twitch followers over the years".

Two small notes from reading the sources side by side. The 18 August press text spells Hazelden's game "Skipping Stones to Lonely Holmes"; Hazelden's own page and the official FAQ say "Homes". And the patch notes name these lineages directly: fixes are listed for "Skipping Stones" levels, "Heroes+Stones" levels, a "Stones+Mirrors" level and the "Vault of the Beamcasters", which the launch post says is the western world formerly called "The Promise".

Why this matters before you buy: the free originals are the cheapest way to find out whether you like the building blocks. Three of the four run in a browser tab, and Hazelden's pages list the whole control scheme: the arrow keys, Z to undo and R to reset (plus Space to swap in Mirror Isles). If those rules click for you, the larger game is built from them; if they do not, a thousand more of them will not help.

Release, platforms and price

Thekla's 5 October post says the game launched "on Thursday, October 8th (and Friday, October 9th depending on your region)". The PlayStation Store record gives 2026-10-08T17:00:00Z, the same hour as the Steam launch post.

The 24 September "Price & Bundles" post set the $29.99 price and three Steam bundles at 10% off: with Mewgenics, with Animal Well, and with the soundtrack. We did not check the bundle prices themselves. The Switch 2 version is confirmed by the publisher's own posts and FAQ, but its price is not on this page because we could not read it from a source we are allowed to use.

How big it is

The publisher gives two sizes, and they are not the same claim. The Steam description and the launch post say "hundreds of hours of gameplay". The official site's FAQ goes further: "More than 500 hours of gameplay await the most dedicated of puzzles solvers." Neither is a measured completion time, and no completion data from players was available to us, so treat both as the publisher's framing. The puzzle count is more concrete: "more than one thousand", and the June demo alone carried "100+ Handcrafted Puzzles", according to the 15 June post.

The first week of patches, counted

This is the part a reader can check. The script below reads the game's Steam posts through the store's public events endpoint, keeps the ones titled "Update notes", counts the bulleted items in each, and tags each item by keyword. Running it on the posts as they stood on 14 October gives this (an excerpt; the full run also prints every post title, the opening sentences of each patch post and the store figures):

python oss-patch-tally.py

  2026-10-09 20:09 UTC  Update notes for October 9: 10 bulleted items
  2026-10-12 12:13 UTC  Update notes for 12th October [1]: 30 bulleted items
  2026-10-12 15:44 UTC  Update notes for October 12 part 2: 0 bulleted items
  2026-10-14 21:16 UTC  Update notes for October 14: 19 bulleted items

  total: 4 patch-notes posts, 59 bulleted items
  exploit or cheese 10, checkpoint 7, crash 1, jailbreak 0, voice, subtitle or audio 7

How to read it. The tags are keyword matches on the bullet text, so an item can count twice or not at all, and one of the six exploit items on 12 October is a roll-back ("Roll back a bad exploit fix to one Stones+Mirrors level"). The "jailbreak" column is zero because the jailbreak fixes sit in the opening sentences, not the bullets: 12 October fixes "a wizard jailbreak in overworld" and 14 October opens with "Fixes for a number of jailbreaks on the overworld". The single crash match on 14 October is the new "-graphics" command-line option, added for a graphics setting that "crashes on startup". The bullet-free second post of 12 October is the crash fix itself: "Hopefully fix the 'E_INVALIDARG' crash when running with proton (Steam Deck / Machine, Linux)."

What it means for a new player. Three things stand out. First, the 9 October update lowered the Steam SDK version "to avoid the incompatibilities a lot of people were having", and the game now needs "SteamClient021, or Proton v9 or above". Second, bad checkpoints were a theme, mostly in Skipping Stones levels, so anyone who stalled in one before 14 October may find it behaves differently now. Third, the notes are written to avoid spoilers on purpose: the 9 October list ends with "Various fixes that seem too spoilery to put in patch notes...". The counts above are therefore a floor.

Where it runs

Steam's record lists Windows only, with full controller support, DualShock and DualSense support, Steam Cloud and Family Sharing. The minimum specification is Windows 10 64-bit, an Intel Core i5-6600K or AMD Ryzen R5 1600, 8 GB of RAM, a GeForce GTX 1050 Ti, Radeon RX 580 or Arc A380, DirectX 12 and 14 GB of storage. The recommended card is printed as "NVIDIA GeForce GTX 2070 Ti or AMD Radeon RX 5700 or Intel Arc B570", with 16 GB of RAM; we quote the card name as the page prints it. Thekla's 15 September post says the game is Steam Deck Verified, and the patch notes show Linux players running it through Proton.

Languages: eleven on Steam, with full audio in English only. Gamirror Games' notice of 8 October says the Chinese voice-over "will not be available at launch" and is expected "approximately one month after launch"; the Chinese text is in from day one. The English cast, named in the 1 October post, includes Emily O'Brien as The Queen, Liam O'Brien as The Warrior and Darin De Paul as The Wizard, with "a special appearance" by Jonathan Blow.

Age labels

The PlayStation Store page shows ESRB Everyone with one descriptor, Mild Fantasy Violence. Steam's record carries three labels, all flagged as generated by Steam rather than issued as certificates: 6 in Germany ("Fantasy-Gewalt"), 6 in Brazil and 13 in Indonesia. We did not read the rating boards' own databases for this article, so these are the store labels only.

Reception so far

On 14 October Steam's all-language summary showed 2,129 reviews, 2,069 of them positive (97.2%), which Steam labels "Overwhelmingly Positive". Steam's store data also carries a Metacritic score of 83 for the PC version. The launch post lists critics' scores the publisher chose to quote, from 10/10 (Shacknews) to 8/10 (GameSpot, Nintendo Life and others); it is a selection, not a survey.

The demo is gone, but its saves were promised

The Steam Next Fest demo ran from 15 June and, per the 22 June post, was extended "until this Friday, June 26". Both posts promised that demo progress "will carry over to the full game". On 14 October the demo's store record returned no data, so we found no demo on offer. If you played it in June, the publisher's promise is that your solved puzzles count.

What is not known

The Switch 2 price and listing details, because the store page is not a source we use. Sales figures: Thekla and Arc Games have published none in the posts we read. How long a first playthrough takes for a typical player, as opposed to the "500 hours" upper figure. Whether the Chinese voice-over arrives on its one-month estimate. And how many more exploit and checkpoint fixes are coming; the posts say only that patches will continue.

Should you start now

If the free originals appeal to you, yes, and play one of them first: an hour with Mirror Isles or Heroes of Sokoban will tell you more about whether this game suits you than any trailer, because those rules are literally inside it. If you are on Steam Deck or Linux, the 12 October crash fix and the Proton 9 requirement are worth knowing before you buy. If you dislike re-solving a level because a patch closed the trick you used, the honest answer is to wait a few weeks: four patch posts in six days, ten exploit fixes among them, is a game still being sanded down, and the launch post promises more of the same: fixes for bugs, performance and "quality-of-life improvements".