'500-hour' Order of the Sinking Star is as complex and exhausting as it sounds
polygon.comYou 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”.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Compared to Baba Is You which gets difficult and interesting after like 10 minutes.
I'm about 20h in and agree the story is pretty meh, but that's no surprise coming from Blow.
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!
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 deliverately pry at. Thanks!
The perspective you offer here makes me want to find or bring about a venue for… this.
A pivot perhaps, but not a shallow or immediate one.
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.
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!
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.
What makes you say that? He called him by far the best president of his life time. Seems perfectly happy to me.
https://x.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1887599339037663629#m
https://xxcancel.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/188759933903766362...
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.
That's on you - you shouldn't expect an interesting article from Polygon.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
I have been turned off from a few JRPGs with such high playtimes that they have no respect for the player.
While I do enjoy longer games like Yakuza, etc, I really enjoy being able to play through a game in 1 to 2 evenings.
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.
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
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?
It was already there in the Witness. One secret challenge involves you watching a movie and slowly tracing a light for 56min straight.
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.
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 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
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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fABGyVzVwI
The fictional creator, "Jimothy Lasic", has supposedly "said repeatedly that if you can't figure out what you're doing in the game you're just not thinking in the right way."
The joke skewers the same self-important sermonizing running from Braid to Order of the Sinking Star: endure my tedium, absorb my philosophy, and if you aren't enlightened, you're thinking wrong.
It's everything the MAGA/Gamergate crowd screams about when a game acknowledges women or LGBTQ+ people exist: preachy, ideological, more interested in lecturing its audience than entertaining it. Apparently "keep politics out of games" makes an exception for a foaming-at-the-mouth Trump supporter assigning hundreds of hours of philosophical homework.
That's what makes the review's discussion of Blow's Trump support relevant: once you present your games as lessons in how to think, your own judgment becomes fair game. You're asking players to trust that adopting your way of thinking will reward their patience. The Game Helpin' Squad parody punches back up at a designer who punches down at his own players' intelligence by assuming that any failure in that relationship must be theirs.
This review follows that question of trust into the contradiction between the new game's celebration of collaboration across differences and the developers whose work it draws on distancing themselves from the project over Blow's pro-MAGA politics. If we're supposed to take the philosophy seriously, we get to question its contradictions too. "You're just not thinking in the right way" cuts both ways.
Unfortunately, Braid's rewind mechanic can't undo January 6, Trump's historical revisionism, or Blow's infamous track record of sycophantic praise for Trump, crackpot COVID-19 conspiracism, and bigoted attacks on inclusive hiring as well as his own colleagues and players. Rewriting history requires a different kind of time travel understander. Meanwhile, understanding why his own star is sinking shouldn't take 500 hours.