Order of the Sinking Star's enormous Steam Next Fest demo is worth checking out

Order of the Sinking Star, Jonathan Blow’s long-in-development puzzle game from Thekla, has a free Steam Next Fest demo available Monday, June 15. Blow says the demo is “bigger than most entire paid puzzle games,” and a short hands-on at Summer Game Fest left the writer impressed by how the project celebrates an entire puzzle sub-genre despite controversy that has led some contributors to distance themselves from Blow.

The game frames itself as a collection of Sokoban-style block-pushing puzzles, but it’s actually multiple Sokoban games stitched together into an open world. Blow obtained licenses for several smaller games and reworked their ideas into an interconnected experience that he estimates could take 500 hours to fully complete.

Early areas introduce focused rulesets—mirrors that can be pushed and teleported through, rocks that form bridges, and gem-powered beams that behave differently by color.

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