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".
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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 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 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'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.
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.
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.
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
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
Game Helpin' Squad took the piss out of Jonathan Blow's tedious, sanctimonious approach to game design with this parody of Braid called "Time Travel Understander":
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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
Yeah. It's less "opinion journalism" and more "dig journalism". They are essentially trying to punish their political enemies by using every chance to mention the political stance of the enemy in question, so that the readers of the publication (who largely share their political opinion with the journalist) categorize him as "the enemy" rather than judging his work without prejudice.
It's a particularly dirty form of culture war. Rather than restricting their political disagreements to articles about the subject matter "out in the open", these journalists sneak in opportunities to throw shade at people in articles that aren't about politics at all. And in this case the journalist even has the gall of adding a faux innocent "Oh I’m not raising these points to get a dig in".
It seems perfectly pertinent to show the wide gap between the game's message and the developer's message.
So weird that you want journalists to "shut up and play ball" while the developer doesn't have to. If anything, it is Blow and Trump who are finding and attacking political enemies everywhere, all the time. You are fine with culture wars, but only when they come from one side - the other side is dirty and terrible to have the galls to do the same.
No, Blow "plays ball" in the things he produces: his games aren't political as far as I know. But the journalist does not play ball: He includes political jabs when reviewing games without political jabs.
For both parties is is legitimate to throw political punches in other contexts, like on social media.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
what are his misogynistic views? the only thing i saw that people might take offence to was that he voted for trump, but he didn't seem like he was particularly happy to do so.
i still cant quite get a read tbh. a lot of people were pro trump based on 2016-2020 which was a very different trump compared to today. id be curious his thoughts on today, because banana republic indeed.
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'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.
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!
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?
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.
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.
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.
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".
Compared to Baba Is You which gets difficult and interesting after like 10 minutes.
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
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.
Can't wait for 11hr unskippable cutscene that contains a hidden puzzle. And if game dies during that time... Restart from the beginning.
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.
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.
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 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.
It was already there in the Witness. One secret challenge involves you watching a movie and slowly tracing a light for 56min straight.
It's a good movie, though. For anyone who's interested: https://maraoz.com/the-secret-of-psalm-46-transcript/
The point I'm making the game doesn't respect my time. Why should I respect it back?
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.
I'm sorry, I really like both games, but this is unbelievably false.
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 deliberately pry at. Thanks!
The perspective you offer here makes me want to find or bring about a venue for… this.
I'm about 20h in and agree the story is pretty meh, but that's no surprise coming from Blow.
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.
It's a particularly dirty form of culture war. Rather than restricting their political disagreements to articles about the subject matter "out in the open", these journalists sneak in opportunities to throw shade at people in articles that aren't about politics at all. And in this case the journalist even has the gall of adding a faux innocent "Oh I’m not raising these points to get a dig in".
It seems perfectly pertinent to show the wide gap between the game's message and the developer's message.
So weird that you want journalists to "shut up and play ball" while the developer doesn't have to. If anything, it is Blow and Trump who are finding and attacking political enemies everywhere, all the time. You are fine with culture wars, but only when they come from one side - the other side is dirty and terrible to have the galls to do the same.
For both parties is is legitimate to throw political punches in other contexts, like on social media.
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.
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.
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 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.
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).
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.
A pivot perhaps, but not a shallow or immediate one.
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.
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...
https://x.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1939982295936782396
i still cant quite get a read tbh. a lot of people were pro trump based on 2016-2020 which was a very different trump compared to today. id be curious his thoughts on today, because banana republic indeed.
That's on you - you shouldn't expect an interesting article from Polygon.
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.
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”.
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!
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.
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.