Fifteen years after Braid redefined what an indie puzzle game could be, Jonathan Blow’s studio is going bigger than it ever has. Order of the Sinking Star, the next game from Thekla, is coming to PlayStation 5 later this year, Sony confirmed on the PlayStation Blog alongside an extended hands-on preview — and the scale it describes is startling for a team of roughly 20 people.
Per the game’s Steam page, Order of the Sinking Star packs more than 1,000 interconnected, hand-crafted puzzles; the PlayStation Blog preview cites 900+ levels, multiple endings, and a decade of development. For the studio that made The Witness — itself famous for 650-odd line puzzles on a single island — this is a different order of ambition: multiple worlds, a cast of playable characters, and an overworld with its own layer of brainteasers.
Sokoban with a repertory cast
The structure is the twist. Where Braid had one time-bending protagonist and The Witness had a silent wanderer, Order of the Sinking Star hands you a roster of characters whose abilities are the puzzle vocabulary. The opening casts you as the Queen, lost in a strange palace that opens onto the overworld, teaching the grid-based block-pushing basics and the rewind mechanic that lets you undo any misstep mid-puzzle.
From there the game splits into three regions you can tackle in any order. Head north into The Hearty Heroes of Hauling and you juggle a trio with complementary powers: Valens the warrior can only push blocks, Tif the thief can only pull them, and Isidore the wizard swaps places with objects on line of sight. West lies The Promise, where an explorer channels colored gem beams through a maze-like mine. East, the Mirror Isles star a wealthy trader who swaps places with his own reflection to cross a waterlogged archipelago. A fourth southern region, Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes, wasn’t in Sony’s demo but promises a marooned sailor redirecting rivers among giant stones and lily pads.
The cast keeps growing — a druid who transmutes blocks, a bard who charms enemies, a priestess immune to attacks — and the preview’s key observation is that the characters eventually start solving puzzles across worlds, a late-demo turn Sony says “turned the entire game on its head.”
Monsters, but no combat
Puzzle purists can relax: there is no fighting. Instead, goblins kill any character standing on an adjacent square and beasts breathe fire along line of sight, turning enemies into moving puzzle pieces. You can bait monsters into attacking each other, charm them with the bard, or shield allies with the priestess — and some gates only open once the local threats are dealt with. It’s combat as constraint-satisfaction, which is about as Thekla as a mechanic can get.
Story is more present than in the studio’s earlier games — the characters actually talk — but exposition arrives in small, sporadic chunks, secondary to the mechanics, with environmental storytelling doing the quiet work of explaining why everyone is displaced from their surroundings.
The long game
Ten years is a long development cycle even by Blow’s standards (The Witness took about eight), and the result is positioned as hundreds of hours of gameplay. There’s no firm date yet: Sony says “later this year” for PS5, while the Steam release date remains listed as “to be announced” — though a free demo is already available on Steam for anyone who wants to test the block-pushing waters early.
For PS5 owners, the pitch is simple: the most ambitious game yet from one of the most rigorous puzzle studios working, arriving before the year is out. The mystery behind that strange title, Sony teases, is itself something the game eventually explains.
