😍

@Secret_Tunnel
Never heard of this but that's a nice trailer. The Mole Mania superfan in me is very much intrigued.

I got to the Witness far too late so I’ll have to get this one on the sooner side.

This does look like Mole Mania doesn’t it?

@GameDadGrant
Single-screen (action) puzzlers were a pretty vital genre throughout the 80s and 90s. Adventures of Lolo trilogy, Fire 'n Ice, Mole Mania, Catrap, even Donkey Kong '94 and Wrecking Crew apply to a certain extent. You hardly see them anymore so a modern version of one could be pretty awesome. I think Baba Is You is probably the most well-known recent example.

@GameDadGrant
@TriforceBun

They call these sorts of tile-based block-pushing games Sokoban-style puzzle games these days. Baba Is You is indeed easily my favorite of the genre, with Stephen's Sausage Roll as a solid second. People also love A Monster's Expedition and a few others, but they've always felt a bit basic to me, like they're exploring way too many little permutations on every little interaction. Order of the Sinking Star looks like it's going Baba Is You style: there are so many moving parts that every level feels totally unique.

Jonathan Blow's previous game The Witness is probably in my Top 5 favorite games of all time. This one apparently has 500 hours worth of puzzles! Easily my most anticipated game right now.

Cannot wait! The Witness is easily one of my favorite games of all time and I have no doubt that this game will be similarly brilliant.

@TheBigG753

No big straight lines to save you this time.

@Shadowlink

We'll see about that!

For anyone interested, there is a demo on Steam available for the next week. Apparently you are able to play a rather large portion of the game.

@TheBigG753

I was going back and forth on whether I want to play this or not. I'll be playing the full game on Switch 2 so my progress from this demo wouldn't carry over, and do I really want to disjoint my experience by playing an unfinished demo a few months prior to launch in the first place?

I decided to try the demo out for an hour or so just to get a taste.

...and it wouldn't run on either computer I tried it on! So there's that decision made for me.

Hey, this thread has 13,000 views! Is this one of the top Google results for Order of the Sinking star? Look alive, folks.

(I unironically love that the first responses in this thread are our resident Gen Xers comparing it to MOLE MANIA.)

As someone who loves diving into obscure message boards to see what people are saying about games I love, I'll take this opportunity to pontificate about why I'm particularly looking forward to this game.

I'm coming to believe that outside of happiness, love, the works—the type of stuff you could achieve through drugs or wireheading—the point of the universe is understanding. Contemplation, as Aristotle would put it. But I'm also not quite high IQ enough to be a mathematician who can do multidimensional symbolic manipulation in his head, so I need geometric representations of this stuff. Better yet, toys that I can poke and prod. Better yet: games that are designed to show me all the cool stuff on a silver platter.

I think Jonathan Blow and Nintendo are kindred spirits in this pursuit. He's a bit more principled and higher-brow, but I don't think it's fair to say that Nintendo is just really good at providing cheap entertainment either. They're clearly tastemakers, and MKW and Bananza prove they haven't lost that goal. Capcom and Sega can still make great arcade games that challenge you to master some domain by solving it faster and faster, but the Nintendo style of design where they're specifically trying to illustrate as wide of a variety of creative implications of their mechanics is essentially dead in the AAA space, and it's rare amongst indies too. Blow gets it, and he articulates it better than anyone.

So the whole pitch for this game being "1400 surprises" is tantalizing. You might say it has potential to be the best game ever. Why I expect it to be merely a stepping stone to that pinnacle is that, as a turn-based puzzle game, it's not quite tapping into the player's muscle memory. There's a whole computational subsystem baked into our bodies that Mario takes advantage of. That's how you really communicate these ideas in a humane way. I mean, who am I to criticize an upcoming masterpiece for not being even more of a masterpiece, but if there is a higher mountain, I suspect that that's where it'd be. I'll never reach it.

Anyway. I'm hyped, and it'll be hilarious if this is a better Zelda game than the OOT remake.