Nice writeup. I too am having trouble with Skipping Stones. I feel like I'm near the "end" of the first set of puzzles (within a single star) but I'm not sure how to "get back" after reaching the initial goal. My mind has trouble with these.

I still probably like the Heroes of Hauling section the best. I was stuck for a good while at not knowing where to go next in the overworld (met dead-ends on all sides more or less) but I figured out a way to get to the Mirror/Heroes split and started doing a bunch of puzzles again, and now I'm back in the groove. This game is frequently brilliant, but I definitely have to take it a little at a time. I can only take so much furrowing my brow for half an hour on a puzzle in one sitting after all. At its best it's really clever and rewarding; it's just not the kind of thing I can power through.

Can't wait to play this! I think it will be next up for me after Shocktoberfest and the OoT remake.

How we doing here? OOTSS got confirmed for physical release on Switch 2! And no Game-Key Card either, I believe.

This is a neat game, but I just wish it was a little more consistent. The more I play, the more I realize that I really enjoy Heroes of Hauling and really don't enjoy Skipping Stones. I guess that's kind of the risk when you mix up several disparate gameplay styles.

Heroes is just so clever and satisfying where nearly every puzzle has some sort of teachable or "aha!" moment. At its best it's downright brilliant and generally does a good job not being super persnickety with hundreds of moves for the solution. You can usually logic your way through.

Skipping Stones gets off on the wrong foot. The very first time you play it you're plunged into a complex, multi-screen puzzle that--crucially--is very easy to completely screw yourself over in if you don't solve some of the screens the intended way. Which I feel is a massive design oversight considering the other three zones don't have this problem. More subjectively, the mechanics are also weirdly unintuitive to me here, with the perpendicular lily pads and some timing-based stuff feeling a little off.

I had a bad experience here reaching the very last screen and getting entirely stuck because I didn't do something correctly three screens prior to that so I had to rewind a bunch after looking up the solution. This simply should not happen; the actual goals of the puzzles should be clear to the player even if the way to reach them are head-scratchers. The mechanics here don't jive with the idea of seeking out side-treasures because I sometimes don't know which island I should be aiming for at a fork in the road.

Mirror Isles is pretty cool although when you start splitting yourself in two it gets a little too deep into the "mind-boggling in the overwhelming way" territory for me. Thankfully I haven't seen a ton of this kind of puzzle yet. Beamcaster I think is the type of widespread multi-screen puzzle done right since I don't think you can arbitrarily lock yourself out of solving it. It does have a few very specific rules that aren't always clear to me and took some time to learn though.

There are nuggets in here that are in "brilliant best in its class" territory but I wish everything was a little more consistent. I'm eager to see how things evolve and mutate going forward; apparently I've just barely scratched the surface of this one. Truth be told though, I would've preferred fewer puzzles if it meant every one was a home run.

I've been feasting on this game. Haven't had a change to do a big write-up, but funnily enough I think I feel the opposite of you @TriforceBun when it comes to Heroes vs. Stones. I was getting a little burned out on all of the one-off little Hero puzzles, clever as they were. And then once you get to the crossovers with the Hero sections, there are so many puzzles! Skipping Stones, especially that first huge level, was indeed the hardest of the four worlds for me and as such I saved it for pretty late, but it was a great palate cleanser. I didn't know it was possible to get stuck because of decisions you made three islands ago? I thought the game was really clever for making that impossible! Everything always seems to land exactly where it needs to. That said, I haven't collected all six optional treasures in that level, and that seems to involve some really intense trickery where you have to reason about the entire map all at once. I love that that's in there, personally; Vault of the Beamcasters and some of its world's larger puzzles have been my favorite.

Actually, my real favorite aspect of this game is the overworld. My most mindblowing moments so far have been realizations about some things that are happening on a macro level in this game. And I'm only about 200 puzzles in!

Since I've mentioned the other three worlds, I should give a shout-out to Mirror Isles. This one is structurally more similar to Heroes, but different enough mechanically and atmospherically that it really felt like its own thing and held my interest all the way through.

I don't mean to poo on Heroes; it's also really great. They really are exploring every permutation on these mechanics. "A set of puzzles about the warrior and purple lasers! Okay, now a set of puzzles about the wizard and purple lasers!" It's comprehensive, and I'm glad it's not the entire game.

That's sort of my review of the game as a whole. I get the sense that I'm maybe 70% of the way to the first ending, and so far Order of the Sinking Star is exactly what it says on the tin: an anthology of four different puzzle games that explores and remixes the collisions of mechanics between them. If that's all this game was, I'd say great job, mission accomplished, wonderful puzzle game, no complaints.

(Actually, I have one complaint: where's the Switch's Day 1 patch!? It's been two weeks! There's a ton of missing dialogue in here! And it's making me concerned that some of the levels that don't even seem to have dialogue at all due to a lack of subtitles actually had some added in later! How unfinished is this? How much is missing? It's still on version 0.2.5! I get that Nintendo can be frustrating to work with, but when Jon tweeted three weeks before launch that he was "having fun writing this game" they were already cooked, fam. But I have sympathy for them running out of money, and thankfully the game seems to be doing very very well sales wise.)

...but what really has me tantalized is whatever comes after this first ending. Is it just going to be 800 more variations on the same puzzles I've been playing? I actually have seen a certain idea in trailers that I haven't encountered at all yet, so maybe there's more juice to squeeze just from these concepts alone. What I'm really hoping for though is stuff that has the intricacy of the best Beamcaster and Skipping Stones levels. I went back and played Corrypt the other day, and there is a certain je ne sais quoi to its thematic, macro-scale puzzle mechanic that I don't get from these one-off puzzles. This is the type of thing I'm hoping Order of the Sinking Star is leading me towards.

Made it to the first ending last night! 269 puzzles, 47 hours. Judging by puzzle count, that's probably about a fifth of the way through, especially assuming they get harder as the game goes on.

I was running out of steam by the time I got there. The puzzles in the Stones and Mirrors crossover, my final section before the end, seemed to revel in the feats of trigonometry and engineering they ask of you. Really cool stuff, but so close to the end I just wanted to sprint!

Then I played past this first ending a bit, and... bahahaha, there really is more a lot more to this game! It's opened back up now, and there's so much cool new stuff to try out. It is the trailer idea I alluded to above, but I never expected how much mileage you could get out of it. And they're throwing in new stuff on top of it too.

The game has also apparently had a thematic mask off moment where, having weeded out the people who only played until the credits sequence, it is now willing to very very directly address one of the big questions it's asking. Jon said in his interview with Edmund McMillen that there's some stuff in this game that literally no other developer would put in, and... yeah, you can say that again, lmao.

Some of you guys will appreciate it. I'm curious where it'll go with it; there have been some thought-provoking ideas already. A certain monologue early on in Heroes, by the wizard, got me thinking...