LONG FORM · 7 DISPATCHES · 75 MIN READ
Dispatches
Written features that go past the entry cards. Each piece is built from a transcript held in the research ledger, rewritten into continuous prose — no timestamps, no caption noise, no quotation marks lifted straight out of a machine transcript.
DISPATCH 01 · DESIGN How Order of the Sinking Star Was Designed
Jonathan Blow spent ten years on a puzzle game whose four worlds were built to be crashed into one another. In his own account of the project, he explains why the puzzles had to come from the objects, why the overworld had to stop being a level select screen, and why he wrote a programming language to get there.
DISPATCH 02 · CRITIQUE The Cost of Enormity
Order of the Sinking Star is built from more than a thousand puzzles across four interlocking worlds. The same scale that makes it generous is also the thing that most reliably works against it, and the game's sharpest critic spent nearly seventy hours finding out exactly where that line falls.
DISPATCH 03 · ART Readable by Design
A puzzle game lives or dies on whether the player can read the board. Order of the Sinking Star's art direction starts from that constraint rather than arriving at it later, and the result is a look that is engineered as much as it is styled.
DISPATCH 04 · CRITIQUE The Cast That Never Stops Talking
Order of the Sinking Star surrounds strong puzzle design with a party of characters who narrate nearly everything they do. Whether that is a feature or a fault depends entirely on what you came for, and the disagreement it produces is the most interesting thing about the game's reception.
DISPATCH 05 · SYSTEMS How the Party Changes the Puzzle
The northern region of Order of the Sinking Star does not introduce new blocks or new terrain. It introduces people. Four characters with four sets of rules turn the same grid into a different game each time, and the region's real subject is what happens when you have to solve with all of them at once.
DISPATCH 06 · DESIGN The Four Games Inside the Game
Order of the Sinking Star is four puzzle games in one, and each of its four regions is an expansion of a small, freely available browser game that existed years before development began. Understanding where they came from explains why the world feels the way it does.
DISPATCH 07 · TECHNOLOGY The Game on a Handheld
A puzzle game with a fixed camera and a readable grid should be easy to run anywhere. Getting Order of the Sinking Star onto handhelds and current consoles still took a year of work from scratch, and the reasoning behind what was and was not optimised says a lot about the priorities of the people who built it.