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.

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.

Another poster here said the first thirty hours were great, but after 40 it started feeling repetitive.

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 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.

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 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.

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 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'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!

> a big step backwards compared to Braid and The Witness

It was already there in the Witness. One secret challenge involves you watching a movie and slowly tracing a light for 56min straight.

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.

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

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.

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":

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 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 deliverately pry at. Thanks!

The perspective you offer here makes me want to find or bring about a venue for… this.

Check out Supraworld. David Münnich is building the most peak 3D puzzle platformer you will ever play.

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.

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.

Solving 600 10x10 jigsaw puzzles in a row would easily exhaust you without posing any challenge at all.

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.

> 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.

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.

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 clicked on this expecting an interesting article

That's on you - you shouldn't expect an interesting article from Polygon.

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.

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.