Order of the Sinking Star

Story and setting

You are transported to a strange realm of curious magic, dangerous contraptions and vicious monsters. The world is built around a central overworld, from which four regions branch in different directions. Each begins as a separate setting with its own characters, rules, hazards and story, before the boundaries between them start to break down.

The confirmed cast includes a queen, warrior, thief, wizard, bard, cleric, druid, trader, explorer, sailor and even a talking boat. Their stories begin independently, but eventually overlap as the worlds collide. The mystery is delivered through exploration, character dialogue, environmental details, notes and discoveries made while solving puzzles. The central question is what lies behind the Order of the Sinking Star and why this realm exists in its fractured state.

How it plays

Order of the Sinking Star is a single-player puzzle adventure built around grid-based spaces, exploration and steadily expanding rules. The game contains more than 1,000 hand-crafted puzzles, with each area introducing mechanics that can later be combined with those from another world. The official material promises dozens of distinct mechanics and hundreds of hours of content for players who want to solve everything.

The northern Hearty Heroes of Hauling area uses a team of fantasy characters with complementary abilities. The warrior pushes objects, the thief pulls them and the wizard swaps places with objects in his line of sight. In the eastern Mirror Isles, a trader uses magical reflections to exchange positions across an archipelago. The western Promise uses coloured light beams and gems to grant abilities such as phasing, breaking obstacles and teleportation. In the southern Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes, a stranded sailor works with stones, lily pads and redirected rivers.

The game is designed to let you leave a difficult puzzle and return later, rather than forcing a single route through the world. A rewind or undo function is also present. Monsters appear as puzzle hazards rather than as the focus of a conventional combat system in the hands-on material shown so far, and some can be manipulated to affect other creatures or open routes.

Trailers, showcases and demo

The announcement trailer, released on 11 December 2025, introduced the game as a massive narrative puzzle adventure from Thekla and established the four-world structure, the unusual cast and the promise of more than 1,000 puzzles. At that point, only a PC release in 2026 had been confirmed.

A Nintendo Switch 2 overview trailer on 14 May 2026 announced the portable version and showed more of the characters, settings and interconnected puzzle design. The extended overview trailer released on 21 July added PS5 as a platform and focused on what happens when characters and mechanics from separate worlds begin to overlap. The release-date announcement on 18 August confirmed Thursday, 8 October 2026 for PC via Steam and Steam Deck, Nintendo Switch 2 and PS5.

The latest major trailer, Explore the Realm, arrived on 23 September. It showed the non-linear overworld, the four cardinal routes, the individual mechanics of each region and the later Gold Rooms, where the worlds are joined together to create hybrid puzzle areas. A Steam Next Fest demo ran from 15 June and included more than 100 puzzles across three worlds, with an update on 19 June adding further areas and an early look at the worlds colliding. Demo progress was confirmed to carry over to the Steam version of the full game.

Platforms, editions and UK price

The confirmed launch platforms are PC through Steam, Nintendo Switch 2 and PlayStation 5. The PC release is Steam Deck Verified. Nintendo’s UK listing confirms a digital Switch 2 version, PEGI 3 rating, single-system play for one person and an estimated download size of 18.4GB. English is among the supported languages.

The publisher has announced a standard digital release at US$29.99, plus Steam bundles pairing the game with Mewgenics, Animal Well or the original soundtrack. A separate soundtrack is also planned. UK prices in pounds for Steam, PS5 and Nintendo Switch 2 are not displayed on the official UK storefront pages at the time of writing, so there is no confirmed British RRP to quote. No boxed edition or UK physical retailer release has been announced. Steam and PlayStation offer wishlists, while Nintendo has a UK product page for the Switch 2 version.

What we still don’t know

The date is firm, but the UK unlock time is not. The official pages do not say whether the game will release at midnight local time, at a fixed global time or at a different hour on each platform. PS5’s public store page also still shows a generic release date to be determined, despite the publisher’s separate confirmation of the 8 October launch.

The full voice cast, final trophy and achievement details, exact completion time and any post-launch plans remain unconfirmed. There is no announced Xbox, PS4 or original Nintendo Switch version. PlayStation Plus and Xbox Game Pass availability have not been announced, and no physical or special edition has been detailed.