Order of the Sinking Star drops October 8. The designers whose puzzles are baked into it are still publicly furious with the man whose name is on the box.
Order of the Sinking Star launches October 8, 2026, on PS5, Switch 2 and PC. That part's simple. What isn't simple is that the game exists because six other puzzle designers spent years building it alongside director Jonathan Blow — and at least two of them have spent the last nine months publicly saying they don't want to be associated with him.
What's actually shipping on October 8
Thekla, Blow's studio, is calling this his biggest project yet — bigger than Braid, bigger than The Witness. It's a Sokoban-descended puzzle game, meaning you're pushing and pulling objects through a space where every move has consequences for the next ten moves, stitched into what Blow has described as the most collaborative thing he's ever made. Game Informer put the puzzle count at over 1,000, spread across mechanics licensed from six other designers rather than invented solely in-house.
Oct. 8, 2026
Release date
PS5, Switch 2, PC
Platforms
1,000+
Puzzle count
6
Outside designers credited
The demo, live on Steam since June, carries its progress straight into the finished game — clear a puzzle now and it stays cleared on release day, which is a small but real signal that Thekla trusts the build enough to let it stand for months under public scrutiny. That's also why the credits question, below, matters more than it would for a game nobody's already played a slice of.
The fight that's still not fully settled
Alan Hazelden (Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes), Sean Barrett (Promesst) and Jonah Ostroff (Heroes of Sokoban) all licensed puzzle mechanics from their own games to Blow, along with Zach Polansky, Patrick Traynor and Marc ten Bosch. That's not a small favor — it's most of the working nucleus of modern indie puzzle design saying yes to working under one of the genre's most famous names.
Arc Games, the publisher, put daylight between itself and Blow directly. CEO Yoon Im said the company is "committed to fostering an inclusive environment" and that an individual creator's personal beliefs "do not represent our company" — a publisher statement about its own director's politics that you basically never see before a launch, let alone months before one.
How we got here
2008–2016
Blow releases Braid, then The Witness, cementing his reputation as puzzle design's most exacting auteur.
2025
Variety reports Thekla and Arc Games are building Order of the Sinking Star with outside designers, targeting 2026.
Dec. 2025
Alan Hazelden publicly criticizes Blow's politics; Sean Barrett and Jonah Ostroff echo the statement.
June 2026
A free demo launches on Steam; players notice a designer's in-game credit missing from a press build.
Aug. 2026
Arc Games confirms full in-game credits for all six designers; Game Informer reports the October 8 release date.
Oct. 8, 2026
Order of the Sinking Star launches on PS5, Switch 2 and PC.
Order of the Sinking Star descends from Sokoban — push, pull, and every move costs you the next ten. · Unsplash
Questions worth asking before you buy
Do I need to have played Braid or The Witness first?
No — Order of the Sinking Star is a standalone Sokoban-style puzzle game with its own setting and mechanics, not a sequel to either.
Will my demo progress transfer to the full game?
Yes. Puzzles completed in the free Steam demo carry over directly when the full game launches October 8, 2026.
Is Order of the Sinking Star coming to Xbox?
As of the October 8 announcement, only PS5, Switch 2 and PC (Steam) have been confirmed — no Xbox version has been announced.
Are the outside designers still involved with the finished game?
Their licensed mechanics remain in the game and will be credited in-game, but Hazelden, Barrett and Ostroff have publicly separated their personal views from director Jonathan Blow's.
What to watch for next: whether the launch reviews mention the credits sequence at all, and whether Arc's public distancing is enough to keep the game's Steam and Metacritic user scores from becoming a referendum on Blow rather than the puzzles. For a genre this small, six A-list designers agreeing to build something together is rare regardless of how the rest of it shakes out — that's worth watching October 8 on its own merits.
