Order of the Sinking Star Is a Handheld Puzzle Marathon

Ten years after The Witness, Jonathan Blow is back, and his new puzzle adventure has landed on Switch 2 and Steam at the same time. Order of the Sinking Star stacks more than a thousand handcrafted puzzles and “hundreds of hours” of play into a nonlinear, interconnected world, wrapped around a fully voiced cast and a mythos you piece together through exploration and cryptic notes. That pitch reads one way on a big TV. It reads very differently in your hands.

Blow’s games have always been about sitting with a problem until it cracks, and that’s a fundamentally different relationship with your hardware than a 40-hour open-world RPG demands. It’s the kind of design that thrives in the ten-minute train window or the half-hour before sleep, where you chip at one puzzle and put it down. And the structure Arc Games and Thekla are describing — hundreds of hours, total freedom to solve at your own pace — is unusually well suited to the way handheld players actually finish games.

The Roadblock Pivot Is a Handheld Feature in Disguise

Here’s the design detail that matters most for portable play: if you hit a wall in one intercardinal region, the game actively wants you to rotate to another world and come back later. That’s an anti-frustration valve, and it’s exactly what a commute demands — you can’t afford to burn a 25-minute train ride grinding against a single stubborn puzzle. Where a linear puzzler would stall you, Sinking Star hands you a side door. On a device you snap shut the moment your stop is called, that’s not a nicety, it’s the whole reason a thousand-puzzle game is playable at all.

Blow’s games have quietly been suspend-resume showcases for years, and this one looks built for it. Switch 2’s sleep mode and the Deck’s instant suspend mean you can freeze mid-thought on a half-solved mechanism, pocket the hardware, and return hours later without the checkpoint anxiety that makes action games awkward to interrupt. Puzzle solving is the rare genre where an interrupted session costs you nothing — the board just waits.

No Framerate, No Resolution: The Switch 2 Spec Sheet Is Missing

Arc Games and Thekla haven’t disclosed a single performance target — no framerate, no resolution, nothing for either the Switch 2 build or the Steam version. What we can reason from is track record: The Witness ran cleanly on the original Switch’s modest Tegra, because puzzle games are typically geometry-light and CPU-bound rather than GPU-hungry. But the talk of “seamless” colliding regions and fully voiced narration suggests a more fleshed-out overworld with streaming and audio load, which is where a handheld build can stumble.

On Steam Deck, the honest answer is that a puzzle adventure of this scope should sit comfortably inside the hardware’s ceiling — this is not a UE5 action title — but I won’t hand you an FPS number the developers never gave. Verify against Deck Verified status before you commit, and note that this is a digital-only eShop release, so the Switch 2 version’s footprint is whatever Nintendo’s store listing reports on launch day.

Three Launch Bundles, Ten Percent Off, and a Marathon’s Worth of Storage

On Steam, the launch comes with a 10% discount and three pairings: Order of the Sinking Star + Mewgenics, + Animal Well, and + the original soundtrack. The Animal Well pairing is the telling one — both games trade in atmospheric, secret-dense worlds where the real reward is the click of understanding. If you’re shopping, that bundle is the one aimed squarely at your instincts as a puzzle player.

The catch for handheld players isn’t power, it’s commitment. Hundreds of hours of handcrafted puzzles is the kind of library-slot decision you make for the year, not the weekend. This is a game you’ll leave installed for months, dipping in on commutes and lunch breaks until the map runs dry. If that’s your habit, Order of the Sinking Star is one of the most natural fits the Switch 2 and Deck have seen this year — just clear a backlog slot first, because a thousand puzzles isn’t something you knock out in a week.