r/OrderOfTheSinkingStar

what? :D

Allright so I'm just gonna put everything in spoiler text because i feel like i should. whatever. i'm probably wrong about all this, but based on my previous experience with JBlow's games, i think i get what this one is. i doubt i'm right, and i don't believe that this is some super intelligent conjecture or whatever, even though i might talk like i'm full of myself, i assure you this is pure sophistry at best, and fantasy at worst. i only played the demo, and i saw part of the recent beta review interview Wookash Podcast did with Blow. The section at 32 mins into the video is what got me to think. there are no story spoilers here, and i gleaned nothing from any internet sources i didnt name, this is just my guess after playing Blows games for years and years and loving every second.

tldr, i feel like Sinking Star at its core is a preontological approach to the phenomenological perspective of "playing a game". let me cook here for a sec.

Braid, at its core, wasnt really about the atomic bomb, or the princess, or who the monster is. that game was a glimpse into the mind of an artist. like, tim is the vehicle that the narrative uses to place the player in, but to what end? to make the player feel something? well yeah, i postulate it's to make the player feel like a genius, and not just in the small "i solved this puzzle look how smart i am i bet everyone took longer blah blah" that we all do (including me). the torture of the nature of true genius is the message. the city burning, the city alluded to by the last line in the game (when tim starts building his castle), the flight of the princess (a metaphor for an unexplained experience), the realization of the self as a monster, and not the hero that was thought to exist, all of it - this is the player moving through strange lands all bound together in theme by a strange relationship to a previously assumed constant (manifesting as time manipulation), encountering obstacles that demand strength of will and intellect in equal measure, and triumphing with a note of bittersweet solitude. we watch the princess escape, and we almost feel like this is right, somehow, that she'll be better off, that our journey is better suited to just ourselves, it's ok to be alone and maybe rage and destroy your own creations, we can always slip away from the fire and back into the memories of the paintings in this house, this castle we built after we realized we had to do this alone. powerful shit. just my own reading of it, but idk, it means something to me.

The Witness, on the other hand, is about the stillness of the human experience when you can REMOVE time. the witness is a single moment in the brain, a single instant of human thought, a snapshot of one state of the human mind. puzzles galore, yes, but also a familiarity in the landscape. patterns everywhere, and some of them never make sense. some of them touch us in whatever moment we think of when we play the game. the player is experiencing a diagram of the human condition, just for a moment, without the need for flux or entropy, just a circular thought experiment without a need for a destination or indeed an origin. almost like the movie Inception, The Witness is about the exact moment that you experience when you have an idea, what that feels like, what that looks like, and if you could make a holodeck version of your brain at that moment and go walk around in there, what that plays like. no death, no birth. ideas, free flowing, bound by certain commonalities that always suggest depth, as if the depth itself, not the destination, was the point.

So, Braid is about the struggles of genius through time,

The Witness is about stopping time for a moment of reflection,

I think Sinking Star is about putting all that spacy super deep hipster bullshit aside and just inhabiting the brain of a gamer. A gamer playing a puzzle game. Blow made a game for us, ABOUT US. Like, he is making the game specifically for anyone who plays the game that is ABOUT THEMSELVES - the gamer. I know, it sound kinda dumb and silly, but hear me out here.

in the interview i saw, Blow speaks of these characters like they each embody a personality trait that is central to the mechanic that particular character is used for. Take the heroes of hauling. the push guy is forward thinking, single minded, and brazen. the pull girl is constantly taking things with her, emotionally and physically, whether she likes it or not. the wizard is scatterbrained and impulsive and gets ahead of himself. I hear blow say these things, and I am forcibly reminded of the Disney movie Inside Out. yeah, the one where all the emotions are personified as separate characters. like, it struck me that each character is, almost like a horoscope description, present in everyone. these characters are just vague and one dimensional enough that it seems they each represent a part of something larger while also functioning as their own story. thats not a point of criticsm, it just seems to follow that each of these individuals need the other ones to complete the picture. get it? this is like making a co op game completely single player, no npcs required.

their cooperation is what eventually is needed to bring home the bacon. you gotta get everyone to work together. you have to play as each one of them, switch between each thing as needed, and get all of it to work together to get to whatever is next. we all understand that's the game, that's been the pitch since day one. each of those mechanics are needed to get to whats next, and the gamer has to master each of them (and the surprising and delightful combos that happen seemingly out of nowhere) to get to whats next. the gamer is playing their own brain, in pursuit of their own drive. in a way, the intro area in the clouds is like a "welcome home", like we rolled out the red carpet for you, the gamer, to come in and see whats next - but you gotta show us you're worthy. Sinking Star is like a psychological breakdown of the personality required to complete it. The gamer is the subject of the game itself. He made it for us. It's like all he did was set the pieces and the board to facilitate the game, we are playing a chess match versus ourselves

Braid was about Blow's memories.

The Witness was about our present.

Sinking Star is about the player's future.

The Witness is one of my favorite games of all time and Braid is fantastic as well. This game looks brilliant and new and fun and I can't wait.

Guys does anyone else looped the trailer just to listen to the music? We gotta find this, it's beautiful.

When playing the //edit2: underground levels of the // promise, the most zoomed out view is at first a square, with black bars on each side. This nicely shows the whole layout of the map. However as soon as I arrive at the other side of the map, the view switches and now repeats, filling the whole screen. Are there others who found this repeating tileset more confusing to navigate?

I'd love to have an option that toggles the visual wrap around. The player sprite, if it exits to the right, would simply reappear at the left.

//edit: In a version with no wrap around, I would suggest simply showing rocks or similar instead of black.

I played the first part of The Promise (before you get >!the rod!<) and was kind of amazed that there seems to be no way to "break" it and get into an unwinnable state at all.

Then I got >!the rod!< and after that it seemed that it was trivially easy to put the game into an unwinnable state which could result in hours of puzzle solving having to be restarted because you pushed a box into a bad place. (Obviously you can undo, but I'm talking about making a mistake and continuing on without realizing.) That seems unfortunate. It gave me anxiety and discouraged free experimentation like I would do in the rest of the game.

But at the same time, I was able to complete it without being soft locked, so maybe it isn't so bad. Maybe it's actually pretty reasonable in that you _can_ soft-lock if you do something silly like push a box into a corner, but you almost always know you've done the wrong thing and can undo right away. If you are able to make reasonable progress in an area, then you can reasonably assume you haven't soft-locked and can proceed. Which makes it a really clever design - but a very brittle and difficult to prove design. I would worry about increasing complexity of this section as it expands outwards in the full game.

Thoughts?

The official X channel just posted. Jon also said on last nights stream that he screwed up the date earlier when he said next week. So release date announcement is imminent!