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Thekla Reveals Order of the Sinking Star, a Massive Narrative Puzzle Adventure for 2026
Teased at The Game Awards After Ten Years in Development
Arc Games and Thekla, Inc. have officially unveiled Order of the Sinking Star, a massive narrative puzzle adventure created by Jonathan Blow, the award-winning designer behind Braid and The Witness.
Revealed during The Game Awards 2025, the project has been in development for nearly a decade and will launch on PC in 2026, with additional platforms to be announced.
Order of the Sinking Star is positioned as one of the most ambitious puzzle games ever undertaken. Thekla describes it as a world-spanning adventure featuring more than 1,000 handcrafted puzzles, each built around evolving mechanics that merge into a single interconnected system. The game introduces a cast of unlikely heroes, four distinct realms and a sprawling mystery that unfolds through exploration and logic rather than dialogue-driven exposition.
Blow calls the project a “game design supercollider,” created by combining ideas from multiple designers to reach a level of complexity far beyond traditional puzzle games.
A Realm of Colliding Worlds and Interwoven Puzzle Systems
Players will explore four different worlds, each with its own rules, stories and mechanics. These realms eventually converge, allowing puzzle systems to interact in unpredictable ways. As the worlds merge, characters meet, and mechanics collide, creating a cascade of emergent challenges that respond to the player’s curiosity and dexterity.
Thekla describes the adventure as a blend of exploration and intellectual discovery. Players can roam at their own pace, revisit previous areas and return to puzzles when they choose. Throughout their journey, they will encounter a queen, a thief, a wizard, a warrior, a talking boat and other eccentric characters who bring personality and narrative texture to the puzzle landscape.
The design roster behind the game includes notable contributors such as Alan Hazelden, Sean Barrett, Jonah Ostroff, Zach Polansky, Patrick Traynor and Marc ten Bosch. Their previous work inspired the foundational mechanics that drive Order of the Sinking Star’s first layers, which then expand into greater combinatorial complexity.
A New Engine and a Bold Technical Undertaking
Order of the Sinking Star is built on a new in-house engine written in a custom programming language designed by Thekla to replace C++. Blow confirmed that the studio plans to release the engine as an open-source project after the game launches, continuing Thekla’s tradition of encouraging innovation within the development community.
Arc Games CEO Yoon Im described the title as a significant milestone for the publisher and a defining release for the puzzle genre. The publisher expects the game to stand as one of the most significant puzzle adventures of the coming generation.
With its intricate systems, narrative ambition and decade-long development cycle, Order of the Sinking Star positions itself as one of 2026’s most intriguing PC releases. More details will be revealed as the game approaches launch.
