Order of the Sinking Star Demo Reviews: What They Say

The demo reviews of Order of the Sinking Star say two things at once: the puzzles are exceptional, and the package around them is rough. Steam rates the free demo Very Positive — 1,373 of 1,496 reviews are positive as of October 9, 2026 — and the reviewers who cleared it in roughly 4 to 15 hours praise the craft, the variety and the difficulty ramp almost unanimously. What they criticize is everything outside the puzzles: the placeholder AI voices, dialogue that arrives in fragments, Mirror Isles difficulty that escalates unevenly, and a few technical faults.

What do the demo reviews say?

Three professional pieces were written about the demo, plus a large stack of Steam user reviews. They are not the same kind of document: IGN filed a preview, The Gaming Outsider filed a PC demo review, and Kotaku filed a culture piece about the demo. None of the three carries a numeric outlet score in the text that was read for this page, so the only number attached to the demo is Steam’s own rating.

The pattern across all four is the same: the design earns the praise, and the presentation collects the doubts. Nobody in this group calls the puzzles mediocre, and nobody calls the wrapper invisible.

What do reviewers praise?

The puzzles stay fresh over 105 of them. That is The Gaming Outsider’s central finding, in his own words: “Each puzzle is well-crafted and continues to feel fresh even after 105 puzzles.” He also praises the difficulty curve as a loop rather than a wall — the game eases you into a new ability or concept, then increases the challenge to produce the “a-ha” moment instead of front-loading it.

The puzzles refuse the obvious reading of their own mechanics. Kotaku’s reviewer makes the same point from the other direction: “none of the puzzles I’ve played feel like they’re toying with these mechanics the obvious way. Each challenge finds a novel relationship between your footing, your exit and your large rock.” He also notes the difficulty “ramps up apace”, and that — unlike his main complaint with The Witness — nothing in the demo felt merely exhausting, with one mirror puzzle excepted.

The scale shocks everyone. IGN’s headline calls the game “seems huge and packed with smart puzzles”, and its reviewer cleared every available level in about 4 hours. The Gaming Outsider opened his review by admitting he expected a typical 30-minute-to-2-hours demo and got 15 hours instead. Recent Steam user reviews repeat the same surprise in player terms: one says the demo “is still longer than many full games”, another reports that clearing everything they could find “took me a whole 5 hours”, and several describe Sokoban as a genre they had never tried and now find addictive.

The presentation lands, voices included. Recent positive user reviews praise the art style, the music, the animation and the characters by name, and at least one of them singles out the voice acting — which matters, because it shows the voice controversy described below is not a shared verdict among players. The official audio design is doing real work here: the music and ambience never loop, everything is dynamically generated, and each playable character has a signature sound.

What do reviewers criticize?

The story arrives in fragments. This is the most consistent complaint across outlets. The Gaming Outsider could not hold the narrative together: there are no cutscenes, dialogue sits at the beginning and end of each puzzle, and by the time he solved one he “had forgotten what was even said at the beginning” — made worse by hopping between regions, which breaks the thread again. Kotaku’s reviewer describes dialogue that “feels like you’ve jumped into the middle of a conversation”, and flags the pile of codices, coordinates, runes and audio tapes as a mystery he suspects will resolve into the same kind of self-referential ending he disliked in The Witness. That suspicion is his hunch, not a spoiler — the demo does not contain an ending. For how the narrative actually works across its three layers, see the story page.

The Mirror Isles escalate unevenly. The demo’s eastern world is where the negative user reviews concentrate. One recent review puts it precisely: “The complexities of the puzzles in mirror isle didn’t escalate gracefully. The further the escalation goes, the more obscure and random the solution gets.” That matches press experience — Kotaku exempted exactly one mirror puzzle from his otherwise clean report card — and it matches what players report elsewhere: the Mirror Isles hold the demo’s hardest wall, which the Mirror Isles walkthrough covers.

Progression is hard to read. A recent negative review states the problem cleanly: “I can’t tell which levels are optional and which aren’t”, with the story feeling slow as a result. This is structural rather than a bug — the Overworld never tells you where to go — but reviewers experience it as friction, and the demo never announces its own totals.

Technical faults show up in the review text itself. A minority of recent negative reviews are not about design at all: they report a crash a few minutes in, a “black screen of death” on first launch, and a laptop restart after a crash. These are individual reports rather than a measured failure rate, and the known faults with their fixes are tracked on the demo crashing page (in preparation).

What is the AI voice issue in the demo?

The first thing a player sees in the demo is a menu prompt about voices. The build mixes human-recorded voiceover with placeholder computer-generated voices, and it lets you switch the placeholders off — the option is labelled “No Clankers!”, a piece of tongue-in-cheek wordplay that Kotaku’s reviewer calls “being real cheeky” and reads as shipping a controversy you already know will rile people, “just to service hearing one’s own words aloud”.

Official source: Order of the Sinking Star Demo — AI Generated Content Disclosure (Steam)

The official disclosure is specific and worth quoting alongside the criticism: the demo uses human-recorded voiceover from the professional voice cast mixed with a toggleable placeholder computer-generated voice, and “the full game will feature only human-recorded voiceover. No AI generated content will be in the full release.”

Players split on it. One recent negative review gives the demo an “Immediate ‘DO NOT RECOMMEND’ for using AI in development”, while other recent reviews — including one praising the voice acting — do not raise it at all.

[!note] The placeholder voices are a demo condition, not a stated full-game condition. The toggle and the disclosure belong to the demo build; the official position is that the release is human-recorded only. Reporting the first as the game’s permanent state would misstate the official text — and reporting the official promise as already verified in the demo would misstate that too.

How long did reviewers take to finish the demo?

The honest answer is a spread, and every figure comes with its source: IGN’s reviewer cleared all available levels in about 4 hours; The Gaming Outsider measured 15 hours across 105 puzzles; TechTimes summarised it as 15 to 50 hours depending on thoroughness; players report 8.4 and 6.5 hours. The “50 hours” that circulates as a developer claim is a misreport of a reported 40 to 50 hour estimate attributed to Jonathan Blow whose original interview could not be located — it should never be printed as his words. The full breakdown, including why the figures disagree, is on the demo length and puzzle count page.

[!warning] These numbers are not comparable to each other. The demo changed underneath its reviewers: it launched on June 15, 2026 with 75 puzzles and received the Part 2 content update on June 19, 2026, adding two playable heroes, new puzzles and new areas to reach 105. A review written against the first build measured different content than one written against the second, and reviewers take notes while casual players do not.

What is the demo’s Steam score right now?

Steam’s own rating is the only number attached to the demo, and like every figure on this page it is a dated snapshot:

The count moved slightly downward between the two snapshots rather than upward, and review totals are not static — they shift as ratings come and go — which is the reason every rating quote on this page carries a date. The demo is a separate free Steam app from the full game, and its reviews belong to it alone.

Do the demo reviews still matter after launch?

The full game launched on October 8, 2026, and launch reviews are a different document from demo reviews — they judge a product, where these judged a slice. Three things determine how much of the demo verdict transfers.

Scope. The demo holds 105 puzzles against the store’s “over 1000” for the full game, and its content stops unevenly: the North and East are full routes, the West appears as a single level, and the South is absent entirely — confirmed independently by IGN, The Gaming Outsider and the creators.gg campaign brief, and laid out in the demo walkthrough.

Investment. The official position, stated three separate times, is that demo progress carries over to the launch version on Steam. Praise about puzzle quality therefore transfers for free: the hours spent in the demo are not discarded. The limits of that promise are on the progress carry-over page.

The complaints with a defined end. The AI voice issue officially ends with the demo — the full release is human-recorded only. The story-fragment criticism is a criticism of a slice that contains no ending and no cutscenes. Kotaku’s Witness comparison, which frames much of the skepticism, is best read against how this game differs from The Witness and Braid rather than as a verdict on the demo alone.

[!tip] If you are using demo reviews to decide whether to buy, weight the puzzle-design consensus heavily and the wrapper complaints lightly: design is what the demo proves, and the wrapper is what the demo says it is borrowing.

Related

• Demo length and puzzle count — every playtime figure with its source, side by side
• Demo walkthrough — what the reviewed build actually contains
• Does demo progress carry over? — why the demo hours still count after launch
• Mirror Isles walkthrough — the world behind most of the negative reviews
• Order of the Sinking Star vs The Witness and Braid — the comparison Kotaku’s skepticism leans on

Steam’s review counts move weekly; this page’s score figures are re-checked against the live endpoint whenever the demo’s rating shifts.