Order of the Sinking Star: The Four Games It's Based On

Order of the Sinking Star is built on four licensed puzzle games by three other designers: Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes and Mirror Isles by Alan Hazelden, Promesst 1-3 by Sean Barrett, and Heroes of Sokoban 1, 2 and 3 by Jonah Ostroff. Thekla licensed all four, expanded each into one of the game’s four worlds, then built the systems that let those worlds collide.

Quick Answer

The four games sit under the four worlds like this. Two mappings are confirmed by identical world names, one is stated outright by press, and one is inferred from matching descriptions — Thekla has never published an official pairing chart, so the evidence column is the honest part.

Official source: Order of the Sinking Star on Steam

What were the four original games, actually?

None of the four is a commercial release in the sense players usually mean. They are small, free games that predate Order of the Sinking Star by years, and each one is a compact statement of a single rule.

Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes and Mirror Isles are early free webgames from Alan Hazelden, built with the PuzzleScript tool. In Mirror Isles you push mirrors to teleport yourself around little archipelagos; in Skipping Stones you send rocks and lily pads rippling across the water, with each landing setting off the next. The official FAQ compresses them into one line each: the first is “a serene puzzle game about throwing stones into water to create stepping paths”, the second “a clever top-down game focused on swapping places with reflections across islands”.

Heroes of Sokoban 1, 2 and 3 by Jonah Ostroff are smaller still — PuzzleScript box-pushing with a party of hero classes, where a fighter and a wizard interact with the same crate in different ways. The sequels add monsters to dodge around and, in The Bard and the Druid, new classes with new tricks. The official FAQ describes the series as “a fantasy-themed puzzle game where you manage distinct hero classes (like warriors and mages) with unique movement and pushing mechanics to reach the exit”.

Promesst is the odd one out: Sean Barrett’s Windows puzzle game about carrying gems to pedestals that fire beams of coloured light, where standing in a colour grants an ability. That is exactly the shape of Order of the Sinking Star’s western world, where a lone Explorer channels coloured beams through giant gems to phase through walls, smash boulders and teleport across distance.

[!note] The one-line descriptions in the table above describe the source games, not the finished worlds. Thekla published them in the store FAQ specifically to say which earlier works the design is built upon.

Which world sits on which original game?

The mapping is stronger for some worlds than others, and it is worth knowing which is which before you repeat a claim.

• South — Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes. Confirmed twice over: the world carries the source game’s name unchanged, and press reporting says plainly that “the south of the map is based on another Hazelden game, Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes”.
• East — The Mirror Isles. Confirmed the same way, with the same source describing the eastern portion of the map as based on a 2014 puzzle game called Mirror Isles.
• North — The Hearty Heroes of Hauling. Press states it outright: the reporter describes reaching the north and “playing Hearty Heroes of Hauling, Thekla’s variation of Jonah Ostroff’s Heroes of Sokoban”. Official copy never says this directly.
• West — The Promise. The one you have to reach by inference. No source says “the west is based on Promesst” in those words. What supports it is press listing the north and west against Ostroff’s trilogy and Barrett’s Promesst series in that order, plus the exact match between the official description of Promesst — a cave filled with mysterious beams of light — and everything Thekla says about The Promise.

[!warning] Thekla lists the four foundation titles but has never published a formal pairing chart. Treat South and East as confirmed, North as press-stated, and West as highly likely rather than official. The per-world pages carry the same status labels: Skipping Stones, Mirror Isles, Heroes of Hauling and The Promise.

Why could four separate puzzle games be combined into one?

Because all four already spoke the same underlying language. Press coverage citing Edge records the practical reason: the four games the worlds came from all had a Sokoban-style design with an underlying grid structure, so they could fit together when combined. Jonathan Blow said as much in an interview about form — the game is top-down and tile-based because “that was a structure that helped us do this thing where we combine these four worlds together and could make good functional puzzles”.

That grid foundation is also why the reading skill transfers between worlds. If you can read a puzzle grid in the north, you can read one in the west: same tiles, same fixed-versus-moveable distinction, different verb on top.

The arrangement is a licence, not an homage. Press reporting puts it flatly: “Four big chunks of Sinking Star are based on small indie-developed puzzle games, all licensed with permission.” That is why the four titles and their designers can be named in the official FAQ in the first place.

The combination itself is the studio’s stated method. Thekla’s own wording: “Instead of building from a single core concept, we created a ‘game design supercollider’ — smashing together the ideas from multiple puzzle game designers to create a puzzle landscape that’s much more intricate and vast than what has come before.” Blow repeated the framing when the release date was announced: “By creating a kind of game design supercollider, we were able to bring together ideas from some of the most brilliant puzzle designers in the industry.”

Official source: Making of Order of the Sinking Star: The Game Design Supercollider

The collisions are where the lineage becomes playable. The northeast border of the map, for instance, is where the systems based on Heroes of Sokoban cross over with the rules governing Mirror Isles — which is exactly what the Gold Rooms do when they bridge two realms. The Overworld map guide lays out the four directions and how each one inherits its source game.

It also explains the studio’s usual caution about Blow’s earlier work. Braid and The Witness each grew from one designer’s rule set; this game starts from several designers’ rule sets and collides them, which is a different kind of authorship. The comparison with The Witness and Braid covers what that difference costs and buys.

Who else is credited with design on Order of the Sinking Star?

The four foundation games are the headline, but the official material also credits additional design contributions: Zach Polansky (Enigmash), Patrick Traynor (Patrick’s Parabox) and Marc ten Bosch (Miegakure), “and several others”, including design contributions from Twitch followers over the years.

No source attaches any of those three to a specific world, so none of them should be pinned to a direction. What press does confirm is narrower and more interesting: the reporter who met Patrick Traynor in the north was played through a room — a Wizard amid eight large crystal blocks — that Traynor had designed himself. So the contributions are real and specific, but the credits list is not a map.

[!tip] If you are trying to work out “which designer made which part”, the four foundation games are the only pairing with published evidence. The rest is credited contribution without attribution, and the honest answer is that it is not public.

Are the original designers credited in the game?

This became a public discussion during development, and the sequence of events is on the record. Press reporting from July 2026 describes Alan Hazelden raising concerns about attribution; in response the project’s website was updated with an FAQ entry naming the original games — the same entry that now supplies the four descriptions used above. The same reporting notes that an early build carried an in-world plaque reading “Instigator: Hazelden, A.” in the Mirror Isles, which was absent from the later PC demo, and that Thekla stated contributors would be credited in the full game and through press and MobyGames listings.

The official announcements do name the designers. Press material from the 2025 reveal lists design contributions from Alan Hazelden, Sean Barrett and Jonah Ostroff, and later announcements extend the list to Polansky, Traynor and ten Bosch.

What this page does not claim is a line-by-line reading of the shipped credits. Order of the Sinking Star launched on October 8, 2026, and the statements above are what was on the record around that launch rather than a verification of the final credits roll.

What you actually see of the originals in the finished game

Each world keeps its source game’s rule more or less intact, which is the easiest way to feel the lineage while playing.

If you are choosing a first world rather than tracing lineage, the source games are a decent personality test: plan-first water routing in the south, spatial projection in the east, party-combo box pushing in the north, resource routing in the west. Beginner tips covers that choice in more detail, and none of the four routes is a wrong start.

Related

• Overworld map guide — the four directions and which foundation game each one draws on
• Gold Rooms explained — where the separate lineages start crossing
• Order of the Sinking Star vs The Witness and Braid — what the multi-designer method changes
• How to read a puzzle grid — the Sokoban-derived skill every world shares
• Beginner tips and first hour — which world to start in

This page is re-checked when the shipped credits and any official pairing statement change the evidence above.