With more than 1000 puzzles for players to solve in Order of the Sinking Star, indie game veteran Jonathan Blow knew that there may be an issue in making everyone solve everything in order to have the credits roll. Therefore, the game has multiple "endings," all of which you can feel satisfied by if you decide you've had enough of magic puzzles.
"Once we realized the game was starting to get big this issue came up. You can't expect everybody to like commit to doing this giant game; there's such a thing as just having a satisfying time playing a reasonably sized game and so we structured the game so that we can be maximally accommodating to that," Blow explained in a recent interview with us.
"There's three end games essentially they're all good end games so it's not like it's not like you get a bad one and then you have to work harder to get a good one...there's a first end game where once you get to that you could consider yourself reasonably satisfied as having completed the game but for people who want to play more and want to dig in and and go further we leave a way to do that and to find the rest of the game," he continued.
For Blow, the trick was in making sure people didn't feel left out if they decided not to continue the game after the first ending, while also making sure that there was enough reason for other players to continue solving puzzles if they weren't quite ready to leave Order of the Sinking Star behind.
"It's not enough to just put the endings in but you have to feel like you really finished the game from the first ending and not like 'oh we just let you win after playing some portion of the puzzles.' Because that's less satisfying so part of the trick is to keep the extended part of the game sort of hidden away so you don't feel like you're expected to play it until you get there," he said.
As Order of the Sinking Star is set to release later this year, we'll have to wait a bit to see for ourselves if all of the game's endings are satisfying, but it's clear Blow and his team have put in the effort to make the game compelling no matter where you decide to leave it.