Order of the Sinking Star is a very tricky game to review. The latest effort from Jonathan Blow and his team at Thekla, it's an absolute beast with nearly a thousand puzzles to solve and multiple endings to discover.

It's impressive on paper, but to be completely honest, I grew quite weary of the whole thing as I delved deeper into this ambitious project.

First, though, a primer: Order of the Sinking Star is a mash-up of several smaller puzzle games, all refined and brought together as one title.

Starting out on an overworld map that grows exponentially the further you go, each of these four puzzle worlds are assigned to one of the cardinal directions.

Go north for Heroes of Hauling, based on Heroes of Sokoban by Jonah Ostroff; east for The Mirror Isles and south for Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes, each based on games of the same names by Alan Hazelden; and west for Vault of the Beamcasters, based on Promesst by Sean Barrett.

All these branches have their own mechanics, but are all unified by a top-down perspective and a basis in Sokoban-style puzzle design which, in a nutshell, means you need to move objects around in a grid to reach a goal.

Let's go through each of them quickly.

Heroes of Hauling has you playing as various fantasy-style characters that each do something different; one can push objects, another can only pull them, while another will swap positions with whatever or whomever they look at.

Many puzzles here require you to combine the abilities of multiple characters to reach the solution.

The Mirror Isles is a set of puzzles in which you must use magical mirrors to teleport yourself to the location of your reflection.

You can push the mirrors around, send other objects through them, and even clone yourself by positioning things correctly.

Skipping Stones is quite self-descriptive; you need to use large stones that can skim over the surface of water, which in turn can move lilypads that allow you to cross over and reach new areas.

Finally, Vault of the Beamcasters is the most complex. You must activate (and deactivate) various coloured beams, each of which has unique properties, in order to gather gems.

These gems are what power the beams, but you must also carry them into an underground zone and ultimately place them all in one area to solve the puzzle.

Each of these quadrants is doing enough on its own to support a standalone game, but what takes things to the next level is that Order of the Sinking Star eventually overlaps them, resulting in all manner of head-scratchers.

You might need to use the heroes alongside the mirrors, or use skipping stones to help transport gems to power beams — the possibilities are manifold, and the end result is a game with hundreds of hours worth of puzzles to pore over.

It's ambitious and a scale of puzzle game I've not really seen before. For that, and the fact it all feels so cohesive and polished, the game should be commended.

I really love that there are no superfluous elements to the puzzles; they each give you everything you need to reach the exit and nothing more. There's a leanness to each level that makes them easy to read.

Something else I appreciate about the design is that you can pick at the game in any order. If you're stuck in one region, you can back out and go elsewhere with no penalty.

Unfortunately, after solving hundreds of puzzles over dozens of hours, I really struggled to maintain interest.

I love a good puzzler, and I've enjoyed exploring Order of the Sinking Star, its myriad layers and puzzles gradually building on each other in some fascinating ways.

I've been trying to put a finger on where it's lost me, and I think it comes down to two things. One, I think it might just be too damn big for its own good, and two, I feel very little curiosity about the setting it presents.

The game's size is pretty insane, and anyone who enjoys this type of puzzler is going to be in heaven. For me, while I like most of what Order of the Sinking Star is doing, I think it maybe takes too long to reveal its hand.

As to the latter point, there's an effort here to establish characters and spark intrigue in the concept of these overlapping worlds. It hasn't really worked for me.

I'm not much a fan of the dialogue; it's needlessly verbose in many cases and doesn't do much for any of the characters. Some stages begin and end with these exchanges and I found very little reason to listen.

So, I'm sort of conflicted. On the one hand, this is another well-put-together puzzle game from Thekla with careful and clever design throughout. On the other, I think it loses momentum with its sheer scale, and it's missing a hook to pull me in deeper.

What's frustrating is there could well be some game-changing twists later down the line, but if I ask myself whether I want to force myself through another 50-100 hours of increasingly difficult puzzles and uninteresting exchanges between all its dull characters, the answer is, ultimately, no.