Starseed Pilgrim

The only hint you are going to find after your opening of the readme.txt file is laconical: "Keep on as long as you have questions." With my verdict it's the same thing.

Put simply, this is a game in which you get out what you put in. It is incremental in its brilliance. It is a game of pure mechanics and of player skill. It's confusing in a good way and difficult in the best way. From a game design perspective it is perfect, but the ambiguity will definitely push some players away.

Its purity of concept could be taken as wilful obscurity, original to a fault, but Starseed Pilgrim also has a system worth mastering, and a mystery worth pursuing.

The Internet hype around Starseed Pilgrim is surprisingly only a bit exaggerated. [CD-Action 08/2013, p.85]

Few games are as initially opaque as Starseed Pilgrim, and few offer as rich a dawning sense of discovery in return.

Like an oboe, this game gets ruined in the playing. Well, a bit. [June 2013, p.94]

Starseed Pilgrim is composed of interesting elements and neat twists, but suffers from the assumption that you can encourage exploration simply by refusing to tell the player what to do. [Aug 2013, p.73]

-What is this game ?! -"Keep on as long as you have questions." -What the f*** do I need to do ?! -"Keep on as long as you have questions." -What is this thing ?! -"Keep on as long as you have questions." This game let you discover everything about it. Its mechanics, its story.. everything. You will be lost. You will search. Maybe you will succeed.. and you will understand what's the beauty of this game.

This game causes you to think. It's not my normal cup of tea, but I believe it's really well made. If you like a creative intellectual challenge than you'll likely enjoy this game.

This game came very highly recommended so I was sad to walk away with mixed feelings. My first couple of hours with the game were incredibly satisfying as I tried and succeeded to understand the bizarre mechanics. Learning how to play was the fun of the experience and it was satisfying when you finally make real progress. However once you run out of things to discover it becomes an increasingly difficult and repetitive to progress. I imagine a lot of people will relish the challenge at this point, for me it's where I lost interest. The first few hours were great though.

Metacritic critic reviews give this an 83. I don't understand that. I didn't put a ton of time into this game, but I quickly lost interest trying to learn what was going on, and didn't understand what I was trying to do despite quite a bit of trial and error. Some people like games that are ambiguous and frustrating - making you feel like if you suffer through the start of the game for long enough you might eventually be rewarded with some understanding. If so, this game may be for you. My backlog has too many other options.

I could not make heads or tails of this game. The lack of direction, the confusing mechanics, make this a very hard game to get into. Maybe this appeals to some people, but not me. I probably could have enjoyed it more if I wasn't dying over and over and restarting from the beginning each time...