However, none of the game's promoters said too much about the game, other than there being a world to explore and that "you've got to play it for yourself". I'm a huge fan of Metroid- and Zelda-style exploration, and I'm always looking for similar experiences. That convinced me to buy the game on a Steam sale.
I've now put 4 hours into the game and I'd like to come right out and tell you what the game is: there is a relaxed exploration phase, but the core game is a difficult, time-limited puzzle/strategy game with heavy randomization. If that sounds appealing to you, stop reading right now and give the game a try. It has deep strategic mechanics and is worth the money, especially on sale. If you're still not sure, here's a vague description of what the game feels like, without spoiling much of the experience:
I've now put 4 hours into the game and I'd like to come right out and tell you what the game is: there is a relaxed exploration phase, but the core game is a difficult, time-limited puzzle/strategy game with heavy randomization. If that sounds appealing to you, stop reading right now and give the game a try. It has deep strategic mechanics and is worth the money, especially on sale. If you're still not sure, here's a vague description of what the game feels like, without spoiling much of the experience:
However, if that doesn't interest you - as it would have been the case for me if anyone had been open about the game's genre - allow me to spoil the game for you with a review of its design.
Feel Free to Explore - But Don't Mess Up!
There is a second part to the above blog post that goes into a lot of spoiler-ific detail:
On the whole I agree with the author's assessment. Starseed Pilgrim is a very creative experiment, but ultimately forces the player to endure too much punishment and frustration to get to the heart of its play. There are too many ways to completely fail a pilgrimage and lose several minutes of progress. A game like Super Meat Boy, on the other hand, is challenging and often punishing, but the result of failure is usually less than 10 seconds of progress.
This is especially pronounced in the game's first pilgrimage. The game throws the entire set of mechanics at the player and doesn't make the end goal any closer or less randomly placed. It seems like most of the frustration on message boards is due to figuring out the point of the first pilgrimage. Once that is achieved, you can start the exploration phase, which is much more inviting to the player.
The bubbling mechanic (which I didn't discover until I'd finished the entire exploration phase), is another example. Falling off the bottom of the screen in the night world means starting all over, unless you know that you can plant a seed in mid-air to slow your fall. There is absolutely no hint anywhere in the game that this is possible, nor any challenge that requires you to know it. As the blog post suggests, an auto-bubble would avoid overly-punishing the player. You could even deduct five seeds for an auto-bubble, which is severe for a new player and still annoying for a more experienced one.
The worst part about the difficulty is that at times it felt Nintendo-hard - i.e. the difficulty was being used to pad out the length of a game with very little content.
This Is How We Do It
Starseed Pilgrim also lacks in the affordances it provides to the player. I highly suggest you watched the linked Extra Credits video (and all Extra Credits videos), but if you don't affordances are simply the hints that object and environment design give on how to interact with the world. It's how the door handle tells you to pull and the bar tells you to push. Affordances are the key to allowing players to freely explore the world without giving them tutorials at every step.
I played through the PSN version of Thomas Was Alone (which I highly and unreservedly recommend), which has a commentary track from developer Mike Bithell. He gives a great breakdown of the decisions that went into planning jump heights and how different character abilities were introduced. Without forcing the player through tutorials, the player must demonstrate rudimentary knowledge of basic abilities before he can progress to the later challenges.
In my opinion, Starseed Pilgrim would have greatly benefited from something like "training islands". The training islands could be visually distinct (small 3x3 squares?) and have no randomized elements. That would not only have given more content in the hub world to explore, but also reward the player's exploration by giving them greater mastery of the mechanics. For example, there could be a couple of training islands that require different uses of bubbling. Other islands could demonstrate different rates of black creep through different materials, how to point lances in the right direction, and how to plant vines to harvest more hearts. You could even disallow farming seeds in the training islands to keep the total challenge the same. Since the game is about discovering the mechanics, make it so that progress through the hub world ensures progress through the mechanics.
Given the lack of direction in the rest of the game, the opening screen ironically suffers from an overabundance of affordances. The player is presented with a closed environment (the only one of the game), two expository lines of text, and the arrow keys labeled with "Jump", "Move and Dig", and "Dig Down". It also has 11 arrows scattered around the near part of the screen showing blocks that can be dug. Since it is impossible for the player to progress without digging down and to the side at least once each, the dig instructions could have been omitted. If the opening screen had also mandated at least one jump, then that could also have been removed.
Leaving the unexplained arrow keys would at least have told the player what buttons to start pushing. The different block colors already suggest interactivity with some blocks, so the 11 directional arrows also aren't needed. The first screen contains no possibility of death and no complex mechanics, so it's not unreasonable to let the player figure out those very first movements. Instead the player is given a false expectation of how much the game is going to explain.
What Difficulty Curve?
Starseed Pilgrim's last flaw is a lack of progression, or even the meaningful feeling of progression. While not all challenges are the same difficulty, there are only two tiers of challenges. The first tier is very hard to almost impossible for a brand-new player, but pretty reasonable for someone who's been playing for a couple of hours. The second tier is very hard for all but the most skilled players. The problem is that there is no logical progression from easier to harder challenges, either from beginning to the first tier, from the first tier to the second, or within challenges in the same tier.
On top of this, the randomization of seeds, growth patterns, and goal locations makes it so that even the best plan for an adequately skilled player can fail at times. For the experienced player who knows what they are doing, this is not a problem. For the new player, however, they don't know whether the failure was due to a lack of understanding, a lack of skill, or a bad draw. Heavy randomization with a cryptic design don't make for a fun mix.
Chrono Trigger was one game that did an excellent job at ensuring that players were prepared for the challenges the game would throw at them. In the description of Quest 3 in the Reverse Design of Chrono Trigger, thegamedesignforum describes how players are taught the principles of 3-part bosses and temporary/triggered vulnerability. These challenges happen early in the game and are straightforward once the principle is learned. Later on in the game, these same principles will become essential to surviving.
Also tied into the lack of progression is the lack of any feedback about story development. We are told at the beginning that "the sky is dying", but the pilgrimages and exploration through the hub world have no visible effect on the world. The background is always stark white, and no amount of challenges completed will change this. If the game had presented more tiers of challenges, with even subtle background effects upon completion, it would have given me more incentive to complete each challenge. For example, if the background had started as black, or a shade of gray, and each completed challenge lightened the background around that island, I would have felt like my work was making some impact. I know part of the story is about accepting fate, but that message could have been communicated in the ending, rather than making the player feel like nothing is happening.
Conclusion
It's one thing for Jonathan Blow to say "As long as you still have questions, continue.", but if your question is "what's the point?" or "when do I start having fun?" then you've got a problem. Starseed Pilgrim has a lot of innovative ideas and I wanted to like it, but ultimately it falls short. A little more polish and play-testing could have turned it from a critically-acclaimed game to a widely-acclaimed one. It could have been a seminal indie game like Braid and influenced design in both indie and AAA circles. Instead it's one more in a long line of indie titles that could have been so much more.
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