Derelict Star

What to expect from Derelict Star: An incredibly tight, brave puzzle platformer that asks you to do more than you could ever expect. The level of confidence the developer has in their player to do everything the game wants you to do is almost unparalleled. Often I would do something sincerely difficult and be genuinely surprised to find out that it was, for all intents and purposes, a necessary thing. Strictly speaking, you have the option of avoiding some of these "difficult necessities," but no matter how you play the game, you are bound to do some stuff that will take an hour or two on their own. What really appeals to me with this game, however, is the puzzly aspect of the "puzzle platformer" label I've applied. The platforming is extremely fun, sure, but I love how much you have to tinker with the movement system, how much you have to learn over the course of the dozen+ hours it takes to beat the game. Just as often I was stumped on how to do plenty of things, let alone doing them in the first place, and I loved it because it all felt actually intuitive! Ofttimes with this style of design, I find it frustrating because it boils down to an arbitrary sort of "input hunting," where you aren't so much actually puzzling a thing out as you are throwing your head at a wall and trying ♥♥♥♥ until one thing happens to work. Admittedly, there is a bit of that in the game, but it's so rare that I am simply unbothered by it. This comes from the fact that, despite the game's general feeling of precision, very little is actually all that precise. It's just that the floaty movement system adds a veneer of difficulty to doing pretty much anything. For most, I think that would be a slight against the game, but for me it's a surprising boon. In essence, the game gives you a movement system that feels clunky, difficult to use, and overall just a hassle for the player when you first start. But, with time, you learn more and more how to move with greater confidence, and as you play the game makes you do more and more that seems uncomfortable, if not outright impossible, and with time, you can eventually come to do it all. That's what I mean by bravery, Derelict Star is a brave game because it doesn't hold the player's hand at all but instead offers the far more enticing option of giving you the space to figure it all out yourself. I always think back to The Witness, Jonathan Blow be damned, when it comes to the sort of open-ended design that this game takes part in. There's no real linearity beyond the tutorial level. Instead, you are allowed to go literally wherever your heart desires. The only thing stopping you from doing ANYTHING in the game is your capacity to do anything. There are no upgrades, no unlocked areas, nothing but skill checks and knowledge checks. Your methods of transportation are also slim, simply just teleports to checkpoints and walking are all you can afford. As such, you learn to familiarize yourself with the level and you can expect to have to re-do a lot of things. Actually, you should expect to have to DO a lot of things as well. While playing this game, my thoughts would often go to N++, another floatier kind of platformer with a similar breadth of content. In short, there's a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of stuff to do. An absolute metric ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. In long, there's a ton of necessary content. You're tasked with bringing home 13 (but really 9) power cells to your ship in order to power it up such that you can actually leave the damn place at your leisure, so what that means is that you are REALLY tasked with exploring Derelict Star's dilapidated world. The world is massive, filled to the brim with content. Setting aside the sheer amount of things you have to do just to get around, there's also optional challenges in the form of bits which multiplies the amount you have available to do tenfold. You're not required to do any of those optional challenges, hence why I chose to use the word OPTIONAL to describe them. Instead, you're asked to do them only if you want to, and I quote, "for the love of the game." My personal philosophy towards these bits was that I would do them at my leisure, sometimes as I found them, but other times later on whenever I wanted to. By the end, I had gotten no more than 1/3rd of them and the ones I did get likely extended my time in the game by 8 or so hours, and I'm sure I'll spend plenty more getting the rest. Optional or not, I want those damned bits. On that note, the game has a good variety of lengths for your various challenges, optional or otherwise. Some things are short, but precise. Others are long and generally not that mechanically intensive. Other times, you have short challenges that come down more to their puzzly nature than necessarily anything to do with execution. And, on rare occasion, you have the particularly brutal sections that combine all forms of challenge. Execution, puzzle, length, these are the toughest of the tough, and the moments of the game where I was most surprised by the developer's audacity. Derelict Star is an audacious game. It's stark, striking visuals that build isolation and loneliness, combined with your main character's pensive nature means that you are left with little else but the game and your response to what it asks you to do. My responses were, to summarize, shock and awe.

I saw a video on youtube recommending this game, ended up refunding it after an hour of gameplay. It started off great, I completed the tutorial section without much difficulty, I thought the movement system was neat and I was excited to head on to the game proper, the Derelict Star space station. However I was immediately disappointed when I was thrust into a very samey looking large open world, with no enviromental storytelling and little to no context of why I should care about the goals of my character or the world. The incredibly simple graphics and presentation did not improve or really change in any way in the first few areas I visited. The navigation is quite bad, the ingame map does not display the room and map layout at all, just the various checkpoints with no additional info. Bringing up all the menus requires you to sit and watch the same loud text scroll *every single time* instead of it just being instant. I was shocked when the game told me that the vast majority of collectables were useless, again, where is any motivation for me to collect them? The biggest letdown was that the new areas were significantly more difficult than the tutorial, requiring very precise timed jumps that would take me hours to learn. At that point I was considering if I wanted to invest hours upon hours of my time to master the game's one single actual gameplay mechanic, movement (which is very interesting, but not enough on it's own), coupled with no story, boring presentation, terrible quality of life and a large amount of useless collectables. I decided that I have better things to do and better games to play for the same price. Do not recommend unless you enjoy beating your head against a vintage hard and bland wall.

Most of the praise this game is getting is well deserved. It really is a work of someone who deeply understands and enjoys platforming. It has a light metroidvania flavor to it in the form of knowledge of the movement. Which is super exciting. But I also heard many people say it's not that hard, and it's very fair. Don't fall for it. The exploration and movement is great. But the difficulty spikes will turn you off completely. And there is no way of knowing if the path you are exploring is vital for progress or not. I mention this because the game makes sure you know some collectibles are absolutely not necessary to unlock anything, so only go after them if you enjoy the challenge. I played many difficult platformers before. The ones that work always make sure not to waste the player's time. Meatboy and celeste will always encapsulate difficult sections inside a single room with a checkpoint, and it restarts in less than a second. Here the checkpoints are not that generous. I found a really tough section with a checkpoint. The checkpoint signals a difficult part, so I got ready to repeat that part over and over again. But once I got over it, the next screen did not have another checkpoint. And the next section also did not have one. So I slipped and had to redo the tough section I spent 15 minutes repeating. This is violating the number one rule of the tough platformers of easing the pain of repetition. Given how the game shows such a deep understanding of platformers, this is a very unfortunate gap. Either that or this was an optional path that was poorly signaled as such, which is also a problem.

I'm pencilling this in as my GOTY. This game is pushing the boundaries of what a platformer can be. In fact, I would consider this primarily a systemic puzzle game, it's just that the core mechanic isn't pushing boxes or colouring a grid, it's momentum-based precision platforming. And even then, the platforming is generally very slow and methodical, so that the challenges are more about gaining a deep understanding of the game's mechanics and knowing what to do than they are about having quick reflexes. (Which isn't to say that there aren't tough platforming challenges... there are some truly diabolical Kaizo-type platforming sections, though they are largely optional.) The game's world is huge and every corner of it is designed with a lot of care and filled with delightful ideas. I still found new areas more than 30 hours into the game. Speaking of playtime, it took me around 11 hours to "beat" the game, which requires 9 of the 13 main collectibles, and another 6 hours to get the remaining 4, and I think either of those would be perfectly satisfying stopping points. However, aside from these 13, the entire map is filled with a couple hundred optional collectibles you can obtain by completing extra challenges, and getting all of them took another 35 hours (as per the in-game timer). I didn't initially think I would actually get all of them, but I started chipping away at the easier ones that seemed doable. And as I was doing so, the harder ones began looking more and more reasonable until eventually I couldn't stop until I had all of them. I would strongly recommend this to anyone who likes either puzzle games or platformers (and see if you enjoy the other half of the formula... you might be surprised!) and it's basically a must-play for anyone who likes both. If you do struggle with the platforming, there are a bunch of assist settings and if you struggle with puzzling out the game mechanics' nuances, there is a detailed hint menu/manual that lets you read exactly as much or as little as you need.

The platforming is SO GOOD and SO DEEP. A great game full of secrets where the only thing stopping you from progress is discovering the mechanics and developing lethal precision. For a completionist, it offers truly brutal optional challenges that are very satisfying to overcome.

I had a good time with this getting all the batteries, the optional collectibles were a bit too much but that's why they're optional. Definitely make sure you enjoy precision platformers though, even some of those batteries were no joke.

I've came to this game with the expectation that it is somewhat puzzling and knowledge gated. There is some of that, in a few places, but by volume, most of the game is twitchy, tedious, stilted and demanding of precision. The exaggerated momentum system is just that, it doesn't mean you're going to be maintaining it, weaving through obstacles and whatnot, even when sprinting (if you've pumped enough adderall, you can maintain sprint in a 2 block wide area). Instead, platforming consists of going through obstacles one by one, without continuity. Level design for main objectives range from fine to good, but all the side stuff ranges from "the same idea, but harder" to "a random, completely unrelated idea, and hard". The game does like to throw a lot of instances of platforms that are only visible when they're in your light range, who doesn't like memorization in their platformers? It gets worse, the fixed level screens don't fit a lot of stuff, so sometimes you have to memorize your screen transition jumps. And when that's not enough, sometimes you get to stand on a platform that is on a screen below you, not just sometimes, too many times. The controls themselves aren't that interesting, everything is on a continuous range and vanishingly small differences in input timing result in dramatic changes in results, such as just a few frame change in how long you hold a jump results in wildly different jump arcs. Bashing my head against an obstacle because I mistime the inputs (the sequence of which I know to be correct) by just a tiny bit is simply tedious and boring. The game also takes the concept of "limitation breeds creativity" and runs with it to an irrational degree - the visuals provide less than minimum amount of information, you don't even get a different sprite to differentiate between ascending and descending states! Maybe that's some messed up way of squeezing out "skill expression", whatever, but why then are [i]all[/i] the menus so stupid? Personally, I'm not into this whole indie shtick of simulating agonizing interfaces. With all that said, the game is a step above the mediocrity that is all video games these days, therefore me getting all the power cells and over half of the collectables. Why then the negative review? Because of the writing. What do you mean I should only do optional stuff for "the love of the game"? You think I'm going through this for the story? The story about a lone, depressed astronaut with self-esteem issues? That stumbles upon an abandoned space station that has an AI with a gleeful voice, that sometimes breaks down and is very mean? Lemme guess, the struggle the player goes through playing the game is an allegory for the character fighting their depression. Such BlueSky-coded narrative is copy pasted across much of modern media and it must not be tolerated. There is a single place in the game where how you get the collectable has nothing to do with platforming, a perfect opportunity to test if the player is paying attention. Wrong answer! The developer hates you and thinks you're stupid, here is a hint that tells you exactly what to look for. Honestly, if not for that I wouldn't be writing this, it's that insulting.

Having a lot of fun with this one. Some really tough platforming, but you feel so cool when you get the move right. Generous checkpoint placement means you're right back where you need to be. The level of precision the game demands tires my hand, but its cool to solve a few tricky rooms per session.

Oh my GOD this is everything I ever want in a platformer and so much more!! The movement is so deep & weighty. Every single jump feels momentous and rewarding. The level design is so rich that no single jump ever feels like filler. Every single corner of this world wants to teach you something, or just show you how cool you have become. The gameplay is paced immaculately; shorter gimmicky segments are interweaved with longer segments so you never get too complacent or too exhausted. The level design drastically reinvents itself with each area, it's always such a delight to find somewhere new and be forced to devise a new intuition for navigation, and as a result, gain new movement intuition as well. This game proves that optional collectibles might be the best video game mechanic of all time. You are always offered an opportunity to challenge yourself or explore in a new direction, or you can just leave em for later when you've got a better grasp of your movement quirks. I have a bit of a one-track mind, so when playing a new game, I usually gun it straight for the any% ending or feel the need to go for Everything. However, in Derelict Star, I always had my eye on a cool new platforming challenge. It didn't matter if the main path skipped a few simple qbits for now or if I was spending 30 minutes on something completely optional right next to a main objective, every jump this game has to offer is just so elegant and enticing. Also side note I love how the level design actively explores your hitbox so intimately, now I know what it's like to be tall and skinny and it's kinda awesome The pixel art is so lovingly rendered; each new environmental gimmick stands out as a gameplay element & blends effortlessly into the sprawling atmosphere. All the colors are so lush and punchy, and the environments evoke classic metroidvania nostalgia while introducing some pretty unnerving abstract environments. The setpieces in some scripted segments are so so hype, and the music kicking in intermittently never fails to make me jump around in a happy circle for a few seconds. I love how some spikes and such have their own audio sources for the player, so you hear your jetpack woosh through a tunnel of spikes or hum down a narrow gap. This game fully understands what makes platformers fun and uses every single pixel and gimmick to enhance the experience of movement. This ought to be in the platformer hall of fame along with games like Celeste and N++.

I've never had a game demand I master every intricacy of a small set of mechanics in such a small package. It is like having normal mario levels and kaizo mario levels exist in a single small world. It is so mysterious and challenging, and each step forward feels like significant progress. 10/10 would spend 20 min trying to make a jump between 2 spikes again.