Space Pilgrim Academy: Year 1

Fun, simple adventure. Likeable characters and cool story.

Space pilgrim academy: year 1 is an adventure game, with no combat. In fact it is quite close to a generic point & click game, down to the infamous item combination puzzles of those. I actually filtered point & click games out, but gave this game a chance anyway because its sci-fi and story rich tags. The game always starts in windowed mode, in a 720p window. In most RPGMaker games Alt-Enter can be used to turn the game into full screen, strangely it is not the case with this game. Instead F4 is used for full-screen, but that isn’t mentioned anywhere in the game, I just found it out accidentally by browsing the forums. As with the old RPGMaker games that I’m used to, I started playing with keyboard only. I play with the numpad, but the game sets that up a bit different than my defaults. For example I use Numpad5 instead of Numpad8. The key mappings cannot be changed in the options, so I resorted to an AutoHotkey script to map the buttons as I like. Before the end of Act I I discovered that the mouse interactions offer a lot of hints with the way things are interacteable. so I switched to explore the environment with mouse, and used the keyboard mostly for dialogs. Those mouse hints sure help in narrowing down the puzzle pieces. A lot of environmental items trigger some kind of remark. There are guides for the game in the community hub, and I highly recommend checking out 2 of them. The first one is for the achievements only: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1166202530 The second one is for a full playtrough, with puzzles and achievements : https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1342228994 For the achievements I used the first one, as it doesn’t spoil the puzzles. When I got stuck on a puzzle, I checked out the second one. While not as notorious as the item puzzles associated with some point & click games, I still reached points where I couldn’t figure out in a timely manner how to proceed further (like the access card part in the hospital). At those points I just resorted to the guide listed second. With the help of these walkthroughs I managed to unlock all achievements, which a lot of the players of the game seems to do too. Even the lowest achievement's completion rate was above 30%. There is background music in the game, but throughout my play sessions there were frequently segments with no music. Not sure whether these were intended, or if it was a bug in the game. When there is music, it is an expected MIDI like background music. You can save the game when you have freedom of movement (i.e. not during dialog sequences – and those can get rather long). There are several slots to save to, I just cycled through the first 4. Generally speaking you should save before each class, as those are the parts where achievements can be unlocked. The correct answers were given in the first class after my fails, but for the rest of the classes I just read on prior the correct answers and used them to prevent unnecessary replays for the achievements. As for the story, it is completely linear, so no need to replay it for different outcomes/routes. Failing the answers merely prevents the achievement unlocks, the story just carries through. If you want, you can roleplay a wisecrack student, kinda like keeping with the sarcastic answers in Fallout4. The story of the game is a bit too juvenile for my taste. It feels like a high school drama, with high school tropes. The fact that it takes place in the future merely changes the settings in which those tropes play out. It has a mischievous feel to it, serious sci-fi it is not. As such I assume it should resonate more with teenagers. Still, I kinda enjoyed the story, mostly the non class parts. If you want to buy the game, I would recommend buying the Space Pilgrim Academy bundle. It is frequently sold below 3€, which isn’t a bad amount even if you will ultimately play the first game only, as I did. Maybe down the line I will play the next installments too, though my backlog of interesting games is huge, and this game didn’t manage to stir my interest in point & click gameplay with its puzzles – there is a reason why I generally eschew such games. The game was stable for me, it didn’t crash, the saves didn’t corrupt.