Derelict Star review

I have spent the last two weeks in a blissful kind of agony. When I'm not playing Derelict Star, a very humble-looking 2D exploration platformer that looks like it could run on a Commodore 64, I'm thinking about it. At least a half-dozen times I decided I'd had enough. Faced with an impossible-seeming obstacle, against which I'd beaten my head for hours, I figured it's my duty as a time-conscious adult person to move on. I've seen what Derelict Star is doing and can appreciate it: isn't that enough? Nope.

I have to confess I'm obsessed with this humble but quietly ambitious lil' conundrum. It's a bonafide work of art. It's enveloping and gorgeous, and the way it makes me feel reminds me why I fell in love with videogames.

Derelict Star is a momentum-based 2D platformer with a 1:1 aspect ratio. Its spartan pixel art style makes Celeste look like a Naughty Dog splurge. It has a strict, rigorous but masterable physics system. There's no boss battles, combat or kill rooms. It's about a little pixel person stranded in space who must retrieve from a sprawling old space freighter at least eight power cells to power up their ship in order to get home.

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This freighter is a massive world of ultra-parsable grids, ridden with secrets: it's austere and beautiful in its own way, but purely functional in its visual design. It's basically a landscape of squares. The pixels are so chunky and parsable that I know the difference between dying to a lava coral and standing as close as possible next to it, all the better to gain enough momentum to reach a nearby platform that—five hours ago—I thought I couldn't possibly mantle. The pixel art is primitive by most modern measures but the precision it confers is absolutely crucial to this game's design.

It's tough. I have no qualms with abandoning games, even games I like. But Derelict Star feels too good in my hands. Even when I felt like I'd reached my skill ceiling in this superlatively twitchy platformer, I kept going back to noodle in it. And every time I returned, I happened upon a whole new region of its sprawling map that taught me how to tackle those areas that seemed insurmountable before. This is a special kind of metroidvania—like Öoo—whose inaccessible regions aren't gradually reached with the aid of a new power-up or skill, but for unlocking the mysteries of how the player-character works.

This is a game about learning how to move. It has a lot more in common with a Codemasters F1 game than it does a vaguely puzzly metroidvania (which it also is). It trades in perfect but vibe-driven execution. It wants you to feel out curves, sometimes right angles, just so and at the right speed. It needs you to be locked in. A challenging movement is never obviously possible until you pull it off. When you learn to pull it off with aplomb, the game sings anew with endless potential. Moment-to-moment experimentation is baked into its design. It demands that you keep trying.

Now that I've finished Derelict Star, the 30 odd hours I've spent with it could be dilated into, I dunno, maybe two hours max. And now I feel forlorn because I want to do it again.

Star Jumps

My little pixel person has a jetpack. At the bottom of the screen is a meter that shows how much speed I've accrued via running on flat ground. If I jump and use my jetpack from a static position it's piddling, but if I fill the meter from blue, through orange, into red, via running, and then jump, I can leap vast distances. Sometimes I can maintain a red-level momentum even if I slow down, so long as I don't collide with any momentum-killing surface, all the better to effectively float upward through impossible vertical gauntlets.

There are endless subtleties to the way this jetpack person can be thrown and weaved upwards, downwards or through tight corridors of instant death, in a way that seems bizarrely untethered from the world's steadfastly gridlocked expanse. That is your superpower in Derelict Star, basically: the world is a grid, but you are not fixed to it.

This collision of ultra-readable obstacles with expressive play is where the heart of Derelict Star's compelling tension and agency lies, and it's what makes it stand out among dozens nay hundreds of similar looking platformers. The rules during the first hour are the same as the rules 30 hours later; you are never better equipped, but you're constantly learning.

Importantly, Derelict Star doesn't sidescroll: the world unfurls as discrete rooms. Sometimes I use my momentum, my speed, my amazing ability to float, not just to reach platforms but to peek into places it might be possible to reach. In this world of discrete "rooms" there is always usually a regional novelty: maybe there's slippery ice, or maybe there are vines that stop me from jumping (but which can give me a huge amount of vertical momentum if I grasp onto them at speed when they're on walls). Maybe there are collectible dots that give me a brief vertical boost. Maybe there are bouncy airborne bubbles, or bouncy blocky nodes that can propel me great distances, if only I hit them from the correct angle at the right speed. Along the route to every crucial power cell lies a new confusion to my jetpack fellow's path.

Checkpoints are abundant, and from each it's possible to fast travel to another via a map which plainly shows where each power cell is. This gives Derelict Star its freewheeling, explorative atmosphere: if things are too tough, it's three button presses towards another region you might feel better equipped to master. It's a sandbox of platforming physics problems, and once I understood its pace and cadence, I realised that it isn't designed to thwart me. This isn't a masochistic game: it gives me all the time and space to learn, and a whole sprawling world in which to figure it out. It's easier than, say, Super Meat Boy. It's like Celeste: you can finish it. This is not a masocore platformer. It's a patience platformer.

I am always conscious of my hands when I play Derelict Star. I am amazed by what they can achieve. It is extraordinary when I realise that I'm not even thinking too hard about what I'm doing: my hands bleed into the game, and my brain bleeds into my hands. No other medium can capture this zen-like, trance-like expressiveness. Derelict Star is a Rez-like, or a Foddy-like, in this way.

It's essentially a toy, yes, but this focus on fine-tuned movement emboldens the quieter thematics in Derelict Star: this is a game of exquisite, quiet loneliness. Nothing (or at least, nearly nothing) wants to kill you. It's a little puzzle box escape room. There is music, but it seems to creep into the foreground delicately; it's a spacey, synth-laden variant of silence. In Derelict Star you're adrift, and you have all the time in the world. It feels good to just poke around.

This is a maturing medium with countless, and growing, forms of player expression. But Derelict Star is about your hands, man. It's an evolved and aberrated take on the arcade. It's an interplay between hands and eyes. It's unapologetically a vintage game, but a very serious one. It executes on its concerns with formidable severity and quiet technical prowess. It knows that mastery is the province of obsessors; but it also knows that the route to obsession crosses through the pastures of the pleasure of simply trying. And it makes trying feel delectable, sublime.

When I think about Derelict Star, a few days after completing the wily beast, I admittedly struggle to articulate the pleasure of interfacing with it, save for what I've written above. I reckon it feels a lot more like a gorgeous song than a piece of software. It definitely made me dance with my fingers. My fingers are still operating to its logic.