Starseed Pilgrim is a game about going to outer space. Through hard work and experimenting you discover the systems, the rules, and your own abilities. Through use of these you explore the world. And whenever you think you’re done, whenever you think you have uncovered it all, everything gets turned upside down, and you realize just how little you know. Playing Starseed Pilgrim I felt like I singlehandedly was NASA. And I singlehandedly was tasked to explore and discover the universe. And whenever I felt I had it all down, a new phenomenon appeared, and all my knowledge, all my experience was suddenly undermined, not useless, never useless, but put perspective. Few concepts are as core to the gaming medium as discovery and exploration. And few games deals as honestly and clearly with these concepts as Starseed Pilgrim does.
The most basic part of Starseed Pilgrims is discovery. Beyond a few basic actions, nothing is explained, and everything dependent on the players ability to discover new facets of the game relatively few layers, mechanics, and systems. It’s not the amount of games aspects that grow as you discover, rather it’s the use case of them that keeps on going.
Exploration in Starseed Pilgrim is at first impossible. Without knowing your tools, you won’t get far. Exploring the world without first discovering the tools can’t be done. Exploration in Starseed Pilgrim is different than finding previously unseen edges of the map, or crossing new areas. There is no minimap. No goals. The only reason to explore is to fulfill your own curiosity. The world that you explore is so different from any existing world, that rather than exploring the world, you’re really just exploring the concept of exploration. Why do I care about this world? Why do I care about any game world? What am I hoping to find? Sometimes questions like these are answered, other times they are best left unanswered.
Unanswered questions can be interesting and hunting; those are the ones you come back to. But Starseed Pilgrim is a game about the opposite; it’s a game about answering as many questions as possible through exploration and discovery. Starseed Pilgrim wants you to think, but it also wants you to do more than that, it want you to come to a conclusion, and then it wants you to think again. It also doesn’t care if you don’t come up with an answer. Starseed Pilgrim is like no other game. Its narrative is not one that gets told, nor one you make up in your mind. No, the narrative IS that you make something up. Your thoughts are the story of Starseed Pilgrim. Not your conclusions, nor your questions, but simply trying to answer them. I can’t say I finished Starseed Pilgrim, I’m not sure if that is even possible. But I gave my best shoot, and came back different.