65/100 Jason Rohrer's "Inside a Star-filled Sky" is an experimental multi-directional shooter with danmaku and tactical elements who has beautiful pixel art style and pleasant melody for soundtrack. But author's vaunted recursion disappeared into the depths of infinite levels...

Inside a Star-Filled Sky is a game developed by the lone indie developer Jason Rohrer. Inside a Star-Filled Sky is exactly the type of game I'd expect to see win some kind of award at the IGF - but winning an award at the IGF doesn't necessarily mean it's a good game.

Insidie a Star-Filled Sky is a novel concept and little more. The game itself is themes around the idea of recursion where you 'enter' power ups and enemies. While this is a nice idea it doesn't really impact the gameplay that much and each item you enter is effectively just the next room. I did appreciate the power up mechanics. You can collect up to 3 powerups and they can be combined in interesting ways to produce interesting effects. This fact alone, however, is not enough to merit a recommendation from me.

As a product, the game is very unpolished and feels like a prototype - for example editing the controls involves manually editing a config file. There's also no sound effects to speak of, just some ambiance music.

There are some nice ideas here but I don't feel the developer took time to flesh them out into a compelling gaming experience and instead delivered us a rough prototype.

Score: 3.5/10

The developer's website (http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-rohrer/) lists his entire published portfolio. Critics of this game should try some of Jason Rohrer's freeware releases. What British mathematician John Conway did for games as procedural life generators, Jason Rohrer has been doing for games as statements about ethics and the limits of human consciousness. But while Conway's "Game of Life" is a wide-open laboratory, Jason Rohrer uses the medium of pseudorandomness to make syllogistic statements. For example, each step you take in "Passage" brings you a bit closer to the same conclusion: when facing a finite lifespan, the love you make is worth more than the treasure you take. Fairly straightforward conclusion, yet "Passage" is never hamfisted or forced - reasoned argument always trumps hand-waving assertion.

"Inside a Star-filled Sky" forgoes syllogistic logic in favor of inductive reasoning. As you traverse each level, you'll discover that you lack the attack power and/or movement speed to reach the exit. So, you must power up your creature and weaken your enemies. This means diving recursively into a powerup, an enemy, or even yourself. As these recursive levels stack up, you face the identical problem at each local scope: how to weaken the obstacles and strengthen yourself. All with an eye toward unwinding the stack and solving the original problem. And so the game politely asks the player to consider a simple proposition: observed casuality in the universe is not a linear function of time but rather an ex post facto selection of one set of points in a multi-dimensional space of possibilities, with each possibility perched on a stack of turtles all the way down. But the game actually makes this statement more elegantly than I ever could.

I love how this game makes me think creatively when I play it. Excellent example of how the latest computers and graphics are not required for a game to have a surprising amount of depth. Bravo to Rohrer for creatively expanding the medium without perpetuating the industry's ever expanding, harmful, and needless hardware and software upgrade cycles.

Interesting concept and gameplay but nothing there to make you want to continue playing after an hour.