This game is beautiful and i really want to like it.
there seemed to be some kind of story and coherency at the beginning, but as far as i know the game has no end and goes on forever, you endlessly explore randomly generated planets (the bad kind of randomly generated i.e empty feeling and seeing the same things on multiple planets) and give them a name once you've found a white orb, why and for what? once you've explored an entire galaxy you just rinse and repeat with a new galaxy. finding those damn orbs on those empty planets with simplistic puzzles

i like art and slow burning exploration games. but in this case i can't help but ask: is there even a point, a goal?
and from what i've read on forums there isn't. and if that's the case this game just might be 2avantgarde4me. i heard about some kind of anomaly that you can find though, and i've seen ringed-in stars in the sky, but it's impossible to triangulate their position based on the information you are given. and if finding the anomaly is the point of the game, the journey getting there is too bland and empty for me to want to bother

i'm all for mystery, no handholding and a "the journey is the goal". but this game just might take those to such an extreme that it comes off as pretentious, farfetched and frustrating, it took me hours to even figure out how the ship worked, (most of that time went to trying to calculate what the numbers on the screens meant, finally understood that they were parsecs, fuel and coords etc) i've read interviews and i know that they wanted the ship to be a mystery and something you have to figure out, but to me, making it a mystery seemed only to serve as a filler to extend gametime and keep you intrested. and understandably so, because learning to operate the ship is more fun than actually exploring the planets. not only because the planets feel empty, but because the cockpit actually is one of the strenghts of the game, it is very detailed and everything you see inside it has meaning and every button does something. which even real simulator games fail to do right, the cockpit in train simulator for instance is just a toy, you can only operate a few essential levers and buttons and the rest is just window dressing. train simulator should learn from mirrormoon's cockpit. it's good.


but ultimatly the game suffers the same problems the tv show LOST does, too many questions and too few answers and all filler and frustration inbetween, and the answers you do get are farfetched and/or hamfisted.

now you might just think i'm not very patient but there is a difference between slowburners and bad pacing: a slowburner is well thought out; on how it will be percieved by the consumers, what message it wants to deliver and WHAT message it wants to deliver. you can extend running time in a manner that doesn't feel like filler and ask questions and keep the answers away from the consumer without being annoying. take 2001 a space odyssey for example, or the game FRACT OSC. those are good because they have soul, an artistic vision, are well thought out and takes into account how it will be perceived and experienced. And since mirrormoon is randomly generated (at least i think so, otherwise the leveldesign just sucks) there is no thought and structure put into the progression of game. making it feel soulless and empty, mirrormoon's artistic vision is beautiful though, but the progression and gameplay is kind of like fumbling in the dark to find marbles and once you got them all you throw them out on the floor to do the same thing again. now that might sound like some kind of avant garde flashmob act, but is it fun? not to me at least.

I don't know how to do anything and it's amazing. I press a button and something happens. I press another button and nothing happens. Trial and error teaches me to pilot my spaceship. I am on a tiny planetoid. I grab the moon and make an eclipse.

I'm being vague and bewildering because this game is vague and bewildering and to explain it, if I could, would be to ruin it. Luckily I can't explain it, except that it's beautiful and strange and it reminds me of trying to figure out old DOS RPGs without a manual when I was eight.

If you like explorational puzzle solving this is a game you should buy.

I am slowly learning to travel in space.
Time is a meaningless variable that slips through my fingers.
Stopping requires a lot a energy while moving feels almost like staying still.

Breathing is hard inside the machine.
I need to stay calm.

My brain hurts

Quite the abstract if you ask me. Yet, I feel this game is an expression of art, and represents an out-of-earth-adventure. Yet, I recomend this for the player willing to see art in one of its finest forms

A procedrually generated space themed environmental puzzle game with a focus on exploration and navigation. Puzzles are procedurally generated and run the range of obvious and simple to clever and surprising. And sometimes even after the anamoly is solved there will still be things to do and discover on the planet, revealing easter eggs and other surprises. Once an anomaly is solved you get the right to name the star, as players explore the galaxy and solve anomalies the galaxy fills up with the unique signatures of various astronauts. This is a starkly beautiful game, evocative of the Italian underground indie freeware classic Noctis. The visual themes call back to Kubrick and Tarkovsky's work. This game is all about the journey.