Developer: Red Herring Labs
Publisher: Phoenix Online Publishing
Rrp: £6.50 (Humblebundle) and £6.99 (Steam)
Released: 17th February 2015
Available on: Steam and Humblebundle
Played Using: A mouse
The planet of Beta Cygni Two has another name, ‘Deadrock’. It’s a title that the planet has earned over the years because no one has ever escaped. Its a harsh desert planet with no signs of life and you’re stuck on it. Congratulations.
Point and Click games… who actually plays these anymore? Well I do for one. I actually rather enjoy them so long as they don’t rely too heavily on moonlogic. Morningstar: Descent to Deadrock is exactly that, a point and click but it unusually eschews the traditional viewpoint of being 2D and side-scrolling. No, instead Red Herring Labs went for first person and static locations in the style of Myst and Riven (I can promise the puzzles are much less obtuse in this game that those).
You play as a character named Powell, who has woke from stasis to discover that the ship he’s on has crash landed and to make matters worse they’ve crashed on a planet that no one has ever escaped from, Deadrock. So now Powell has to try and work out how to get off this accursed rock. As you can imagine Powell isn’t too happy about this and is quite vocal about it, in fact he’s quite vocal about everything.
Unfortunately this means that from the very start of the game it highlights one of the game biggest flaws, the voice acting. It’s not that its bad its just flat, whenever I hear Powell speak I don’t hear a man stranded on a planet. What I hear is a voice actor who’s reading a script and just wants to get his paycheck. The delivery is by no means bad and the quality is fair enough, it just has no life to it.
The puzzles themselves are actually pretty good, many of them with a sound logical basis. As an example I’m going to spoil a fairly early one;
You reach a gorge that you need to cross, the bridge has fallen but there is a standing rock on your side that’s just big enough to bridge the gap. Clearly you need to turn that standing rock into a bridge, but how? Easy. In your inventory combine an object with sulphur in it with your used carbon filter, then add saltpeter that you find on the floor. This makes black gunpowder (no, really it does) use that with the rock then light it. Boom. One bridge.
If you ever do get stuck or just forget what you need to do the game has a no consequence hint system in the form of a radio. It can be a little on the nose at times, but that’s not really a problem unless you use it all the time, in which case you may as well just pull up a walkthrough.
In some cases the game accidentally gives you a hint without intending to, case in point; there was a sequence where I completed a puzzle and the character started talking about how it looked like something from a notepad he had seen. A notepad that I found in another room five minutes later.
The story about Powell and his attempt to escape Deadrock is… alright. I know that seems like a lacklustre explanation but there isn’t much to the story itself. What I was far more interested in were the things that were going on in the background, sadly all my questions are left unanswered and I doubt that they’ll ever be resolved.
Reading back on what I’ve said in this review you’d think I didn’t like this game, wouldn’t you? Well you’d be wrong. I enjoyed every moment with this game, even if it was short lived (clocking in at approximately three hours).
If this appeals to you perhaps try;
