Morning Star
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Last modified 2017-07-23 20:03:45
Despite being an entirely awful game, Morning Star appeals to players with well-applied cinematic tricks and a deep, dark, unusual setting.
I'd appreciate seeing similar qualities in MegaZeux games more often, but the average teenage game developer seems restrictively a programmer or designer; not an artist, and certainly not a dramatist.
Interestingly, but unfortunately, Morning Star was not crafted by a skilled programmer or designer. Its backstage was slapped together by something of a savant ASCII painter. Goofy but (slightly) smarter than he lets on, Noah Rabinovitch is a kind of outsiderly artist, his work totally beyond comparison but mostly broken and dangerous--not like an industrial meat grinder built with slave labor--but more a four-story inner city building, in the bad side of town, 150 years old and for the past twenty mostly uninhabited.
The narrative places us in the character of Jessie, a naive nth-tier angel residing in a boring town along a linear expanse in the starry blackness of God's apparently pre-Earth void.
From here the plot is sometimes thrilling but mostly somber; there are early scenes of surprisingly intense emotion that set you up for a stumbling descent into increasingly convincing evidence of the artist's failing ambition.
Herein are sometimes aimless puzzles more sadistic than clever (frustrating); the constant threat of death by an accidental keypress causing a silent fall into space (frustrating); an inexplicably directed action scene (bewildering), and many well-drawn characters (in either sense). Yet they have little to do or say, and little time with the player.
So the story centers around Jessie: strong-willed, rational, and sweet, often undone by a failure of wisdom seemingly shared with the rest of the angel world, to various degrees and in various respects (Perhaps they never tried the fruit?).
The story ends unambiguously--midbang, muffled by a pillow and tied to a stick and beaten with baseball bats, cutting suddenly to a final copyright notice as the overhead lights fade back on.
I'd appreciate seeing similar qualities in MegaZeux games more often, but the average teenage game developer seems restrictively a programmer or designer; not an artist, and certainly not a dramatist.
Interestingly, but unfortunately, Morning Star was not crafted by a skilled programmer or designer. Its backstage was slapped together by something of a savant ASCII painter. Goofy but (slightly) smarter than he lets on, Noah Rabinovitch is a kind of outsiderly artist, his work totally beyond comparison but mostly broken and dangerous--not like an industrial meat grinder built with slave labor--but more a four-story inner city building, in the bad side of town, 150 years old and for the past twenty mostly uninhabited.
The narrative places us in the character of Jessie, a naive nth-tier angel residing in a boring town along a linear expanse in the starry blackness of God's apparently pre-Earth void.
From here the plot is sometimes thrilling but mostly somber; there are early scenes of surprisingly intense emotion that set you up for a stumbling descent into increasingly convincing evidence of the artist's failing ambition.
Herein are sometimes aimless puzzles more sadistic than clever (frustrating); the constant threat of death by an accidental keypress causing a silent fall into space (frustrating); an inexplicably directed action scene (bewildering), and many well-drawn characters (in either sense). Yet they have little to do or say, and little time with the player.
So the story centers around Jessie: strong-willed, rational, and sweet, often undone by a failure of wisdom seemingly shared with the rest of the angel world, to various degrees and in various respects (Perhaps they never tried the fruit?).
The story ends unambiguously--midbang, muffled by a pillow and tied to a stick and beaten with baseball bats, cutting suddenly to a final copyright notice as the overhead lights fade back on.
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Despite being a sort of short game, I think that it's music and overall feeling more than make up for it. It's got an interesting plot and a few puzzles and things to follow along with. Otherwise it could be called a fairly interactive cutscene/movie thing. Just trying to figure some things out and piece together what was happening in this world made it a game worth playing for me.
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Gameplay: 6/10
The game feels like it was designed to frustrate you. It's really easy to die or screw up without any real warning. There are a few good (although simple, mostly ZZT style) puzzles, and some pretty bad ones. I'd say about half of the puzzles feel rewarding, and about a third of them take real thought and not just luck for figuring them out. The other half were tedious and annoying, and pretty much the entire game forced you to constantly save/restore. What's worse (as many have mentioned) is that you can constantly fall off the edge of the levels, where you're hit with game over without any real message. This will happen all the time, not just when you try to find the real edges of boards or invisible paths but just from walking around normally because of the nature of MZX (and sometimes it can even happen when you move in the wrong direction underneath overlay, and you won't even see the fall animation). There are also some pretty terrible bugs that can ruin your game, but because the game feels so screwed up on purpose it can be hard to realize it. For instance, there's one point where you can make your character disappear entirely and yet the game can still go on - for a while it'll be semi-playable and you'll think that the game is just making things even more ridiculously hard on you before you find out that the game is much too broken to be playable. There are some other bugs if you talk to or do something in the wrong order that can take far too long to realize. I had to load up old save files and replay a lot of the game many times because of all of this, and it was pretty frustrating.
Oh, and the boss is extremely tedious as well (and you can't actually die, nor is there any actual challenge. It just has an absurd amount of health.)
If you play this game you'd better cycle through a lot of saves if you want to actually make it through. The core gameplay has some strong elements and a few of the puzzles feel solid, and some will just make you glad to have cleared them. Not an especially memorable game gameplay-wise and far too buggy, but could have been pretty good if it didn't constantly feel like punishing the player. With the core elements and without the flaws it probably would have gotten a 7.5 or 8.
Graphics: 5.5/10
A similar pattern continues with the graphics. There are some good core elements that are basically taken down in score because of some horrible decisions. It's trying to go for a distinct style that makes for a surreal and abstract setting, and while this does work it also backfires and makes the game really painful to look at much of the time. First, it's all around too dark and some areas are too low contrast. In the village areas the color will further pulse out, even for the text, which makes it painful to read. There are cycling garbage characters all over the place which not only makes things difficult to look at but also difficult to interact with because it's hard to tell what's background and what isn't. Sometimes platform chars are too dark, which makes it hard to tell where they are (and you can't just feel around or you'll fall into a pit.. not that you'll be able to avoid falling in the pits a lot). There are some effects, which can be pretty neat, or very painful on the eyes, or in some cases both at the same time. It uses ZZT chars as a base with some alterations, which is fine, but IMO the artistic flair of doing this has all but worn out by now. This isn't Forrester - that had a good deal of structure behind the design and this doesn't, which, while clearly purposeful, takes away a lot from the potential of the style. There are some pretty decent fullscreen drawings near the end though.
Basically, it feels like a few gimmicks (some of which are good, but still gimmicks) that are carried throughout the game with too little of the effort that would have gone into more traditional/sane graphics. Not that these are bad at all, but unfortunately the flaws hurt it tremendously. A good example of a case where graphical direction can actively take away from the gameplay experience as opposed to simply not enhance it.
Sound: 8.5/10
The music is high quality and fits the mood very well. Some of it is more ambient than particularly melodic, so probably not what you would want to listen to outside of the game, but in-game it works fine. A small amount of it can get a little annoying.
Story: 7.5/10
This is a very plot driven game, and it does a good job building the atmosphere through the dialog and characters introduced. There's a twist, but it's IMO very predictable. The main reasons I didn't give it a higher score is that there are some things that just don't really flow well into it. At first I thought it was going to be an abstract game that threw out a lot of philosophical ideas (which I woudn't have preferred..) but it actually does have a straightforward purpose and progression, it just drifts from it. In particular there were some story scrolls that I found really boring and completely irrelevant to the game. Still pretty interesting, but it felt rather forced and in the end cliche as well. Another element of the game that perhaps had a good foundation but was bogged down by some things it shouldn't have bothered with (but not as much as gameplay/graphics).
Oh, and some of the names were pretty good, but a lot of them were just unpronounceable garbage which really annoyed me. ;P
Style: 8/10
I think that this game will get a lot of recognition for being different and having a certain kind of unique flavor to it. In fact, I think a lot of people will consider it their favorite, at least for a while. For me it won't really work that way, but I'm very much a substance over style kind of person, and I probably echo this more strongly than most. Anyway, the game tries hard to be distinctive for MZX, and for the most part it succeeds, although in some ways entering this "genre" makes it a lot closer to the few others that are already there. It still deserves recognition for what it accomplishes here, in bringing everything together.
Overall: 7/10
I felt it was a worthwhile game, but at its core nothing amazing, and really filled to the brim with frustrating elements. I would suggest that it should have been more thoroughly tested and adjusted for opinion but I'm actually pretty sure that it was made annoying on purpose to some extent. I don't really like being purposefully annoyed, and I guess that's reflected in the score. Oh well.
The game feels like it was designed to frustrate you. It's really easy to die or screw up without any real warning. There are a few good (although simple, mostly ZZT style) puzzles, and some pretty bad ones. I'd say about half of the puzzles feel rewarding, and about a third of them take real thought and not just luck for figuring them out. The other half were tedious and annoying, and pretty much the entire game forced you to constantly save/restore. What's worse (as many have mentioned) is that you can constantly fall off the edge of the levels, where you're hit with game over without any real message. This will happen all the time, not just when you try to find the real edges of boards or invisible paths but just from walking around normally because of the nature of MZX (and sometimes it can even happen when you move in the wrong direction underneath overlay, and you won't even see the fall animation). There are also some pretty terrible bugs that can ruin your game, but because the game feels so screwed up on purpose it can be hard to realize it. For instance, there's one point where you can make your character disappear entirely and yet the game can still go on - for a while it'll be semi-playable and you'll think that the game is just making things even more ridiculously hard on you before you find out that the game is much too broken to be playable. There are some other bugs if you talk to or do something in the wrong order that can take far too long to realize. I had to load up old save files and replay a lot of the game many times because of all of this, and it was pretty frustrating.
Oh, and the boss is extremely tedious as well (and you can't actually die, nor is there any actual challenge. It just has an absurd amount of health.)
If you play this game you'd better cycle through a lot of saves if you want to actually make it through. The core gameplay has some strong elements and a few of the puzzles feel solid, and some will just make you glad to have cleared them. Not an especially memorable game gameplay-wise and far too buggy, but could have been pretty good if it didn't constantly feel like punishing the player. With the core elements and without the flaws it probably would have gotten a 7.5 or 8.
Graphics: 5.5/10
A similar pattern continues with the graphics. There are some good core elements that are basically taken down in score because of some horrible decisions. It's trying to go for a distinct style that makes for a surreal and abstract setting, and while this does work it also backfires and makes the game really painful to look at much of the time. First, it's all around too dark and some areas are too low contrast. In the village areas the color will further pulse out, even for the text, which makes it painful to read. There are cycling garbage characters all over the place which not only makes things difficult to look at but also difficult to interact with because it's hard to tell what's background and what isn't. Sometimes platform chars are too dark, which makes it hard to tell where they are (and you can't just feel around or you'll fall into a pit.. not that you'll be able to avoid falling in the pits a lot). There are some effects, which can be pretty neat, or very painful on the eyes, or in some cases both at the same time. It uses ZZT chars as a base with some alterations, which is fine, but IMO the artistic flair of doing this has all but worn out by now. This isn't Forrester - that had a good deal of structure behind the design and this doesn't, which, while clearly purposeful, takes away a lot from the potential of the style. There are some pretty decent fullscreen drawings near the end though.
Basically, it feels like a few gimmicks (some of which are good, but still gimmicks) that are carried throughout the game with too little of the effort that would have gone into more traditional/sane graphics. Not that these are bad at all, but unfortunately the flaws hurt it tremendously. A good example of a case where graphical direction can actively take away from the gameplay experience as opposed to simply not enhance it.
Sound: 8.5/10
The music is high quality and fits the mood very well. Some of it is more ambient than particularly melodic, so probably not what you would want to listen to outside of the game, but in-game it works fine. A small amount of it can get a little annoying.
Story: 7.5/10
This is a very plot driven game, and it does a good job building the atmosphere through the dialog and characters introduced. There's a twist, but it's IMO very predictable. The main reasons I didn't give it a higher score is that there are some things that just don't really flow well into it. At first I thought it was going to be an abstract game that threw out a lot of philosophical ideas (which I woudn't have preferred..) but it actually does have a straightforward purpose and progression, it just drifts from it. In particular there were some story scrolls that I found really boring and completely irrelevant to the game. Still pretty interesting, but it felt rather forced and in the end cliche as well. Another element of the game that perhaps had a good foundation but was bogged down by some things it shouldn't have bothered with (but not as much as gameplay/graphics).
Oh, and some of the names were pretty good, but a lot of them were just unpronounceable garbage which really annoyed me. ;P
Style: 8/10
I think that this game will get a lot of recognition for being different and having a certain kind of unique flavor to it. In fact, I think a lot of people will consider it their favorite, at least for a while. For me it won't really work that way, but I'm very much a substance over style kind of person, and I probably echo this more strongly than most. Anyway, the game tries hard to be distinctive for MZX, and for the most part it succeeds, although in some ways entering this "genre" makes it a lot closer to the few others that are already there. It still deserves recognition for what it accomplishes here, in bringing everything together.
Overall: 7/10
I felt it was a worthwhile game, but at its core nothing amazing, and really filled to the brim with frustrating elements. I would suggest that it should have been more thoroughly tested and adjusted for opinion but I'm actually pretty sure that it was made annoying on purpose to some extent. I don't really like being purposefully annoyed, and I guess that's reflected in the score. Oh well.
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Last modified 2014-01-31 21:15:48
Morning Star is a story-based game with nearly no action which relies on atmosphere, plot, and a few scattered, satisfying puzzles to deliver entertainment. The well-selected soundtrack and palettes do most of the mood setting in this game, and the graphical style paints it with a pretty nice retro vibe.
You play the game as Jessie, an angel on a stick floating somewhere in space, which apparently has gravity now because I kept falling into the void--although it's really not as bad as people make it out to sound, just use F9 and F10 frequently, which you should be doing anyway in MZX. Also pay attention to where you're going!
The initial plot mostly consists of Jessie trying to figure out why everybody's so angry so she can go visit her brother, but things soon get pretty deep, and Jessie is sent on a quest across the ichthys to figure out why her home was destroyed. Jessie is well written as a naïve, adventurous idealist in a far-less-than-ideal world. The ending hits unexpectedly and hard with a complete gameplay shift that might not mesh well with everyone.
As far as complaints, I don't have a whole lot of them:
- Game breaking bug 1: Don't talk to the magenta person a second time until you've found the paintbrush.
- Game breaking bug 2: Use F7 from the editor to escape the locking bug shortly after talking to gtuw. This is the only time you'll need the editor.
- The game should probably handle player death better. While the negative response to it was pretty exaggerated, it's still an issue that should have been addressed. The overblown reaction, if anything, is just an indicator of how good the game is otherwise.
Play it at night in the dark!
You play the game as Jessie, an angel on a stick floating somewhere in space, which apparently has gravity now because I kept falling into the void--although it's really not as bad as people make it out to sound, just use F9 and F10 frequently, which you should be doing anyway in MZX. Also pay attention to where you're going!
The initial plot mostly consists of Jessie trying to figure out why everybody's so angry so she can go visit her brother, but things soon get pretty deep, and Jessie is sent on a quest across the ichthys to figure out why her home was destroyed. Jessie is well written as a naïve, adventurous idealist in a far-less-than-ideal world. The ending hits unexpectedly and hard with a complete gameplay shift that might not mesh well with everyone.
As far as complaints, I don't have a whole lot of them:
- Game breaking bug 1: Don't talk to the magenta person a second time until you've found the paintbrush.
- Game breaking bug 2: Use F7 from the editor to escape the locking bug shortly after talking to gtuw. This is the only time you'll need the editor.
- The game should probably handle player death better. While the negative response to it was pretty exaggerated, it's still an issue that should have been addressed. The overblown reaction, if anything, is just an indicator of how good the game is otherwise.
Play it at night in the dark!