Countdown 2016, 12: Starseed Spoilers

Welcome to the Electron Dance Advent calendar. Each day will bring another post from the archives.

Have you read Faith of the Pilgrim posted on 11 May 2013?

Although The Five Stages of Starseed Pilgrim was widely appreciated, I followed up with a detailed analysis of how Starseed Pilgrim worked. Most of the reviewers and critics had been determined to keep the secrets of Starseed Pilgrim locked away (and we were left wondering if they had actually discovered all its secrets) but I decided to Hell with that. Especially as way too much coverage was obsessed with the mystery of the game, which was not why it was great.

I spilled all of the beans and was not shy about what I saw as problems. I’m just as proud of Faith of the Pilgrim as Five Stages but it’s the latter that gets most of the attention.

Go read it!

From the comments:

• BeamSplashX: “Considering the amount of times I had to reassemble my mind with it constantly being blown while reading this, I’m actually rather glad I didn’t tackle this myself.”
• Morld Pil: “This captures a lot of my love/hate relationship with Starseed Pilgrim.”
• David T. Marchand: “We usually don’t want FPSs where it isn’t clear who you need to shoot. Nor do we like adventure games where we know we have to tie a rope to a stick but we also need to figure out how to tell the game that’s what we want. My opinion is that Starseed Pilgrim is exactly this.”
• Phlebas: “I disagree about some of those points of unfairness.”
• droqen: “The game doesn’t punish you for giving up, but everyone talking about it sure does. You punish yourself, though it’s not your fault.”