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Return to the Stars's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Help, Hints and/or Instructions | #5 | 3.818 | 3.818 |
| Presentation (Text, Graphics & Sound) | #9 | 3.273 | 3.273 |
| Story (Plot, Setting & Objective) | #9 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
| Puzzles | #9 | 3.045 | 3.045 |
| Overall Rating | #11 | 3.045 | 3.045 |
| Writing (General Quality) | #13 | 2.955 | 2.955 |
| Implementation | #13 | 2.955 | 2.955 |
Ranked from 22 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Overview of Game
After having been taken captive in battle, you soon settled into a routine: sleep, eat, shower, reconsider your life choices, repeat. Until, one day, there is no more food. Or guards, for that matter. It seems to be up to you to find a way out of your prison and back home...
"Return to the Stars" is a short-ish (about 45 minutes) military-themed sci-fi game in which you must escape from captivity on an alien planet. There are some puzzles, but I wouldn’t call it a “puzzle game” – there’s a good deal of exploration as well.
Requirements to Play
The game can be played directly in your browser. To play off-line, you will need a Glulx interpreter: among the more popular options is Lectrote, available for Windows, Mac, and Linux: https://github.com/erkyrath/lectrote/releases
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Comments
A nice little romp through a mysterious world.
The writing is pleasant and sketches an atmosphere through many intriguing details. It’s fun to explore the world and discover the little worldbuilding touches. I loved the opening description of the cell, and the details about the ship.
To me, the main problem was that the game isn’t sure how deep it wants to be. It works perfectly well as a simple adventure with moderate stakes. Attempts to raise those stakes, however, feel half-hearted: even timed or gory scenes never feel like real danger.
There are many threads that never get explored: Did anyone else in the squad get captured, and if so where are they? Why did the aliens leave? Why did they leave behind what they did? Where they the aggressors in the war, or were we? What’s with their taste in furniture? Some of those are bound to stay mysteries, but I’d have liked the player character to try to investigate at all.
Many of the puzzles are underhinted. In particular, the force-field puzzle is misleading, and the solution isn’t really guessable even with the correct understanding.
The map is complex, with many dog-leg or one-way connections, and unusual movement verbs. It makes the exploration more vivid, but also the gameplay a lot more frustrating.
Overall, I enjoyed the game, but I think it came off as more light-hearted than intended.
Nice game. It is fairly small but long enough to be entertaining and fit as an entry in ParserComp, though I think longer games should somehow get credit for being long (if they are good). I liked the puzzles, especially the one involving "zhq" (rot13). The final command needed to finish the game required me to look at the hints - something the main character would know, so to me that was a "guess-the-verb/phrase"-problem. But overall, well done!