I knew very little about Morningstar: Descent to Deadrock before going into it. I also could find very little information about it. It is another published (but not made by) game from Phoenix Studios. It was originally a freeware adventure game made back in 2009, now with updated graphics and other bells and whistles. And that’s kind of it. I don’t know if this is part of a larger plan for later games or a shared universe. As far as I can tell, it’s completely stand alone, which leaves me a little curious as to why. But first, the basics.
As a point-and-click adventure game, Morningstar works pretty well. The game is presented from the first person perspective of (I guess) a space trucker named Powell. Opening with a rather gorgeously rendered cinematic in the vein of a high resolution version of 90s games like Myst or Descent, the spaceship Morningstar is shown spinning out of control, hull on fire as it’s pulled through the atmosphere towards a planet. Running to get to the cockpit, Powell finds the pilot has been impaled by a piece of steel rebar. All in all, the situation is not pretty. After the ship crashes, Powell finds himself left on his own to try and fix the ship. Another of his crewmates is dead in a failed stasis chamber and Captain Novak is pinned to the pilot’s chair, but alive. The rest of the game is about picking up items, combining them, and generally jerry rigging the Morningstar to get it spaceworthy again and off the planet. The planet that they find themselves on is infamous and off limits. It is nicknamed Deadrock.
Instead of walking around rooms to interact with the environment, Morningstar is set up like a series of hypercards. Moving your mouse over a scene will reveal blue squares around items and points of interest. Some will have arrows that can be clicked, causing a change of scenery, either allowing the player to see a different part of a room or a different one all together. Occasionally Novak will pipe up in your ear in order to deliver some new piece of information or just to banter with Powell. Likewise, you can contact him first, and he, in turn, will give a clue as to what to do next or at least the general area of where the next thing is that needs to be found.
Eventually you will come across another wrecked ship and a mystery concerning what happened to its crew, but always with the goal of getting the needed parts to get back into space. The game is rather light on plot or on worldbuilding. There’s no grand quest or mission that has to be accomplished. There’s no urgent reason to get back into space other than simply not wanting to be on a dead planet with limited supplies.
The puzzles themselves aren’t too challenging and all make perfect rational sense. Heavy boxes in your way? Use a steel bar for leverage. Does a panel have screws? Use the screwdriver. Only once or twice did I have to rub one object with every other object in my inventory to get it to work, but even that wasn’t a hassle. Not once did I ever even feel the need to check a walkthrough. All in all, I finished the game in under two hours. I fixed the ship, and we lifted off, outrunning the threat in another nicely rendered cinematic and that was it.
I haven’t got a lot to say because there’s no greater narrative arc to Morningstar. Powell doesn’t have a backstory, neither does Novak, nor does the third crewmember, though both voice actors didn’t sound too broken up about finding him dead. Both actors also had a bit of trouble moving too far beyond dry delivery or possibly dull surprise as their emotive tone of choice. The mystery, while the reveal does answer some questions regarding the oddities of Deadrock, doesn’t really matter much in the end. It’s a Star Trek episode that forgot to add in a moral message about humanity and simply let its events stand as a representation of a rather unfortunate day at the office, which is an odd choice to take if the game really is standalone.
It sounds like I’m coming down harder on the game than I feel I should. Morningstar is fine, but in the vein of saying something nicely or interestingly, it feels merely like another game on the growing pile of science fiction video games that are willing to explore the variety that the genre has to offer and not much else. Thanks to blockbuster films and geek culture in general, the modern image of sci-fi generally involves lasers, explosions, monsters, and other standard action fare, but in space. That’s rather unfortunate.
Even after just a short time of listening to sci-fi short story podcasts, my view of what is possible in the genre has expanded. You always know that there is an opportunity for a wider variety of approaches in space stories, but you don’t have a conception of them until you experience the alternatives for yourself. (I can say the same thing about the fantasy and horror genres for that matter.). With all of human imagination ripe for the picking, most of the time our choices in games boil down to some variation of shooting a bunch of dudes in the face, but this time in space. Likewise, because it is in space the thinking seems to be that to take advantage of that setting, the story must be big, galaxy spanning, perhaps, which should suggest the need to explore big consequences.
Thankfully we are getting a growing number of sci-fi games with much smaller scopes and interests. From the conspiracy noir of Gemini Rue to the science gone wrong narrative in test chambers of Portal to the graduate student archivist project of Analogue: A Hate Story to the fourth dimensional geometrical escape plan of Antichamber to the redefinition of sentience presented in The Fall — and so on and so forth. Though Morningstar is nowhere near as interesting as those games artistically, going smaller means that these developers can’t rely on spectacle and need to compensate instead by offering a generous helping of narrative and thematic meat. Still, now we can say there is game where the ship has gone down, and it really is just a matter of fixing it up by finding some replacement parts. That’s novel in a way, I suppose.