Morningstar: Descent to Deadrock (2015)

 Sometimes pleasant surprises happen when you buy cheap bundles. I mean yeah, I did write previously of heaps of unplayed games, but I just can't resist a cheap deal, especially if it's about adventure games.

Morningstar: Decent to Deadrock is one of such surprises. It's not a long game, nor a difficult one. In fact, my Steam counter says I ran it through in 118 minutes, a hair under 2 hours, so in that sense, I'd be a bit disappointed had I paid the full price of it. But considering I paid considerably less, and got a couple of other games at the same time, I think it's a pretty pleasant surprise all in all.

The visuals of the game were a big surprise. The CGI looks good and the cut scenes are very well made

The game starts with a crash landing. A spaceship Morningstar plummets through the atmosphere and crashes on a desolate desert planet. You wake up from your hibernation chamber, trying to figure out what has just happened and if anyone else is alive. This all is shown and controlled from a Myst style 1st person view.

Most of the puzzles require you to carry things between places, in some cases, you'll need to combine items in the inventory in order to create new items. The puzzles are mostly pretty intuitive and logical, which is always a good thing in an adventure game.

Your basic game view. One of your shipmates hasn't been that lucky.

Basically, you move from location to location and solve puzzles here and there. None of them is particularly tasking, mind you, but it's all a very pleasant distraction. While playing I couldn't help but think how nice fit the game would be for a tablet device and not so surprisingly it is available for at least Android and Apple devices. So that in mind, if you do get it, the portable version would be a way to go, as the interface seems to be tailored for a touchscreen. And it seems to be cheaper than it's in Steam for tablets anyways.

As the game is short, it does leave some things a bit open-ended. I'm guessing the devs will be making a sequel at some point if this one sells well enough.

So that's about it. Morningstar isn't a ground shattering game, but it was, I think, a very pleasant surprise from a game I knew nothing about and had really no expectations. I wouldn't shell out a top price of it, but if you can find it cheap enough, give it a go.

You can get it from Google Play, Steam and iTunes.