A tantilizing premise for people who like games about exploration, discovery, and finding needles in haystacks.
Mirrormoon EP is one of those games that shuns traditional gameplay tropes and manages to carve out a niche of its own in its style and execution. Ultimately, this game is about exploration. If that is important to you then stop reading here and play the game fresh and unbiased, its not that expensive to just try it out, and you will have quite a few addicting hours of exploration ahead of you. This focus on exploration is very evident from the initial start of the game as it throws you into the CGA colored cockpit of some mysterious and hull-less spaceship floating among stars, giving you little indication of what the controls are. It invites you to start pressing buttons at random and make your own judgment on what to do next. One of the first things to notice after powering up your ship is a disc ready to place in some sort of drive with a nice big button next to it. After loading the disc you find yourself transported to the surface of some small moon with another moon orbiting it. You have some type of tool in hand, and are given little direction on what to do. After wandering the moon you come across artifacts and tools that are used together to navigate the moon. Although aimless, the tools become intuitive, and in your tinkering with them, you find yourself putting together the pieces of a puzzle, if even just by accident. You put together some type of space bridge, that somehow fails and leaves you to wander a galaxy of 1,000 stars to find clues to where you need to go next.
Space exploration is the gooey center of the game. This is where the game starts strong. Each star you explore has a moon with an entirely new set of puzzles based on the mechanics in the original moon. Many are random variations of these elements. You will see some varied environments, and new structures, and even cameo objects from other indie games, but inherently each new moon is just a play on the initial mechanics. Most of the puzzles on each moon are awarded with naming your star for everyone to see, only if someone else playing the game online has not beat you to it. Eventually you will start finding clues as where to go next, and this is the games climax, as it lures you with possibilities of an epic space voyage.
I found this initial search for clues to be very addicting, but eventually it becomes tiring and a chore. The award of naming your stars starts to wear off when you have named 30 or more of them and still have no idea where the clues are pointing you towards. The game literally points out the exact star you need to go to next, but in a sea of a thousand stars, this is like searching for a needle in a haystack. When I finally stumbled upon my final goal, it felt like I ended up there by chance, not by my own intuition. I was expecting some grand finale, but it was only a quick puzzle and no fireworks. This left me feeling I had wasted my time searching star after star after star.
For some reason though, I want to go back one more time. After each galaxy fills up to be 50% percent explored, a new one is randomly generated in a new season. Maybe I can do it better this time, or maybe I will find myself again completely lost just hoping I'm lucky pulling that needle out of the haystack.