Quirky puzzle action
Starseed Pilgrim is starts out being quite obscure with its rules, and the process of discovering them (without outside help) is both frustrating and rewarding. I should note here that discussion about the game has grossly overstated the way that reading about the game before playing it will ruin your experience. ALL good games are better if you discover what's in the game from inside the game, rather than from outside of it. Starseed Pilgrim isn't special in this regard. It's just got weird rules. Pretty much all puzzle games do. It's the weird miscellaneous genre. Anyway...
Sooner or later you find that randomness holds significant sway in this world, and accumulating resources increases your chances of success. So after you get a grasp of the initially mysterious mechanics, luck and grinding play a large role.
The game's structure is an interesting effort toward combining a system of 'endless' randomly-generated puzzle-action (like Tetris, Panel de Pon, and Puyo Puyo) with crafted puzzle-platformer challenges (like Loderunner, Lup Salad, or Braid). This mixture could be improved by aiming more toward the side of crafted stages.
It could do with more of a sense of progression. The unchanging atmosphere is austere, thanks to minimal low-res pixel art graphics, and ambient music with chords as sound effects. There are rhymes written in the background of the hub world, which tell a whimsical tale about an environmental space disaster or something.
The game's strength is in that feeling of mastery through discovery as you uncover its rules. I recommend it for that, despite the weak payoff of optimising and employing your grinding strategy.
