Review: Island of Falling Stars

Island of Falling Stars

 As far as 3D creepypastas go, newcomer Goerge's marathon entry is pretty standard fare: it stars a defenceless Lyra recolour who wanders about her dreamscape and collects glowing rocks, only for things to get progressively worse as she does so. We've seen this before, of course, but does Island of Falling Stars live up to its comrades?

You know the drill.

 In this kind of game, atmosphere is everything, and Island of Falling Stars is a bit of a mixed bag there. The first couple minutes are silent aside from the sound of your hoofsteps, and as you collect stars the world will grow increasingly hostile until you are left alone to wander in the blowing debris with only the light of the fallen star to guide you. Problem is, none of them are very scary, since the game is fairly predictable and survival is more a matter of routine; once you figure it out the game is an absolute cakewalk.

 There was going to be an entire paragraph here dedicated to the hilariously cringeworthy ending, but I just couldn't do it justice (hint: it's exactly what you'd expect, except even more ridiculous).

That archway leads nowhere, unfortunately, and since it's somewhat out of the way many players won't even notice it.

 Even for a dream world, this one has a rather odd environment: it's littered with unusually interesting objects and setpieces, most of which serve no purpose whatsoever (aside from the simplistic maze, in which the second star lies). I'd say it's almost cruel to put a cave on the map and not allow the player to enter it: even with the magic barrier in place I kept instinctively checking back to see if it was possible to unlock it somehow, only to eventually wish that he had never included it in the first place. It's not bad for a dream, most of which tend to not make sense anyways, but if Goerge does move on to create other fangames then it'd probably be for the better if he not design their levels quite like this one.


 To be honest, Island of Falling Stars feels like a practice effort in which Goerge the enterprise Java developer tried out various things and slapped a game on top afterwards, and according to the development log that's exactly what he did. From that perspective it succeeds, but as a game it kind of falls flat and thus there's not really much of a reason to play it again afterwards, so for now I'm not really going to put a grade on it.

Note: if you're having trouble playing the game on Linux, try playing around with the file permissions.