Originally posted December 11th 2015 on the Seafoam Gaming

Thanks to JMJ Interactive for the review code.

Title: Star Sky

System: Wii U (eShop)

Price: $4.00

Release date: 9/10/2015

The main game/story

In this interactive adventure, you take control of a boy in search of his own destiny and whatnot. It’s really not a “Game” in the sense that there’s no objective, except to just go on a walk, enjoy the scenery and take what life throws at you.

When similar titles have been released on digital stores in the past, it caused some folks to believe that these atmospheric titles don’t deserve to exist solely for the reason of being drastically different. With this being the first Wii U eShop game of its kind, does Star Sky manage to make for an engaging change of pace, and one that takes the idea of an atmospheric experience to a whole new level?

Graphics

An incredibly simplistic, silhouette art style set on a night sky is all you’ll see in this game. It doesn’t look bad, but it doesn’t look too impressive, either. There are some events and moments that look gorgeous on your TV screen, but for the majority of the experience it’s a calm blue sky that’ll be your main point of focus.

Music and Sound:

Outside of a sound effect that plays whenever a special event is about to take place, you’ll pretty much be listening to nothing but ambience. For a game like this, and considering the setting of which the game takes place in, it works rather decently for the most part, but the experience will be greatly enhanced if you use headphones to immerse yourself, which is a really neat advantage to having this playable on the gamepad.

Gameplay

As mentioned in the intro, (along with the official eShop description) Star Sky really can’t be classified as a game. With the main goal being to simply get to the end, walking or running at the right moment to trigger events that will affect the ending, you really can’t do much besides relax and take your time.

With eighteen different events in total, you won’t be able to complete them all in one playthrough, encouraging replay value. This sounds like a great idea in theory, but unfortunately it ends up feeling rather repetitive after a while. You’d think that the ideal solution to that issue would be to simply put it down and play it another night to relax before going to bed, right? Well, that may work for a while, but eventually you’ll come across every major event in the game, essentially meaning that sooner or later you’ll run out of new things to experience, making the game lose its appeal rather quickly.

Conclusion

Out of all the games that I’ve reviewed this year, Star Sky was by far the most difficult for me to explain, mainly because it’s not meant to be your average game, with its intention being to relax you with an atmospheric experience. Unfortunately, the game will eventually lose its appeal over the course of multiple playthroughs, no matter how hard you try to make the experience last. It has a great idea with nearly everything else set in place to make something truly relaxing, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired, and you’ll likely find yourselves forgetting about this game after playing through it for a few nights. No matter how hard I tried, Star Sky just wouldn’t click with me, which is a shame as this game definitely had the potential to be the first of its kind on the Wii U eShop!

At the current price of $4 on the Wii U eShop, Star Sky is not worth spending your money on, even if you were hoping for an atmospheric game to relax with, when you could easily buy a puzzle game from the eShop for a lot less. However if this title does go on sale and it happens to be priced at around $1.50 or so, then it wouldn’t hurt that much to pick it up and have a nice night to relax. I give Star Sky a 3 out of 10, and can only recommend this title for folks after a price drop, and if they are a big fan of atmospheric games regardless of their replay value.