STARSEEKER: Astroneer Expeditions is a confusing game. The gameplay and the mechanics are simple, but many will struggle to find meaning in its repetitive nature. Starseeker isn’t a hollow experience, but it certainly struggles to keep players engaged.
Starseeker is a multiplayer extraction survival game where players embark on short missions to the surface of an alien planet. Unlike more traditional games within the extraction genre, which are usually driven by inter-player conflict and combat, Starseeker focuses on other aspects. Almost every mission involves gathering resources, crafting specific items or navigating to an indicated location to complete a number of tasks. What makes Starseeker stick out within the genre is its near-lack of combat, though it does exist in a simple, rarely practiced form.
Conflict at large isn’t something Starseeker is interested in, combat or otherwise. The game builds itself on the loop of taking quests, dropping down to the planet for 20 minutes to mine or search for old wrecked spaceships, then going back to base to repeat it all over again. This formula works well for other games, but Starseeker struggles to find a way to make this continued effort feel meaningful. Players will be met with minimal resistance, and most tasks are fairly easy. The only true conflict the game presents is time itself. Some tasks simply take a lot of time. Crafting requires a lot of resources, and some missions’ goals are solely to gather a lot of something rare. These are not challenges, but roadblocks — only stop-gaps until the next mission. Unfortunately, the next mission will always be about the same.
Variety is not the strong suit of Starseeker. The story doesn’t help much in this regard either, as it’s restricted to skippable text box prefaces for missions. What modicum of story does exist is simple and not particularly memorable. Without much motivation to be found in the narrative, Starseeker has no way of incentivizing players to engage other than their own desire to play. Within the first few hours of gameplay, you will have likely seen most of what the game has to offer. Of course, this comes with a grain of salt, considering the game is still in early access. There may be more down the line, but as of now, there isn’t much to experience.
What there is to experience, however, is not bad by itself. Despite being repetitive, it’s easy to feel like you are making progress. As new blueprints unlock and you acquire new tools and weapons, the game ceases to feel so stagnant. The exploration is also a high point, as environments are often fascinating and colorful, with unique options for traversal such as slides made of mud or underground tunnels that weave through the planet. These moments of discovery and playful wonder are Starseeker’s best, and they help make monotonous tasks feel less mundane.
That is truly the game’s strength: the beauty in the mundane. There is nothing special about the tasks or how one accomplishes them, but to be brought back time and time again to somewhere fantastic reminds you of how beautiful simple things can be. If you didn’t have to run back and forth collecting scrap and compound, you’d never realize that everything great about the game had been around you the whole time, since the second you landed on the planet. This doesn’t make the game any more fun, but it does make the effort seem more meaningful. Whether working through similar tasks over and over is worth that realization is up to the individual, but it is important to recognize where the game can succeed, even if it is in the subtext.
Starseeker is not a game for everyone. Most of the player’s satisfaction will come from taking joy in little moments, sometimes shared with others. What is offered is a simple game with a cycle of gameplay just engaging enough to keep going, but not interesting enough to speak for itself. Starseeker is beautiful, and there is some sort of fun to be had if you go looking, but it certainly won’t help you find it. If you like alien landscapes with great views and are willing to stop to watch every sunset, then Starseeker is a game that may just have enough for you to put up with drab gameplay.
Senior Arts Editor Hudsen Mazurek can be reached at hudsen@umich.edu.
