Quick Review: Luna's Wandering Stars

A lot of puzzle games out there love to start the player with a base concept, then switch things around and throw curveballs to surprise us. It's even more applicable here, as curveballs and loops are the name of the game in Luna’s Wandering Stars.

Starting simple, like any good puzzle game ought to do.

Developed and published by Serenity Forge, and released on May 15th, 2015, Luna's Wandering Stars is a game about using orbital mechanics to your advantage. Every time, you’re controlling a moon floating around or near a planet. Smaller asteroids are also floating around, and you collect them to fill up a gauge – the level is completed when the gauge is full. Each level has three golden asteroids, and catching all three in a level earns you a gold crown on that level.

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeee~

From the Sun outwards, thus starting from Mercury, each planet of our Solar System has 15 levels, and a new gimmick is introduced in each set. The Mercury set has the basic orbital mechanics involving the moon. The Venus set shoves a rocket up your moon’s butt, allowing you to control its trajectory with short blasts – and thus, you have to maneuver your floating rock around until you’ve filled the gauge. The Earth set has the moon always spin around the planet, but you can control the Earth’s gravity and, thus, affect the moon’s trajectory. Be careful of the destructive debris floating by, however. The Mars levels are especially fun; your moon has a gun now, but you must use it to kill the deadly obstacles (May they be the murderous, red-tinted asteroids, or the purple asteroids that slow down your moon).

Is anyone going to address that the Moon is basically
absorbing asteroids to make itself stronger?

And so on: In the Jupiter levels, you are setting up redirects which will send the moon in the direction you’ve set, allowing you to collect the golden asteroids. Careful, though – the redirects last only 5 seconds, oh and also, there’s a lot of death traps in every area. The moon orbiting Saturn can change its density – go from tiny to huge, and either avoid or catch everything on the way; this also has an effect on the moon’s orbit and trajectory. And so on, and so forth, all the way to the ninth planet. All very creative puzzle ideas making use of the game’s central gameplay mechanics, with slight tweaks.

Ooof... icollecting those golds will be tough.

Gravity is my harshest mistress.

Also, it’s beautiful to look at. Oh, it’s so, so nice. The music’s pretty good as well. The difficulty, on the other hand, can bounce around quite a bit – after one tutorial level, you’re thrown into more challenges that can be either pretty easy – or pretty damn tough. And if you aim for the golden asteroids… oh boy, are you in for a fun time.

I didn’t finish the game, but I like the creativity behind it. I felt it was a fun experience. The concept is nice: A basic puzzle, followed by eight new takes on the basic puzzle with new gameplay mechanics. Fifteen levels each, that’s quite a lot. I don’t think there’s much else to say: It's good. If you’re interested, you can get it for roughly 10$.