[Spoilers] How the game ends, and how I feel about it.

[Super Bingdo Babo]

I beat the game, and I'm suprised more people are not discussing the ending. I guess I "get it", but it certainly feels like bad design. I'm going to spoil the ending now and say exactly why I feel it's a bad ending.. As a side note, I actually reached the ending screen before without knowing what it was, maybe by a bug or something.
You are brought to a screen with some credits, and are faced with a decision: Delete your save game and finally have closure, or keep all of your progress. Yes, the game literally forces you to delete your save in order to view the ending text. This is why this is terrible design: After rewarding you for your curiousity and persistence the entire journey, it's final moment is to punish you severely. I can understand why it makes sense with the storyline, but it's completely unneccesary and leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth...
The story arc did not match the mechanics of gameplay,
the two definitely felt like stitched together entities,
and the game as a package suffered for it.

..That said, Starseed Pilgrim was otherwise very refreshing and enjoyable.

In my honest opinion, I don't feel like anything is gained from not having the ending spoiled (another huge flaw for a game that otherwise absolutely must be spoiler free), so feel free to spoil yourself and see how you feel about it.

Disclaimer: I did otherwise really enjoy the game, and I have 23 hours logged into it!

[BringItOnHom3]

Yeah I was a little disappointing with the ending but...
making you delete your save file kind of emphasized the fact that you did complete everything. That I very much like because if you still have your save file you could be running around in the game looking for something that isn't there. It's kind of the lesser of two evils design wise.

[BON jOUR]

"the story arc did not match the mechanics of gameplay"

I couldn't agree more. If the game developer went further with the mechanics and did away with the islands and "mystery" completely this already great game would have been a tetris level classic.

[SirLiveAlot]

My save game deleted it's self without me seeing the final text because i quit on the screen where I had to make a choice. Super lame.

I completely agree with hidden and somehow even matched the hours into the game.

[droqen]

Hey, thank all of you for these thoughtful reflections on the end :)

Endings are tough on us all.

I think it's important to remember the choice you made.

[Super Bingdo Babo]

Hey, droqen! Really awsome that you're reaching out to the community and touching on these points. Brilliant game you have designed here.

Take everthing I say with a grain of salt, cause' really I'm just a spoutin nobody with no real game development under my wings, but I do have some thoughts that I'd think you'd like to ponder about!

What kind of emotion and experience did you hope to evoke from the ending of the game? There is a clearly invoked thought to the end, which I truly did feel, but I feel it's important to consider the whole range of possible emotions and experiences evoked from moment to moment in addition to the intended.

Again, great work, and keep up the great design!

[Pirateguybrush]

I've grasped the mechanics, but I don't feel like grinding through to the end. Could someone please completely spoil the story for me by laying out exactly how it ends?

[zomboy]

Originally posted by SirLiveAlot:

My save game deleted it's self without me seeing the final text because i quit on the screen where I had to make a choice. Super lame.

I did exactly the same thing just now. So you loose your save game file, without choosing to do so, and you miss the "ending". Why? Very lame indeed :/

[Citizen of the Nine Gardens]

Just finished, years later.

Thank you for the game. It was a real ride. I loved all the little poems. I loved how much emotional weight you packed into so few words, and how much the words and mechanics tied together to make the words more meaningful to the player.

Part of me was hoping to fix things- to win, and fix the sky, and have a real live background instead of empty white.... but I think I'll remember this ending more.

Losing something that you yourself have created is nice, is a fitting price.

I wish I could have found out WHY this happend, HOW the sky got broken... but then again, I don't think it was ever going to be that sort of game. I feel washed out, and tired, and finished, and it seems... cathartic. Really well done.

[droqen]

Thanks, Citizen :)

I totally forgot to respond to Bingdo, so here I am, six years later.

I've spent... probably those last six years (not as a result of your questions/comments here (that I can remember)) trying to design games from the outside -- thinking about the range of possible emotions, trying to design experiences that deliver a particular feeling in a thoughtful, measured way.

In practical terms, I think that's a mode of functioning that paralyzes me as a creator. Thinking about how everyone will react and designing around that huge possibility space is hard, it's a lot of work, it takes a lot of the magic out of the creative work I like(d) to do.

I'm not sure how this applies to other creators' processes.

~

I think Citizen's emotions were about as close to what I wanted to evoke as it gets, but I never wanted to evoke the same particular thing in every person's heart. I had a sort of idea of what the ending of Starseed Pilgrim felt like to me, and I made it deliver on that feeling, for myself.

If the artist isn't dead and you really care about what I was thinking when I made the game & its story -- keep in mind this doesn't mean this is my 'intended reading' so much as it is 'my own reading and a description of my process' -- here it is:

When I was developing Starseed Pilgrim, the block types were tied to emotions, and the Pilgrims were likewise tied to emotions or, I suppose, more vague 'feelings'. In some cases I'd thought about 'opposite' colours. Purple was 'WILL' as in willpower, I think Red might have been hate or fury or something? Red was Purple's enemy, because it would destroy it. Likewise, the sticky blocks are blue's enemy: Blue was 'ACT!' and olive was 'BALK'.

So the progression from there became that these blocks and pilgrims were all kind of separate bits of a person's mind. It was never about actual mental health or anything like that, but to my mind something bad had occurred and this person had in some ways voluntarily exiled these broken pieces of themself into the void (where you spend the entire game) either in order to fix the bad thing or to make amends.

The ending speaks to the fact that becoming whole and escaping the void is bad, at least to this person, who is unseen in the game. It's like, breaking into pieces was a way to escape the truth, and the player -- whoever the hell you are -- is putting the pieces together rebuilding this undesirable truth. So in the end it becomes a question of: what's more important? Keeping the peace in this world you made, or seeing the obviously dangerous and undesirable ending?

Sorry that quitting during that last screen prior to seeing the ending wipes your save file. That's not intentional as far as I can recall, and it really sucks :/ it will be fixed in the redone version of Starseed Pilgrim, whenever that comes.

[maximilio]

I finally reached the end and triggered it and encountered a bug. I appeared on the end island, but none of the blocks/garden I had built up was there; it had all been erased. And, the darkness wasn't even spreading out of the stone blocks. I was just stuck on the end island with nothing happening. So the end could be worse. Luckily, I was prepared and backed up my star.save before triggering it since I plan to screw around with the ending a bunch. I tried again and the end worked as normal.

Anyway, I think the end is fine. The way everything falls to the fate of darkness and the matching, sad, reflective music is an impactful and fitting end. Not saying it couldn't be improved, but I think what it's going for is right. It would make more sense if there was gray air (the stuff that stays behind when you break a block in the fleeting world challenges) in the overworld, so that the darkness could spread normally (instead of breaking its own rules to "jump" to other blocks, spreading itself chaotically). (In order for that to work, the game would necessarily have to require you to touch each island with blocks before being able to access that island's challenge.) I think the way it deletes your save and everything also makes sense thematically but may be too punishing for it as a game. Maybe you could "ascend" and there could still be some evidence or tracker that you've beaten the game (or beaten it multiple times even) when you start out anew.

[maximilio]

I just read the post from @droqen and that is really insightful into the development process. I like the idea of it being in someone's head and each color being a different emotion.

[Moon Mind]

The ending... Well... The way I see it, a bunch of the poems can be read as warning us away from it - 'we' or 'I' broke our heart, and would lend it to ourselves... something like this? It reminded me of vaguely Lovecraftian themes and the trope of banishing things we are not meant to know in order to preserve the ignorant world we have. Especially given the column we must ascend, accepting that "Everything" will be destroyed . There is ample opportunity to just fall back down, at any moment, rather than rise to dangerous places.

If I were to go into full art critic mode, in light of droqen's comments, I guess I'd say that each of the pilgrims strives to prove to themselves that they have the strength and willingness to face the piece of the truth that they have hidden from themselves, through the unlocked challenges in the three-key doors - and yet, when the whole truth is assembled, there's nothing left to do about it.

"The sky is crying"... So maybe, after confronting the truth we reassemble from the different parts of how we have suppressed it, we're crying now too. There are some things you can't do much else about but grieve - grieving can be an important part of finding a way to move on from them. Or so I'm given to understand. But it's overwhelming and something we often flee from because we don't like to be helpless - or in order to focus on things we feel we need to do.

Actually now that I put *that* together, if we see our undivided/united self (which all the pilgrims may be parts of) as the sky which is crying (dry its tears and know you're lying - resonates strongly with the block of wishes for ignorance), perhaps the truth we're running from is that we are dying? ... That is a classic of philosophy, and it's absolutely the kind of thing that could drive someone into denial.

Truth destroying comfortable illusions, and the pain of confronting trauma... are themes that 'fit' with that real well, whether or not droqen intended to delve into them deeply. I guess the way I see it, a lot of mental health issues are very much part of normal psychology, but - further, harder, out of proportion. Reflecting on the way the mind works casts light on how it works in relative illness as well as relative health.

I'd like to share this too: After I entered the void in the ending, I tried holding H, hoping it would take me... anywhere. Being unable to make the current situation fade away by "losing my way" anymore certainly says something. The end will not be denied.