Morningstar: Descent to Deadrock

[h2]Cleverly presented, slightly undercooked[/h2] Morningstar: Descent to Deadrock is a point-and-click adventure, but not the traditional sort where you spend half your life watching someone walk from the left side of the screen to the right, realise you forgot something, and send them back again. Instead, most locations are essentially still images - and I rather like that. It gives the game a slight hidden-object-game feel without actually becoming one. There are a few animations, but they don't get in the way. Even if the limited animation was originally a cost-saving decision, it was a [i]good[/i] cost-saving decision. One doesn't get to say that terribly often. The interface helps enormously. Sweeping the mouse across a scene activates a sort of scanner that highlights points of interest, neatly breaking up the usual hidden-object logic of staring suspiciously at every pixel until something admits to being interactive. The first-person perspective also allows Powell to comment on things through little conversations with himself, while the wounded captain serves as an in-world hint system who can point you in the right direction. Better still, the occasional dry verbal nudges between the two give the game some welcome humour. The puzzles are the weaker part. Most are fairly straightforward and rarely require much lateral thinking until the final stretch, and the whole adventure is rather short. There is also some magnificently convenient engineering going on. Apparently human technology can be inserted into broken alien machinery when required. Naturally. I look forward to repairing my next toaster with components from a crashed Klingon battlecruiser. The story likewise stops just when it feels as though it ought to start answering the larger questions it has raised. Perhaps that ambiguity was intentional. Perhaps the resolution simply wasn't part of the minimum viable product (MVP) when someone suddenly announced that it was publishing day. In that case, Morningstar may have achieved the rarer [i]Minimum Marketable Product[/i] (MMP). There isn't quite enough depth here, and the plot could easily have supported considerably more development. Still, the unusual presentation, very effective interface and pleasantly understated exchanges between the protagonists make the journey worthwhile. [b]Thumbs up[/b] - just don't expect Deadrock to surrender all its secrets before the credits do.