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Spoilers!

~ Estimated Reading Time: 5 min ~

They made a game for the types that get a little too into moon: Remix RPG Adventure flavor text, u know i had to show up
I did hold some initial reprehension; the usage of procedural generation can often conflict with personality-driven titles. My favourite games about collecting things share a strong sense of spacial integrity - the lifting of a rock to find a lizard gently placed with designerly intent. At the end of the day, I spent a lot more time having cute art handed to me rather than searched for, but I think it went beyond my expectations of it because it knows its scale.

And for its shape, it is an elegant and pretty little thing - taking advantage of its structure in order to make a gorgeous aesthetic out of the imperfections in its gradients. There's no short of new adventures for the artist behind this as well - pivoting from Franken's winning structure of beautifully hand-picked stolen music from mecha anime, a lot of original music was actually written for this one. And despite that, it is a shift with immediately captivating reward: landing on this gorgeous ambient sound, with just enough analog touches to make it feel warm. Each receptive strum movingly hand-made. With so much artificiality in the proc-gen landscape, it is a refreshingly human experience.

While Franken was more a distillation of the humour and strange atmosphere that could come out of poorly translated adventure games, Formless Star is evoking the same material's whimsy.
It's still punctuated with Splendidland's off-beat comedy; lots of strange phonetic gags in a game made solely of text, that you might not notice until you start stuttering as you try to read a name aloud. It pulls from those Pokedex entries you'd remember as a kid, passively thinking for hours about their strange implications. As a kid, I was captured by that mixture of abstract with sudden scientific language. But here, there's a poetic purpose to those word-choices as well.

There's a warm sentimentality to all of the planet's 'animals'. Each description contextualizes their design in romanticist whimsy - you begin to get a clear sense of its author's sensibilities through its emotionally-driven bits. These are often expressed as gags - gags that are as cute as they are stupid - but there's no denying the sense of love for aimlessness, for moving at your own pace, carries through each and every sentence. Formless Star is constantly expressing its adoration for vagueness, through exactly the archetype of game that inspires us to want to see something in its abstract. When in that mindset, I found it easy to get a bit emotional over the general tone of its words - and the artistic logic of a world that biologically wanders through fragments constantly shifting. One like Glaseer is even able to carry the bitter-sweetness to the lack of control felt in that lifestyle - and it still connects to a silly animation.

Even my first doubts soothed away with time, as I realized there genuinely are a good bit of secrets in this. It impressed me when I realized the two NPCs have different things to say in every biome, and that little hints of their larger personality you can see within. If I made a game like this, I would also write a bunch of AVGN-style riffs on my creatures. I watched a friend play this shortly after my own playthrough, and realized how ironically my bad luck to not get most of the animals in a single reset lead me to exploring a lot more minor details, seeing a lot more stray lines. In the end, it did what I can always hope from a game like this - that I can easily imagine how much more I missed.

The overt author-surrogate dialogue near the end is very sweet - Splendidland well understands the weight of putting something these amorphous and potentially short experiences into the world.
Formless Star's characters exist from the perspective of players, and use the language of consumption. They tell you that you've seen and done everything in a world that's technically infinite, choosing not to regard the potential of experiences to come from nothing. These small things that we play, learn from, feel inspired from, but can often so easily fade out of our minds as to not even remember what we're being inspired by. The landscape of influences in our brain slowly falling below the surface means that even if we don't realize how much it's effected us, we need to respect each piece of art's place in helping us grow.
But it of course deliberates further from the artist's perspective; should we make art for ourselves, if its memories in others are so impermanent? The pain that not all of our love-labour will go seen by every single visitor? It gives itself a bit of both doubt and praise to itself for being able to make things regardless of these difficult thoughts, and I think it deserves to. This is about as inspiring as I could possibly imagine something of its shape could be, and it deserves the praise for existing, no matter in what size.