Derelict Star: Inertia and Intrigue

21 Sep 2026

I rolled credits on Derelict Star this week. Here is a smattering of thoughts. There are some light spoilers, so I’d recommend playing the game first. It’s exceptional, both incredible and one of a kind.

Derelict Star is interested in inertia. It takes time to build speed, and once you’ve got enough of it you enter a “running” state where you can jump higher and farther than usual. Bump into a wall or stop on the ground and you’ll lose your momentum.

It’s also interested in large stretches of space. Although each screen is discrete, the game is structured more like an open world than a single screen platformer. Some platforming challenges span many screens, and it’s not always clear where you should be going.

In single screen platformers, reading levels has a puzzle-like quality. All of the information is there, and you need to divine some insight from it. There’s a small brain teaser before the rush of execution.

Reading the challenges in Derelict Star is different. You’re often performing long gestures that span several screens, simultaneously maintaining your momentum, searching for information, and picturing some route you could take. You are hunting, not for secret rewards but for relationships between the spaces. It lends a gravitas to the world that I haven’t experienced before. Literally any pixel could be important. Is this long walk actually a runway for a big jump? Does this pit of spikes conceal a hidden passage? Does this empty screen become traversable once I’m familiar with the surrounding screens? You sit with the space and study it, and eventually it speaks to you in the voice of the designer.

Here’s a small example. When I first walked through these towers they seemed like set dressing. It was only after an hour of experimentation that I was able to resolve them into this swirling, zigzagging movement that had been there the whole time.

(I know the arrows seem like they’re betraying my point, but imo they give away like 1% of the complexity of the route lol).

While playing Derelict Star I developed strange new sensitivities to difficulty.

It took me ~13 hours to collect one of the qbits, an optional platforming challenge that takes 30 seconds to clear on a successful attempt. In the first few hours I developed techniques to get past each part of the challenge, but some of them felt too inconsistent. I’d only be able to land them one time in ten whereas I could land the others every second try. Focusing on these inconsistent parts of my route invariably uncovered different, more consistent techniques. From lining up pixels, to jumping from a complete stand still, to feathering the hover button. That is to say that I never felt forsaken in those 13 hours. I was always arriving at new insights. For a 30 second stretch of level to maintain that depth of expression for so long was miraculous.

Another example was in a mazy section on the way to one of the power cells. I was frustrated because I’d gotten lost and the maze felt arbitrary. But then I realised that I was getting closer and closer to the power cell as the platforming was becoming more difficult. By following that heuristic I arrived at the power cell pretty quickly. The game had created a new sense for me, a kind of difficulty compass, by which I could navigate the world. I felt like a pigeon that always knows which way is north. It was surreal.

The power cells afford the game brilliant pacing. The road to a power cell is riddled with checkpoints. You are exploring and overcoming challenges, and making progress at a steady clip. Once you collect a power cell you need to return it to the ship in a single attempt, otherwise you spawn back at the power cell’s original location. In practice this means returning through the same space in the opposite direction with heightened stakes.

The game explores this oscillation between frequent and infrequent checkpoints to great effect. Power cells lower down on the map offer the quick rush of discovery followed by a heart pounding climb, where any mistake sends you to the bottom. Higher power cells invert the formula, an arduous climb followed by the euphoria of gravity crashing you straight back to your ship. The horizontal areas offer contrast too, exploring all the twists you can put on a space by moving through it backwards.

It’s a form of exploration that is innately dramatic. By passing through the spaces twice you experience setup and payoff, call and response, tension and release. I would not be surprised (or disappointed) to see this style of exploration become a staple of open world games.

My time with this game was spent honing my expertise with its movement and spatial language. Reaching the end was a bittersweet thing. I had all these skills, and the world of Derelict Star no longer needed them.

My adult life has been spent getting good at the computer. Recently I’ve been feeling that the world might not need people like that for much longer. Its a big scary feeling, and it casts a big scary shadow on my life. I’m grateful to Derelict Star for offering me a bite-sized portion of that feeling. Its not so scary when you can see it all at once.