Inside a Star-Filled Sky is the 8th game by Jason Rohrer. On his website, it’s described as: “An infinite, recursive, tactical shooter for one player.”

This is, pound for pound, a fairly simple game. Upon running the game, the player is dumped into the action with nearly no instruction. While I truly appreciate Mr. Rohrer’s method of forgoing irritating tutorials (which are often unnecessary anyway), this guide is a little piece of documented introspection on what this game is and how to have fun with it.

Clean out levels. Go somewhere. Clean out that too.

Inside a Star-Filled Sky has no preset objective. This is a mechanic which, to some, means total freedom whereas others see this as aimless gameplay. Advantages play tends to point the player towards finding the arrow in each level to progress up the chain, however this is no real reward for doing that as opposed to entering into every and anything that catches the players fancy. While there may not be an end game to work towards, don’t confuse the concept of “no objective” with “no point”.

Personally, I enjoy finding the arrows in each level to back out a floor. This makes it feel a little like Gauntlet simplified. That’s just my taste though.

The player is also given the opportunity to design a flag which can be left in certain areas. This mechanic feels like tagging the walls of the infinite. The flags you find can be entered along with everything else, thus creating one more path you can take. On the other hand, in the world’s infinite nature, there is little hope of ever seeing the flags you leave behind again.

Everywhere you go, everything you see contains a level. Go explore.

Each level has several arrow tiles which take you upwards to the next level. Using shift to enter anything causes you to travel downward deeper. Levels appear to be constant to some extent. So if you travel downward a couple levels, and then out again, you will see the same levels going out as you did going in. I don’t know to what extent this is true.

• Not everything should be random.
  
• Sound effects are important.
  
• Self-determined goals are nifty.
  
• The player doesn’t always need to play a tutorial.

I put this information in a separate guide, but here it is again for completeness sake.
The ongoing nature of Inside a Star Filled Sky is maintained by a simple bookmark file within the games native directory. If you find yourself stuck or simply wish to delete your saved game and start over, locate this file:

"bookmark.ini"

or

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\InsideAStarFilledSky\settings\bookmark.ini"

The developer programed this game so that every single keystroke and every frame of every play through would be locally recorded in a small file. This way, if there was ever a massive error, he could watch what happened by examining the file somehow. The “Type something for posterity” mechanic was introduced so that the player could communicate with the dev. While playing, you could type what was on your mind or what you were trying to do and he would see it on the screen while watching the replay.

This was intended for debug purposes only. It serves no other purpose for the player.

Jason Rohrer’s new game “The Castle Doctrine” is equipped with the exact same mechanic.

Developer Jason Rohrer’s Website:

http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-rohrer/