thomas ohashi / blog / Cool Game: Formless Star

Cool Game: Formless Star

Sunday, June 1st, 2025

Hot on the heels of my Franken recommendation is a new game by Splendidland, Formless Star, a short and lovely JRPG style game taking pretty direct inspiration from the relatively recently localized PlayStation game Moon (which is also great).

You play as a member of a crew that was hired by a space cartographer to document an endlessly changing planet by finding and identifying all of the animals that live there. The way you do this is by wandering around the map through its various biomes and interacting with anything interesting. If you get stuck or run out of places to look you can teleport back to your ship and go inside. When you go back outside the planet will have reformed itself.

Each area looks incredible and you can easily clear obstacles or build bridges, so wandering around is a fun and relaxing experience.

Screenshot from Formless Star: The player character, who has an apple-like head, stands in the middle of the screen surrounded by fruit and gummy land tiles, some flower and grass land tiles, and some water tiles

The animal designs and their interactions are all pretty great. I don’t want to spoil much so I’m only going to share a screenshot of #1.

Screenshot from Formless Star: The player stands next to a long necked quadruped animal with white and red stripes and a head shaped like the top of a lighthouse. There is a UI encyclopedia menu that shows the animal on a grid and a text entry that reads: #01: Lighthorse - Stands at the coastline to act as a beacon, however it has difficulty discerning a puddle from an ocean. Said to be proud of its red stripes.

The writing is really nice and thoughtful too. I’m not going to go as far as to say this game is good for your mental health because I’m not a doctor, but it might be, so do yourself a favor and try it out.