Helping a fallen star find its way back home into the night sky provides some simple pleasures in Forgotten Key’s charming The Shine of a Star, a Samorost-like point-and-click lite adventure that’s heavy on atmosphere and style, but very light on puzzling and everything else. Unfortunately, as you explore surreal scenery and interact with a menagerie of odd creatures, the experience proves equally frustrating due to maddening hotspot searches made worse by darkly lit environments that go a long way toward dulling the shine of this very short game.

The opening is serene: Just the name of the game in glittering white and a glowing full moon against a velvety black night sky. A single star larger than the rest twinkles in the center. Click on it, and it falls to the earth below. Once on the ground, the celestial star is nowhere to be found. In its place is a single glowing humanoid figure. There’s nothing to indicate what you’ll need to do to help him (her? Do stars have a gender?), so there’s no choice but to immediately start exploring. The game provides an optional tutorial on how to interact with the environment, but since this is a thoroughly straightforward adventure, I suggest skipping this so as not to interfere with the mood set right at the start.

To move the star around you simply left-click where you want to go. It’s beautiful at first to watch the glowing protagonist saunter slowly across the dark hand-sketched backgrounds. However, this leisurely stroll soon becomes tedious, as there is no way to either run or fast travel, even to an exit. Every action requires sitting through this painful movement first. To add an item to your inventory, you’ll need to watch the star slowly, very slowly, walk toward the object first (which seems rather a strange speed for a star). If you want to talk with a character, you’ll have to wait yet again.

When I say talk, I really mean read thought bubbles. And when I say read thought bubbles, I really mean decipher images. There is no voice acting or even text to read, and part of the game’s challenge is determining what the pictograms in a character’s thought bubble require you to do. Usually the various creatures you encounter need you to help them out of a predicament or find something for them, though at times the message is more cryptic and not quite so obvious.

While there is no speech, there is a variety of entertaining sound work. As the game opens, you’ll hear the crash of the star as it falls to the earth and then the soothing trickle of a stream. The strange cast of characters you interact with make odd sounds like grunts and muffled screeches, highlighting the strange “otherness” of the world you find yourself in. The music begins as a simple refrain of piano and occasional xylophone melodies. However, as you travel further in the game, some twanging mouth harp-like bass vocals begin wavering in and out of the soundtrack.

In addition to a bizarre soundscape, the artwork presents a world that is extremely dark, rendered in thick outlines awash in browns, blacks, and greys. A normal-looking wood at the beginning of the game transitions into a land filled with odd details and strange inhabitants like squat stone trolls, giant mice, and a half-elephant/half-hedgehog type of creature walking upright. Sometimes the world seems large, filling the screen with giant trees, waterfalls, and caverns, but whenever you travel through a tunnel, the playable area zooms in to about a quarter of the screen’s size, adding to the slight claustrophobic feel that the oppressive darkness already creates.

Though you’re never in any real danger, there’s something sinister in this strange world, from the unusual brown, floating part-man/part-blob thing with a bright orange ear, a pig nose, and a bright droplet of drool dripping from his mouth to the splashes of what appears to be blood in a cavern. A gigantic frog-thing with a long thick tongue waits patiently underground and you’ll even see what appears to be a mushroom cloud from an atomic blast. Occasionally the game makes items you require easy to spot – a splash of color in an otherwise dreary backdrop beckons you to explore and interact. However, the color palette is very, very dark and the hotspots can be quite small, with no highlighter to help out. If you haven’t easily found an available object to interact with, you may find yourself spending the majority of your time within a scene sweeping the cursor looking for one that really doesn’t want to be found.

When you do find rare hotspots such as twigs and cobwebs within the largely non-interactive screens, you can either manipulate them in the environment or put them in inventory. You’ll never carry too many items at once, nor have far to travel to use them, so the inventory puzzles aren’t very difficult. You can combine items, but with so few objects to collect even these complications aren’t that tricky. Aside from exploring, gathering inventory, and figuring out what these strange earth-bound creatures need from you, you’ll encounter a grand total of two logic puzzles in the game, and though I found them rather easy, there are no hints or skips if you get stuck. These consist of a Lights Out puzzle on rows of glowing mushrooms and a constellation pattern challenge.

But the puzzles really aren’t the point of The Shine of a Star. This feels much more like a short tone poem – an experiment in creating a surreal and soothing mood. There is no real story to follow, but perhaps that’s the idea. You’ll find yourself just as bewildered as a star that has fallen from the heavens and found itself alone in a dream-like world that borders on a nightmare. While you probably won’t spend more than an hour stranded in this strange land, and a bit too much of that involves frustrating screen sweeping for hidden hotspots, the surreal ambience does shine through amidst all the darkness on occasion, though hoping for anything more would just be wishful thinking.