Aurora Nights is an entertaining educational game for learning to identify the constellations.
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I played Aurora Nights tonight while high. It’s a small tool for learning constellations, not very intricate or engaging, and totalling about 45 minutes in length. The style is simple, and the scale is small. Still, it has a nice little aesthetic going - one that must have drawn me in more than I’d noticed, because, embarrassingly, I teared up while playing.
Mostly it’s just that when I think about space for too long, I feel moved enough to cry. Have you ever considered how humans have always seen the same stars? Our distant relatives are separated from us by thousands of years, but it doesn’t matter. Past, present, and future - we all share that same lovely connection. That's all I'm saying.
Anyways. This has been near the top of my Steam account for five years. I mastered it way back in March of 2017, within 48 minutes, and it’s been collecting dust ever since.
Until tonight. Tonight, I decided that it was high time to dust it off, replay it, and stamp it with the coveted ‘Mastered’ and reviewed status. All of the games I own are in line to receive this attention, so why not take a small break to write about something easy and short?
Well, Aurora Nights is exactly what it says on the tin. You connect-the-dots with some constellations, pretend you’ll memorize them, and learn some cool astronomy facts. It’s honestly not even the best version of what it could be, but it’s a charming enough little experience.
Interestingly, it’s not an experience you can find anymore. It’s been unlisted from the Steam store, and isn’t available anywhere else from what I can tell. I only have access because I already owned it - which means I could be the only person to ever write a review for Aurora Nights on this site. Not a particularly coveted honor, but an interesting tidbit nonetheless.
Visuals: 2/5
Sound: 1.5/5
Gameplay: 2/5
Education: 2/5
Overall game score: 2/5 [1.9/5]
Visuals:
Aurora Nights’ visuals are exceedingly simple, but they’re adequate. I find the night sky to be such a nice aesthetic that even the most plain version of it is pleasing to me. The star map - which acts as a central hub, displaying all of the constellations you’ve finished - is very pretty as well.
Unfortunately, the game does lack an important visual element through artistic embodiments of the constellations. The art that these star configurations represent - in both a physical sense, as well as a mythological and historical one - are one of their most important values. The latter has some shallow representation through the main menu’s encyclopedia, but the former has no such luck.
An interactive constellation atlas should definitely provide some sort of depiction of this facet of the constellations’ histories. For example, you could find stock images of their artistic portrayals and put these in the encyclopedia along with the facts you already earn. This would’ve been a great reward for earning three stars on the star puzzles.
Still, there IS something cool about making the connections between the stars yourself, deciphering how each fits what it’s supposed to represent.
Overall, 2/5.
Sound:
There is a delightfully soothing ambient track, featuring acoustic guitar, that plays over the star map. Unfortunately, this is abruptly cut off whenever you click on a puzzle. Replacing it are nature noises - crickets, wind, and the like - until you return once again to the map. I think that the nature noises themselves are a good idea, bringing their own level of calm to the experience, but it would’ve been made a lot better if the track continued to play in the background.
Overall, 1.5/5.
Gameplay:
Like I’ve mentioned, Aurora Nights is pretty much entirely made up of playing connect-the-dots with constellations. If you’d like to, you can earn up to three stars on each puzzle by completing them two more times without mistakenly clicking on the increasing number of ‘wrong’ stars. This takes a lot of clicking, even if you don’t make any errors, and it’s more annoying than anything else.
More interesting to me is that by earning stars, you unlock facts about each of these featured constellations within the main menu’s encyclopedia. This is probably the best idea in the game; there’s an incentive to earn all of them, simply because it’s cool to learn about astronomy.
Sadly, there’s not much else to say. There’s not a lot of ‘fun’ to be had with Aurora Nights. It’s an educational tool. If you like learning about space, you might enjoy the experience (that is, if you don’t know enough to catch the information that I’m sure the game lacks.) I personally believe that educational knowledge like this can easily be combined with more intriguing gameplay, and that doing so might even make it more digestible; but I also understand that this version is probably more interested in simply teaching its trade. To that extent, I appreciate that it's interactive at all.
Overall, 2/5
Education:
If I’m being honest, I don’t know much about astronomy, even though I’ve always found the topic fascinating. Personally, I found out a lot of interesting stuff that I didn’t know on the subject through Aurora Nights. But, conversely, it’s obvious that the game lacks a lot of the facts and figures that would be included in better resources and star maps. Even though the project was obviously small-scale, I can’t overlook that you could simply go on Google and find something of higher quality that has more information to offer.
Overall, 2/5.
Overall game score: 2/5 [1.9/5]. I can check this one off the list now. I quite enjoyed giving it a look again, even if it was pretty forgettable. Space is simply such a fascinating topic that even something as bare-bones as Aurora Nights can catch my attention. But being high helps, I suppose.
Mostly it’s just that when I think about space for too long, I feel moved enough to cry. Have you ever considered how humans have always seen the same stars? Our distant relatives are separated from us by thousands of years, but it doesn’t matter. Past, present, and future - we all share that same lovely connection. That's all I'm saying.
Anyways. This has been near the top of my Steam account for five years. I mastered it way back in March of 2017, within 48 minutes, and it’s been collecting dust ever since.
Until tonight. Tonight, I decided that it was high time to dust it off, replay it, and stamp it with the coveted ‘Mastered’ and reviewed status. All of the games I own are in line to receive this attention, so why not take a small break to write about something easy and short?
Well, Aurora Nights is exactly what it says on the tin. You connect-the-dots with some constellations, pretend you’ll memorize them, and learn some cool astronomy facts. It’s honestly not even the best version of what it could be, but it’s a charming enough little experience.
Interestingly, it’s not an experience you can find anymore. It’s been unlisted from the Steam store, and isn’t available anywhere else from what I can tell. I only have access because I already owned it - which means I could be the only person to ever write a review for Aurora Nights on this site. Not a particularly coveted honor, but an interesting tidbit nonetheless.
Visuals: 2/5
Sound: 1.5/5
Gameplay: 2/5
Education: 2/5
Overall game score: 2/5 [1.9/5]
Visuals:
Aurora Nights’ visuals are exceedingly simple, but they’re adequate. I find the night sky to be such a nice aesthetic that even the most plain version of it is pleasing to me. The star map - which acts as a central hub, displaying all of the constellations you’ve finished - is very pretty as well.
Unfortunately, the game does lack an important visual element through artistic embodiments of the constellations. The art that these star configurations represent - in both a physical sense, as well as a mythological and historical one - are one of their most important values. The latter has some shallow representation through the main menu’s encyclopedia, but the former has no such luck.
An interactive constellation atlas should definitely provide some sort of depiction of this facet of the constellations’ histories. For example, you could find stock images of their artistic portrayals and put these in the encyclopedia along with the facts you already earn. This would’ve been a great reward for earning three stars on the star puzzles.
Still, there IS something cool about making the connections between the stars yourself, deciphering how each fits what it’s supposed to represent.
Overall, 2/5.
Sound:
There is a delightfully soothing ambient track, featuring acoustic guitar, that plays over the star map. Unfortunately, this is abruptly cut off whenever you click on a puzzle. Replacing it are nature noises - crickets, wind, and the like - until you return once again to the map. I think that the nature noises themselves are a good idea, bringing their own level of calm to the experience, but it would’ve been made a lot better if the track continued to play in the background.
Overall, 1.5/5.
Gameplay:
Like I’ve mentioned, Aurora Nights is pretty much entirely made up of playing connect-the-dots with constellations. If you’d like to, you can earn up to three stars on each puzzle by completing them two more times without mistakenly clicking on the increasing number of ‘wrong’ stars. This takes a lot of clicking, even if you don’t make any errors, and it’s more annoying than anything else.
More interesting to me is that by earning stars, you unlock facts about each of these featured constellations within the main menu’s encyclopedia. This is probably the best idea in the game; there’s an incentive to earn all of them, simply because it’s cool to learn about astronomy.
Sadly, there’s not much else to say. There’s not a lot of ‘fun’ to be had with Aurora Nights. It’s an educational tool. If you like learning about space, you might enjoy the experience (that is, if you don’t know enough to catch the information that I’m sure the game lacks.) I personally believe that educational knowledge like this can easily be combined with more intriguing gameplay, and that doing so might even make it more digestible; but I also understand that this version is probably more interested in simply teaching its trade. To that extent, I appreciate that it's interactive at all.
Overall, 2/5
Education:
If I’m being honest, I don’t know much about astronomy, even though I’ve always found the topic fascinating. Personally, I found out a lot of interesting stuff that I didn’t know on the subject through Aurora Nights. But, conversely, it’s obvious that the game lacks a lot of the facts and figures that would be included in better resources and star maps. Even though the project was obviously small-scale, I can’t overlook that you could simply go on Google and find something of higher quality that has more information to offer.
Overall, 2/5.
Overall game score: 2/5 [1.9/5]. I can check this one off the list now. I quite enjoyed giving it a look again, even if it was pretty forgettable. Space is simply such a fascinating topic that even something as bare-bones as Aurora Nights can catch my attention. But being high helps, I suppose.