Project Hail Mary: Journey Among The Stars Review - A Squandered Star

When Project Hail Mary: Journey Among the Stars was announced in April, I was pretty stoked.

I own a signed copy of The Martian, and I'd breezed through the Project Hail Mary novel in just a few days. I love science fiction, and Andy Weir's brand of irreverent and easy-to-read prose makes his novels (and their film adaptations) entertaining, fun, and surprisingly emotionally affecting.

It's disappointing then, that Project Hail Mary: Journey Among the Stars, an immersive mixed reality experience that tells a new tie-in story in Ryland Grace and Rocky's planet-saving journey, is boring, janky, and kind of pointless.

I don't want to spoil the story of the novel, film, or game, but to touch on it briefly: in Project Hail Mary: Journey Among the Stars, you play as Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling's character in the film), an unlikely astronaut on a mission to save Earth and Erid, the homeworld of his new friend (and alien) Rocky.

The mixed reality experience tells a previously untold chapter of the story, a pivotal voyage in which Rocky and Grace must work together to keep their starship Hail Mary intact as they bring a world-saving cargo to Erid's star, 40 Eridani A.

I'm intentionally omitting details from both the novel and Journey Among the Stars. What's important to know is that this game or experience had an opportunity to add to what has been one of the best recent examples of relationship-based science fiction. The friendship between Rocky and Ryland is deeply engaging and affecting. In Journey Among the Stars, it's not.

Die hard fans of the novel or film will find something here to enjoy. It's nice to hear Rocky's voice and to interact with him in mixed reality. But there's nothing that adds to the cumulative enjoyment of Weir's fiction.

Part of the reason the story fails to launch is because it's just not very dynamic. But another reason is that the rest of the experience casts a long shadow, because the core gameplay of Journey Among the Stars is not very interesting, fun, or exciting. Throughout your journey, the ship is constantly breaking down, and your job is to fix it with Rocky's help. That's classic Weir, to be fair, and reading or watching it is fun. Playing it, not so much.

Fuses blow and must be swapped. USB sticks have gone missing. Electrical panels short circuit and fail. Atmospheric chambers spring leaks. You'll solve these problems by picking things up and putting them down again, or picking up a tool and touching it to the offending area, or touching buttons or twiddling dials of drawers, panels, and gizmos which spontaneously appear and disappear when required (mixed reality, after all).

While these sorts of puzzle solving mechanics might be interesting for people who enjoy the idea of engineering (and listen, I've built a Land Rover engine for fun), the "puzzles" and problem-solving in Journey Among the Stars just aren't fulfilling. There's no challenge, there's no real problem solving, you simply insert this or that object into this or that device over and over until the credits roll.

What's worse is that the actual functionality of this gameplay is pretty unpolished. Objects don't behave with consistency. Tools don't interface with their natural mates reliably. There's jitter and jank with literally every single interaction, and even when these physical interactions technically work, they never feel satisfying or fun. You never feel like you're actually in a spaceship, more that you're in your living room pretending to be in a spaceship (while wearing a VR headset...).

Furthermore, there are actual, honest-to-goodness bugs. For example, panels that were held in place with screws which naturally needed to be unscrewed, simply didn't. I pulled the panel off by hand, screws still attached. So, not only was unscrewing the screws janky and boring, it was also stunningly unnecessary!

During several electrical conduit search puzzles, in which you must use a tool to find invisible wires and electrical panels, the game simply decided enough is enough. I'd not yet found the complete electrical conduit when I was suddenly transported to the next phase of the mission.

At other times, you'll be required to take manual control of the Hail Mary's flight. This sounds cool, except the first few times I piloted the ship, I was simply aimlessly flying through space while voice over told me to avoid debris and fly better. I saw very little debris, and flying toward it or away from it didn't seem to really have any effect on anything, but it may have, because I seem to have damaged my ship.

During another similarly barren flight sequence, I recall thinking, "I feel like there's supposed to be flightpath gates for me to travel through or something. This doesn't feel finished." Imagine my surprise when flight sequences in the second half of the experience suddenly had flightpath gates for me to pilot the ship through. "Oh, there's the game," I said.

Was this a bug? Or bad design? More importantly, does it matter? Either is pretty telling of the game's polish.

It's not all bad. The voice acting is phenomenal, even if Ryland Grace's voice actor sounds like Linguini from Ratatouille. The visuals are pretty great, even if I wish it was in full VR and not mixed reality. Interacting with Rocky is cool, even if his AI is about as advanced as a virtual pet from twenty years ago. And the music is phenomenal, no notes.

Project Hail Mary: Journey Among the Stars - Final Verdict

Those few positives, however, are not enough to make Journey Among the Stars a truly worthwhile experience. Where the Hail Mary novel and film are each a profound journey on their own, at once entertaining, exciting, and cerebral, Journey Among the Stars just isn't. It's a passable chore simulator with a few interesting moments, hampered badly by janky controls and an ineffectual story. Die hard fans of Weir's work might like it, but if they do, it won't be on the game's own merit.

UploadVR uses a 5-Star rating system for our game reviews – you can read a breakdown of each star rating in our review guidelines.