It’s the start of a new week, and you’ve got a bad case of the Mondays. Ah, but why do I antagonise you so with these twee and crushingly normative white collar office job cliches? You aren’t necessarily working a 9-5, and every day is hard, isn’t it? You’ve got a lot on your mind. You’ve got a lot on your plate. It seems there’s no end to the woe. Rest easy, my friend – no vexation you are feeling can possibly be as vexatious as the Space Invader area in Today’s Star Is.

Today’s Star Is, er, is a new free 2D spaceship labyrinth game from Toby Alden, one of the developers of melancholy precision platformer Love Eternal. Which is apparently very good, and which we did not review. Some inside baseball: when a games journalist dies, we are judged at St Peter’s gate not for the Biblical sins we have committed, but for the obviously deserving games we have skipped. If the tally grows too monstrous, we are cast down into the fires of Valnet Tophet, there to spend the aeons power-ranking Marvel mid-credit sequences. My list of oversights is so long it reaches around the world, like the coils of Jörmungandr. I am hellbound. But I accept my fate with good heart, because Valnet Tophet cannot possibly be worse than the Space Invader area in Today’s Star Is.

In Today’s Star Is, you are a tiny, unarmed spaceship with skittish, Lunar Lander-style ‘spin and thrust’ handling. You are trying to fly through a labyrinth of spiked surfaces to collect a star. You can bounce off regular walls without taking damage, but hitting a spike blows you up instantly, and the spikiness of the walls increases as you reach the other end of the labyrinth. You also have to worry about the Space Invader, which sleeps inside a hunting ground indicated by dashed lines. Enter that region, and the creature will pursue you without mercy, passing through solid surfaces and killing you on contact.

And then there’s the star. It sulks in a crevice, a SEGA prop with a hangover. It is Monday incarnate. You have to grab it with a short ranged, hold-the-button tractor beam and lug it back through the layout. The star has physics, meaning that it will swing around like a wrecking ball and hitch on corners, sabotaging your manouevres. It also skips and bounces when you disengage the beam. You can launch it through a bottleneck you’d rather not carry it through, given a bit of dexterity. But more often, you’ll accidentally skim it into a toothy dead-end from which extraction seems impossible. Oh, and yes, it will destroy you if you touch it.

Now imagine all this, plus the Space Invader. AAARRRRGH. You have two things on your side: infinite lives and reasonably frequent checkpoint flags, which thankfully don’t cause the star to respawn all the way back at the other end of the labyrinth. Complete the level and you’ll have the pleasure of seeing your name on a leaderboard, before your accumulated hatred of astral phenomena causes you to lose consciousness.

Aside from the cleverness of the design, which gets a lot out of a few core elements, I quite like the game’s presentation. It might seem overly barebones in screens, but there’s some engrossing sonic texture. Your hissing rocket emissions have a cavernous echo. Your ship dinks off surfaces like a pickaxe hitting stone. The Space Invader (not actually a Space Invader, to be clear – please don’t get legal, Taito) has a waking-up noise that is mildly harrowing.

You can play Today’s Star Is in a browser, or download it for Windows and Mac. Find it on Itch.io. As the title implies, Alden intends to release one of these a day, and I have to ask, Toby, what did I ever do to you? I’m probably overegging the pudding – from the sounds of it, Love Eternal is much harder.