Starless Reviews

Ahem......I came here thinking this was another game....with the same name. But I'm glad I bought this game It is really good survival/puzzle/horror. It gave me the willies, trying not to let my colonists die. Just the bare fact that they can see what their fate might be if they are chosen by the ships AI is Anxiety inducing in the extreme. When the anxiety gets too extreme, I retreat into the fantasy of being a butler to a family of rich entitled heiresses. Once my tension has abated I return to this game and try to save these colonist from the alien like monsters that swarm the ship. This game has me on edge when I play it. I'll beat it, some day... 10/10

Another nice little gem from the Indie game world, I only wish the demo was included as prologue in the full game, and suggest to still play it (it's not on Steam anymore but can be found on Itch). The game plays wonderfully on controller, so I highly recommend using one. Overall a satisfying little game, with great atmosphere, as well as the most unique spin on a limited lives system, and next objective for me is gonna be a deathless run!

This is a puzzle game, and is entirely simplistic in it's solutions but is heavily driven by it's aesthetics and a clear love for ALIEN (which sold me). I've now beaten it twice and thought for $8 I received my money's worth, but really the entire game is just solving to get to the next area without dying, so it's a puzzle game. It's also not particularly heavy on horror or jump scares but a few deaths got me in terms of the suddenness of it. I think it's a solid 7/10, and I hope we see another game from the developer. Steam deck compatible, game runs capped at 30fps and that's not a problem.

Pretty neat actually. It's a simplistic stealth game, but still got a decent array of approaches on each map. It reminds me somehow of a certain era of shareware PC games, around the early 00's. You'd find some ramdom PC games to download, maybe on a forum or some geocities in a corner of the early "wild-west" web. This one gives off that same vibe in a very good way. Just enough polish to make it work, with a direct and to the point gameplay that is both enjoyable and challenging. There are elements of survival horror as well with limited resources and such. I have only a couple of minor grievances, with the cumbersome equipment UI which can get furstrating to navigate and equip items, many items end up being situational at best, and a handful of difficulty spikes here and there. But other than that, I do recommend it, even more so when it's on sale.

This is an excellent game for a few evenings. It is a top-down arcade with horror, puzzle and even roguelike elements. Your character is one of the colonists on a spaceship. She (all of the colonists are women) aims to save the rest of the colonists and reactivate spaceship engines after the death of the crew. When your character dies, you will play as the next colonist. But all actions, which your previous colonist performed, matter. For example, you need to activate three panels in a room full of aliens. The first colonist can activate only two of them and die. After that, the second colonist has to activate only one panel. You will find a lot of gadgets during the game. For example, you can find a teleport, a gun, a night vision device or a trap. You can choose gadgets based on seen rooms. The main cons are controls, graphic design and music (or, more precisely, the absence of music). You can't change controls and it is a big problem. All of the controls are bound to the keyboard (for example, movement is bound to WASD), but gadgets are bound to a left mouse click. This feels disconnected and uncomfortable. Nevertheless, this game is interesting (and even unique in some mechanics) and I recommend you to try it.

It's a fun homage to Aliens without violating any copyrights. I have about 10 hours of play in which includes a restart because I missed too much in the early game. I enjoyed the atmosphere and the gameplay. The author was quite responsive when I ran into trouble. I'd buy a game like this again. It was a good way to spend 3 days or so of game time.

Overall, I enjoyed this game and was looking forward to it since the demo but I'm a bit on the fence about recommending it as there are some negatives to keep in mind. First, the gameplay is a good bit of fun trying to sneak through rooms without being detected by aliens and robots and the various tools you get will allow you to try different tactics. As you have 250 colonists there's plenty of lives if you screw up. The endgame does provide an interesting dilemma for who to save as well. However, it's a really short game that probably is about two hours to finish for a first play. There's replayability in trying different endings but the game's options only consist of New Game or Continue, and finishing the game deletes your save requiring a new playthrough to see different endings. These endings also only consist of a single screen with 2-3 sentences describing what happened. There's also minimal music in this game (I think only the intro/ending really has anything as the game itself is silent except for ambient sound effects and the short track that plays when a colonist is killed). If the gameplay still is something you'd enjoy and these negatives don't deter you, then give this one a try.

I bought this game recently and had much fun going to the end of its possibilities. It's humble-sized (around 3h for me for 1st playthrough, but please note that I'm pretty experienced in the genre) but very solid in what it does. Solo dev, much respect for the delivered work. Overall, I enjoyed the game a lot. I initially saw it during one of the summer conferences and was interested by the genre and the art style. It's exactly what it says it is, stealth elements, light puzzle elements, and mainly adventuring and story-driven, with a heavy dark sci-fi theme that triggered my interest initially. It's also shorter than what I thought back then, during the summer conferences, but when I bought it and saw it was a solo work, I expected a condensed experience. That was conducted well, no feeling of incomplete parts or uncontrolled mechanics. I played through the game 4 times, partly to see if I could get a deathless run. MECHANICS AND GAMEPLAY DESIGN The stealth is moderate but ever present. It goes well with the setting and participates in the theme and the experience. Initially I was annoyed that there existed rooms with no hiding AND no safe beginning (door, etc), but there's a solution to that. I didn't see rooms where the initial placement of enemies would cause an unavoidable fatal encounter, so that's a good point. The limited room for gadgets was also initially a bit of a hurdle, but there's also strategy for that. The limited lives of the colonists is a good approach, and so is the respawn at a set point, making sense for story reasons. A few rooms were frustrating during several playthroughs, until I weighted the decision to use consumables. The energy consumption is a bit much, but looking back, it sets the challenge bar well, about where it should be. Power recharges are frequent enough between checkpoints to leave strategy options opened. Overall, the paths options are perhaps a bit too linear. Considering the size of the game it makes sense. The pro of that is that it prevents from feeling overwhelmed by unknown options or feeling unfairly lost. The con is that there are few moments to gain an advantage by exploring, but nonetheless, there are some of them, and they're rewarding enough. The UI is pretty good, the sound markers are clear, the controls are not overnumerous, controller support is a great addition. The only criticism here is that not knowing what inactive switches will do when activated hurts the strategy planning. The game options are clearly lacking as there are none, not even sound, display or button mapping. This is lacking a lot in that area. The save system is... debatable. There is only one save, and it clears after a playthrough. On one hand, this goes with the fact that colonists number is your lives number, so it would not make sense to allow easy reloading. On the other hand, it might clash with the narrative design of having few but key choices. It does not end up breaking the game because it is short, but it'd be a design clash in a longer experience. NARRATIVE DESIGN, ART AND SETTING The atmosphere is a strong point of the game. In less that 10 minutes, the immersion is complete, thanks to a short but sufficient tutorial part, and an art style that does an excellent job. The documents found accompany the run at a good pace, including the first documents, helping understanding key points of the situation quickly, then, later, diving into the "how" and "why" some things happen/happened. The AI speaking also participate greatly in feeling immersed, breaking what would be a lonely experience otherwise, which would carry the risk of feeling disconnected from the events. They help maintain that connection. The art is gorgeous and 100% hits the target of the dark sci-fi environment. There's attention to details related to the story of where some elements/places are. The few key choices are interesting. What may be lacking is a few answers at the end, but we get most of them. GLITCHES AND ISSUES I met very few of them, but there are some. None broke my game or my experience, as they are easily avoided after meeting one.

OK to be honest upfront, I only played two hours until I deinstalled it. I am struggling with this one. On one hand the price is really good. You forgive a lot of small game design issues and the shortcoming it has. I think this was a good decission. A game does have to be perfect to be fun. The graphics, animation, atmosphere and gameplay idea are good, too. I appreciate its honesty; it doesn't pretend to be something that it is not. In the end I have to give a thumbs down, regardless. this is why: There is one major gamedesign decision, that broke it for me completely: Pitch black rooms. Even though you get *several* tools to deal with the darkness, none of them give you enough cues to know where the enemy is. And you cannot spam them, because you cannot carry enough energy. Also switching between them takes an amount of time, using them takes an amount of time ... the enemy kills you instantly on sight. This is a game of luck. I believe some get through these rooms after a few tries. Others like me die again and again. So if you are a sane and normal person, who does not enjoy seeing women die in agony every few seconds, this is frustrating. Here is another issue for me: A none zero amount of time was spend on making unique dying animations for dying from an alien or from a bullet. probably even more animations as the game progresses(?). I get what they wanted to do, but this idea of making your game-lifes individuals (not clones of one entity) backfires by not giving the player the tools to value a life (pun by accident). Great game design is enabling the player to make meaningful decissions. Ok, this is the major flaw. there are other little things and small bugs I came across which really are not worth mentioning. The game does a great job in condensing the survival alien monster experience into a small package. After two hours I was asking myself if I enjoy this game enough to spend more life time on it. The answer was no. Because it's frustrating.

I have been waiting like over a year for this game and it's FINALLY out. If you like stealth puzzle horror or any combination of the three this game is absolutely worth the already incredibly cheap price.