Deneb: Across the Stars Reviews

From ~2 hours with hundreds of falls, to 6:44.45 min. with none. Truly a polished, alas criminally underrated little gem. It was quite a journey, thank you for making it happen.

A game like Jump King / Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, but it's walking. It's a bit deceptive because it controls more like you're on a unicycle, and that's the core of its difficulty (which makes it hard to understand just watching videos of it). I do like the art and music design too.

A cute mouse controlled precision platformer centered around rescuing dogs through the cosmos. What more can a player want? Well, in actuality, this is a tough one considering the level design is vertical in a similar fashion to other games like Jump King. As a result, small nudges, vibrations or anything that can slightly change the course of your cursor can make you fall from short to quite long distances, as there are no checkpoints. On the flip side, there are "soft checkpoints" as in areas that once you reach them they have platforms that should catch most of your falls from there on (as I say should since you can actually fall from those if you have some bad luck). In terms of presentation, it presents a few levels with not too detail yet pleasing to look at pixel art. The tracks are soft and tranquil as well, almost making you forget about your hand cramps. I wish I could have been able to take a screenshot of some of the structures I passed through but it seems it can't be done as of yet. Also, the story itself is simple and told without any dialogue since it doesn't really need it. Makes sense considering those players who could forget it after getting stuck for hours in some of the most unforgiving sections. All in all, I believe I had my time with it. If you're into the genre you could give it a try since it's not that expensive nor impossibly hard, but enough to keep you on your toes. If you're new to it... well, there's a sign at the very beginning that will plainly state how things most probably are gonna go down. As for me, I'm not even gonna attempt getting all the achievements. I'm fine enough with my space dogs.

This is a rage game. A cute rage game, but a rage game nonetheless. Navigating top-down strict-timing movement using a mouse with limited range sucks, but it's designed that way. Recommended, but only if you like games that kill you over and over and piss you off. And not in a "Fire Emblem Fates Revelations storytelling" kind of way, but in a "Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy" kind of way.

Lovely little game that is also satisfyingly challenging.

This game has a pretty unique mouse-only control system that has a really nice balance of challenging, but not impossible. It can certainly be disorienting going in, but very satisfying once you start to get the hang of it. My run time went from 3+ hours to under 10 minutes across a few play sessions. The use of music and sound is subtle in a really cool (and diagetic) way, plus the art is a truly beautiful pixel art style that actually reminds me a lot of Celeste.

Can't put cursor on the edge of the screen to control angle at a high level, game does the sh*t to make mouse control slippery.

I can't with this game. Maybe if the devs eased the player in a little before ramping up the difficulty to 1000 but nope, it starts off incredibly hard and then just gets harder. The penalty for failure is simply too steep and the constant character movement adds a level of desperation that simply is not fun (for me). It makes me think of the myth of Sisyphus rolling the boulder up a hill only to have it roll back down again in a perpetual cycle for eternity as a form of torture. Not what I am looking for.

Deneb: Across the Stars is a carpal tunnel inducing rage game in the vein of 'Getting Over It' or 'AltF4.' The game seems targeted towards masochists - you know, the types that complete Dark Souls titles using Donkey Kong bongos or reach Spelunky 2's '7-99' ending using DDR dance pads. Do not be fooled by the trailer on the store page because the amount of break-neck speed and pin-point precision required for surpassing even the earliest obstacles is obscene. Deneb would be a difficult game using the more precise navigation provided by a controller but seems near impossible when you're only allowed to use a mouse (at least, for anyone that isn't juiced to the gills with Adderall). For what it's worth, I see some potential in this game but I think that the developer would need to either add an 'easy mode' or dial back some of the existing elements of this game in order to be enjoyable for the masses at large. Checkpoints, an option to freeze your character in place (by right-clicking perhaps), and/or slower 'gliding-block enemies' would be a great adjustment for accessibility purposes but I'm sure haters would just say I need to 'get good...' ...and who knows, maybe they're right. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ On a positive note, the pixel art is quite nice and the game has a lightning-fast launch speed!

It was inconvenient to control only with the mouse, but there is an advantage. When you fall, you can smash keyboard with your other hand.