Really atmospheric for like the first hour, then it becomes a rather tedious game about constantly backtracking to discover a new room every ten minutes or so, with a somewhat generic j-horror twist, only instead of an old gothic-esque japanese haunted house this time we’re in space. It’s cool enough! Don’t get me wrong, I liked it, and I liked the experimental nature of the game and how exploring the capabilities of the medium’s storytelling potential was arguably the focus of the project, even if the story itself isn’t that great nor exciting. You can see they’re having fun and trying shit they normally wouldn’t, even if you can also see the budget constrains at every step of the way. I’m not quite sure why this gets such a bad rep in here of all places. Like, I see why IGN game reviewers could despise a 3-hour-not-so-scary horror game with tank controls, mediocre level design and a deliberately obscure progression in 2013, but in backloggd? It boggles my mind to be honest. Perhaps one day people will see this as what it is; a pretty ok and weird game. Give it a try!
Uma aventura bacana, Starship Damrey experimenta fazer umas coisas legais mas acaba não alcançando seu potencial. Mesmo imerso na atmosfera low-poly do 3DS, acabei me desapontando um pouco com a falta de uso de certas mecânicas introduzidas logo no começo do jogo - trocar entre o robô e o seu cara, "programar" certas coisas nos robôs, gravação e reconhecimento de voz, diria que com mais tempo no forno tudo isso poderia estar mais presente durante o jogo, ao invés de apenas nos primeiros 5 minutos (E também diria que um jogo de terror poderia fazer umas coisas bem legais com gravação e reconhecimento de voz tbm). Adoraria ver uma versão desse jogo mais encorpada, mas por enquanto essa aqui basta.
Ainda que curto, entrega quase impacto nenhum durante sua duração - é um misteriozinho bem arroz com feijão, digno de game jam, não fosse pelos assets medianos e estar num 3DS. Tenho um fraco pela movimentação por ambientes limiares em 3D desde Silver Case, mas não salvou nada aqui.
2short and over 2soon (that's what she said)
Fairly impressive for a download-only 3DS horror game. It's got decent atmosphere and sound design, fun puzzles, and an engaging mystery to solve. I'd love to play some kind of follow-up to it.
Just as it was getting interesting and puff, it's over...
Nice lil' game that manages to really grounds you in its world by being excruciatingly slow at every step of your exploration. If you can deal with that, I'd recommend playing this! It's really short and an experiment worth having a look at, especially in context of being a 3DS game. And as its eshop has closed down now, you can get this at a steal. Did you know it's actually really easy to ha-
How to do a lot with a little. A brilliant insight into what we lose as handheld-specific design is largely left behind. The 3DS is perhaps the best, and last, example of how technological limitations breed creativity.
This game knows when and how to leave the player wondering and wanting. Dead Space may be more visceral, but The Starship Damrey is more interesting.
This game knows when and how to leave the player wondering and wanting. Dead Space may be more visceral, but The Starship Damrey is more interesting.
This review contains spoilers
This is a pretty short game but I honestly really enjoyed it. The puzzles were challenging but not so much that I couldn't figure them out, usually everything you need is around you you just gotta look. Story wise (spoilers) it's pretty basic for most of it, something happens to the ship people are dead, the crew was also experimenting on aliens. There's also a ghost girl (kind of) which surprisingly works once its explained, but the big twist is at the end you manage to open your sleep pod and your hand is green and it's revealed that you're one of the alien that was placed in cryosleep which is pretty wacky.
Supostamente, The Starship Damrey é um jogo de terror, mas acredito que tenha se tornado uma pequena história interativa, que acaba antes de ficar realmente interessante, com pouco suspense e terror, tirando momentos extremamente pontuais ao longo da exploração.
Em termos de mecânica, o jogo é bem básico com seus movimentos, mas certamente tem toques de criatividade, principalmente no início, com os inputs.
Enfim, não vi tanto terror quanto gostaria, mas a experiência em si é interessante, especialmente se feita em um Handheld e não em um emulador.
Em termos de mecânica, o jogo é bem básico com seus movimentos, mas certamente tem toques de criatividade, principalmente no início, com os inputs.
Enfim, não vi tanto terror quanto gostaria, mas a experiência em si é interessante, especialmente se feita em um Handheld e não em um emulador.
Les contrôles sont d’une lenteur de fou et malgré un début intriguant, c’est vraiment pas à la hauteur de la promesse.
Level-5's The Starship Damrey is one of the most oddly, obscure and interesting games I've played in a long while, an adventure visual novel point-and-click first person puzzle hybrid with a space/sci-fi theme for the Nintendo 3DS. If this isn't Virtue's Last Reward then we're talking about this very peculiar title that I've seen absolutely no one talk about, I had to discover it via someone talking about having a problem with it in the Nintendo Homebrew Discord server of all places. As a part of the Guild series of collaborations the developer had with different game designers, in this case it was both Takemaru Abiko and Kazuya Asano working on this project having both previously worked on the teams that made up for the cult classic SNES visual novels Banshee's Last Cry and Otogirisō respectively.
The game's premise is very simple but pretty effective for an adventure game of its caliber, you wake up from being put in deep sleep inside of a pod, and with no way out you make your way through computer inputs until you're able to remotely control one of many robots that used to be available in the starship, then using said robot to go on some usual point-and-click tropes. Getting one object to use somewhere, going to this place where you can investigate something else to use to your advantage, even at some point too being able to mix some of them, kinda. I won't talk too much in detail about the story elements because the game asks you specifically to discover things on your own, and that's what the game excels at.
As a deliberate choice, most of this game doesn't count with any sort of background music at all, it's all set in a very dark atmosphere and what could basically be considered as space horror, it makes it all the more tense to actually uncover the story and experience by yourself the different events that go on in the starship, even the story, as little as it is can get rather compelling and fun to piece together.
Sadly, by the time you're fully invested it's already over and it sucks that there aren't any other sweet one-timers like this one in the platform, this game pretty much screams of the time of the very early 3DS eShop where not a whole lot could be expected as we weren't as informed, so wild experiments like this came around every now and then. Maybe that just has to do with the entirety of the Guild series of games by Level-5, but I can safely say that The Starship Damrey, as basic and short as it is, does remind me of a simpler and better time, and I think it shouldn't be left forgotten and in the rough, the game is neat and needs to be talked about more in general.
The game's premise is very simple but pretty effective for an adventure game of its caliber, you wake up from being put in deep sleep inside of a pod, and with no way out you make your way through computer inputs until you're able to remotely control one of many robots that used to be available in the starship, then using said robot to go on some usual point-and-click tropes. Getting one object to use somewhere, going to this place where you can investigate something else to use to your advantage, even at some point too being able to mix some of them, kinda. I won't talk too much in detail about the story elements because the game asks you specifically to discover things on your own, and that's what the game excels at.
As a deliberate choice, most of this game doesn't count with any sort of background music at all, it's all set in a very dark atmosphere and what could basically be considered as space horror, it makes it all the more tense to actually uncover the story and experience by yourself the different events that go on in the starship, even the story, as little as it is can get rather compelling and fun to piece together.
Sadly, by the time you're fully invested it's already over and it sucks that there aren't any other sweet one-timers like this one in the platform, this game pretty much screams of the time of the very early 3DS eShop where not a whole lot could be expected as we weren't as informed, so wild experiments like this came around every now and then. Maybe that just has to do with the entirety of the Guild series of games by Level-5, but I can safely say that The Starship Damrey, as basic and short as it is, does remind me of a simpler and better time, and I think it shouldn't be left forgotten and in the rough, the game is neat and needs to be talked about more in general.
Neat little adventure game. The conceit of being trapped in a pod and needing to interact with the ship through the computer and robots is cool but ends up just being you playing as the robot. Would have been nice to switch between the two.
Level 5 is a pretty interesting developer that seems to fly under the radar a lot, despite having been making stuff for over 20 years. They were very prolific during the 3ds era, and the Guild series is a bunch of budget titles released by them that cover a wide variety of genres. Starship Damrey is one of them, and it is a puzzle survival horror type thing (?) that doesn't quite work for me. To its credit, the start of the game is genuinely cool and immediately caught my attention. You wake up inside a futuristic cryopod inside a spaceship with no memory of anything and are unable to get out, so you connect to the spaceship's OS and start remotely controlling a work robot to explore the ship and solve puzzles. The robot is a slow clunky piece of shit that can only carry one item at a time, but that was never too much of a bother because the game is designed with it on mind. Exploration is all right, I guess. The ship is actually pretty small, and kinda boring. It's a space you can feel was made with purpose in mind more than aesthetics. There's not really many interesting things to see or find, though the atmosphere is not bad. You can feel the emptiness, and the occasional sounds keep you on your toes. I think the game wants to be a horror game? The setting is there, and there are relatively frequent jumpscares for the 3 hour duration, but I think the game really misses the mark by having no fail state that I could find. There is no way to get a game over, and it makes all of the jumpscares lose their impact because you know you will always be safe. So if it doesn't work as a horror game, maybe it does as a puzzle game with horror elements? I'd say not particularly. The starting screen saying that the game had no tutorials or explanations left me hopeful. My mind was left to get hyped wondering what kind of free form puzzle solving that could entail, and the previously mentioned very interesting start of the game seemed to indicate something good. But in practice, I was really let down. Puzzles only have one way to be solved with no room for creativity, and there's not really many things to interact with, so the answer tends to be obvious just by exploring, and only one puzzle where you are required to mix some ingredients together to make something explode has what I'd call experimentation. And even then, in basically the next room over there is a very easy to find document telling you exactly what ingredients to use. So puzzles are lame and easy, the horror is almost only jumpscares with no payoff, and while the setting has a decent atmosphere, it started to feel samey and like it had run out of ideas pretty soon despite being a barely 3 hour long experience. The narrative has cool ideas, but like pretty much every other facet of the game, it stumbles. It tries, but besides the fun twist right at the end that I did not see coming, It's mostly kinda dull. Story is not very overtly present throughout most of the game, existing only as documents you read and environmental storytelling like things on a crewmate's desk or just corpses, killed by unclear means dotted around the ship. The crew of the Damrey had complex relationships with each other, but in the end it doesn't really feel like any of that matters in the game, it's all just set dressing that would be a chore to read if it wasn't just a couple of lines each. Having said all that, the game was a budget release, going for 8 dollars. I guess you get what you paid for? But I can't help but feel like there was a lot of potential here that is wasted.