I really love a lot of Antonio Freyre’s work but my praise is almost always laden with caveats. More often than not, I find his aesthetic stylings, atmosphere, and world design to be top-notch. Evocative dystopias that are, unfortunately, often accompanied by so-so gameplay or mechanical design. It Comes in Waves sidesteps that criticism by being mechanically light – a walking sim with small hiccups of action and blaster-fire. These bouts are largely there to provoke engagement in the systems: avoid taking damage to avoid water depletion to avoid dying of thirst to avoid losing the game. The ever-looming threat of perma-death gives the whole affair just enough teeth to keep you on your toes, even though the actual trials you face never really give you a run for your money. In my playthrough, I was never particularly close to being in danger, but the theoretical threat was enough to keep my eyes peeled for discarded reserves of H2O.

I’ve seen criticism levied at the game as being boring - the aforementioned dances with combat being too brief and too widely interspersed. I understand the sentiment, but I don’t think the systems could bear the load of the combat if left open and exposed. As-is, you don’t typically get enough time in each fight to dwell on the AI’s shortcomings, the lack of impact, the weirdly inconsequential stats assigned to the various guns you come across. The game is, fundamentally, a walking sim with some third-person-shooter elements, which leaves it a lot stronger than as a third-person-shooter with walking sim elements.

These gaps between combat also help accentuate the emptiness of the desert, an emptiness that feels utterly meditative. This emptiness ends up allowing your focus to wonder to the massive surreal monoliths dotted around your journey. These towering statues, giant skeletal remains, and rivers of blood (?) are further emphasized by a map which doesn’t track the player’s position, forcing you to orient yourself based on cryptic markers and their accompanying landmarks. The end result is a world which embeds itself in the mind, with features that feel like abstract representations of sick-as-hell concept art.

Best of all, your meditative wanderings through the wastes are capped off with a brief, delicate ending – one that recontextualizes and warms everything you’ve done for the last 30 minutes. It’s not over-poetic, it’s not saccharine. It’s just nice, and perfectly serves the game.

A Star Long Cold aims to blend Antonio Freyre's previous No Sun to Worship and It Comes In Waves – unfortunately, it lacks the concise brevity of the former and the meditative emptiness of the latter. I don't think it's a bad game – I love the atmosphere and the visual style, I just don't think the core gameplay loop coalesces into something that I feel compelled to return to after a few runs.

I've seen folks talk of this game as superior to It Comes In Waves by virtue of sidestepping its extended periods of nothingness, but the action of Under A Star Long Cold often feels more vacuous than the literal emptiness of It Comes In Waves's desert.

It's worth checking out as a fan of Freyre's work, and as mentioned – it's extremely successful stylistically. I just wish I liked pretty much anything else about it.

High Score of $26,580/$50,000