Star Rift Saga

I tried a handful of games that all felt and looked very similar with [b]Princess Pomu[/b], [b]Witchroid Vania[/b], [b]Star Rift Saga[/b] and [b]Bloom Thrice[/b]. Despite them all playing competently enough, I found them all to be kind of boring and artistically unappealing. [b]Star Rift Saga[/b] was perhaps the game of all of these that I found most palatable and spent the longest trying out. It has an interesting charm system. You often acquire them as randomized drops off of enemies. Seems like a competent metroidvania to me. Like the aforementioned games though, I found this kind of ugly and generic to the point that it wasn't appealing enough to entice me to continue to play it.

What you have here is a metroidvania from someone who well and truly understands the form, and has advanced the art of it. The bosses are chewy, the fights significant, the build variety is out of this world, the cozy vibe of rolling around at late game and grinding out the last few potential chips is a delight, and I genuinely don't want to leave. Also holy hell can projectile based games learn from this slight homing flexibility and design - Aiming's all well and good for precision high power items but yes, the character can aim a little, too, it's normal to assume that if you're having big bombastic movement, please learn from this game I beg you. 9/10, taking the dev scope into scale - I think it's a solo piece? For that, amazing. Little prone to crashes, but the dev's fixing as soon as they're reported, and it's got a UI problem not unlike expedition 33 - I want to fiddle with the skill system endlessly, but it needs build loadouts/pages/etc.

I'm playing through a couple of Metroidvanias because I eventually want to make my own one. Star Rift Saga, while having a few weird quirks that I ran into during my playthrough, [b]is probably currently the closest design and quality wise to my "vision" in terms of this.[/b] As a game, it's just a very comfortable experience overall. It's really fun to explore the world and essentially take the game at your own pace. It's relatively linear (i.e. you can't really sequence break the game), but where the game shines is how the game gives you reason to engage with the world. In my opinion, Star Rift Saga makes a couple of extremely intelligent design decisions that make traversing through the game enjoyable, almost like a nice stroll with a soft breeze. You're given actual reasons to fight enemies in the game because not only do they drop money, but they also drop consumables, EXP and "chips" which are essentially passives that allow you to modify your build in an interesting way. The game also peppers little collectibles around the map that generally make traversal easier as collecting anything major (like a person that's rescued, a health upgrade, or a damage upgrade) fully heals you. Finally, increasing the difficulty also increases the rarity of drops as well as EXP gain, which I find fun. I played on a difficulty slightly above "Normal" and it was a pleasant experience overall. That being said, I do have to point out a couple of things that I ran into that didn't feel intentional. There were weird loops around some of the music (particularly the boss theme, Break the Wall) where it would just keep looping around the same 15 seconds, as well as a couple of minigames that didn't have audio at all, which felt a bit peculiar. Towards the latter half of the game, typos started appearing in dialogue a bit more frequently, and one of the most cursed things was that the final boss would just... Allow me to shoot at it while it stood still during one of its phases. Even with the quirks listed above, the overall game itself was genuinely just really relaxing and fun to play through, and, accompanied by Vincent Colavita's soundtrack (who worked on Luck Be a Landlord, and in my opinion, significantly improved from it), was just pleasant. I definitely enjoyed the game, and I recommend it, on the caveat that it's a fantastic game, but might be even better with a few bits of polish on the quirks that I encountered.

I'm excited to play more of this! I'm running into a bit of trouble with the keyboard controls-- for some reason, it's permanently pointed down unless I aim up, in which case it aims straight. So I haven't been able to make too much progress. I I did try configuring keyboard settings in the menu, but it doesn't offer a ton of control. I'm eager to try it again with a controller. The story intrigues me and the music is fantastic!

I am having a blast with this game so far! I really like that there are 6 different difficulties to pick from after doing a short introduction to the game because I like a challenge (playing on the 5th highest one) and it seems to make the enemies more aggressive and change their behavior instead of just making them tanky. I also really appreciate the level design... one of my biggest gripes with the genre is getting hopelessly lost and so far, that hasn't happened once in this game. Each NPC you resuce has a different benefit to the game and they all go to a HUB area that you can fast travel to from many locations. It also has a neat chip system that makes you fit the upgrades in a tetris-like grid that expands the more you upgrade from XP. The boss fights are fun and interesting plus eventually you can re-fight them in time trials. There is a large amount of content in the game too! The same composer who did the OST from Frogue, Luck Be a Landlord, and Undergrave wrote the music and it is excellent. The sound design in general is great. If you like Metroidvanias that lean more towards Metriod rather than Castelvania, this is one to check out!

Having a blast so far - boss fights look like a chaotic mess but are well balanced and feel great to beat. Playing Tetris with the upgrade chips is a nice puzzle break

Definitely not a AAA title, but holy moly, this is peak Metroidvania right here. Takes a short amount of time to get going, but once it does, it is an absolute blast. Very polished, smooth movement, fun and unique upgrades, secrets galore, various systems that all work harmoniously. Excellent, excellent, game. Hats off to the developers.

i had a lot of fun with this one, if it ends up doing well i feel the dev could potentially make a bigger and better game in the future too. the demo gives you a solid idea of what the full game offers game launched with an unholy amount of bugs.. but the dev would crush them and have even the worst ones fixed and handled within at most a day... and at the least a few minutes! while there are several QOL and stat tweaks being considered or worked on. this game was a pretty solid experience and more so considering the small amount of hands working on it

This game deserves more attention. I was very pleasantly surprised at the depth of the chip system (similar to charms), and some of the weapons and their varied capabilities. Honestly, I was looking for something to hold me over until Shadow Labyrinth came out, but this game has me hooked! Most importantly, the gameplay is fun—lots of fun. There are maybe 6 difficulty settings. I’m playing on Hard, but there are 2 settings that are more difficult (I prefer more challenging / souls like games). Furthermore, the bosses are pretty fun, very diverse. Do not sleep on this game—it is highly underrated.

Fantastic take on the metroidvania genre. The inventory management system is well done and fun to play around with. Played through entirely on the hardest difficulty and thought that it did a great job of making the game hard but not unplayable by just making every enemy a bullet sponge like what happens in so many games nowadays. Had a few crashes but each one was addressed in kind by the developer and solved. Well done by the developer as a first official launch title, looking forward to more. Cannot recommend enough if you like the genre.