Star Sign

Star Sign is what happens when you combine a cute little round star child with Spiderman and Sonic before yeeting them over an endless void. It's a fast paced 3D platformer that demands skill and quick reflexes as you swing from floating platform to outstretched roots before jumping into a whirlwind that'll send you hurtling across the stage! All the while beautiful chill music sets the scene and perfectly matches the soft visual design and lovely landscape. For a first time developer, Joel came out swinging! I had a lot of fun with my time in Star Sign. While by no means a perfect game, every time I jump into the world I end up smiling. The game has a lot of enjoyable little mechanics and even hidden challenges that let you level up your character's abilities, allowing you to go even faster! Speed really is the name of the game. Along with cheese. While the levels have a clear intended path, the open level design allows master swingers to carve their own way through. This game absolutely screams speedrunner material. When it comes to accessibility, the biggest hurdle is easily the high skill ceiling and requirement for fast reflexes. It's a lot like Celeste in that regard. Unfortunately, unlike Celeste, there isn't much available to help disabled players. If you can't move the cursor fast enough, you are SOL. That being said, it's not completely bereft of accessibility. The game allows you to fully customize controller or mouse sensitivities on both the x and y axes (as well as offering separate inverted controls for both axes). It also gives you the choice between mouse & keyboard or a controller. Both of which are fully remappable! In addition, Star Sign allows you to hide the HUD, change your resolution, customize your anti aliasing, change your render scale, increase or decrease your field of view, and alter your brightness. Plus it separates master volume and music volume so you can customize the sound to your liking. Visually, the game is a treat. All font text is large and dyslexic friendly. Often times text is white or yellow on a black background. Unfortunately, this is where the accessibility ends. Those that have difficulty with blues will seriously struggle with later levels in this game. There are no options to increase or decrease text size. Nor does the game offer screen readers or closed captions. It doesn't have voice acting, but there are some sound cues. Star Sign uses a checkpoint system for levels, but they can be fairly unforgiving at times. You can easily get stuck in a single portion of the level for a while. Finally, if you suffer from a lot of stress or anxiety, Star Sign may not be the game for you. Like many games in its genre, you will die a LOT in Star Sign. It's all about trial and error. The payoff at the end of the level is excellent, but the inherent stress of dying over and over again can be hard for those who already struggle with outside sources of stress. Overall, Star Sign is a wonderful little game that is brought down slightly by somewhat finicky controls, only a few accessibility options, and unforgiving checkpoints. That being said, I highly recommend it to speedrunners and those that love tough platforming challenges. At only $9.99 USD, it's well worth the price! Thank you to Joel Obrist for a review copy. I had a lot of fun screaming my way through your game.

This Game is very Epic!! 10/10

If the trailer looks cool to you, the game delivers precisely what it promises. By the time you reach the credits there's no doubt you will have mastered its mechanics. Star Sign is a deceptively challenging physics platforming game. I was basically ready to give the game a thumbs-down due to extraordinary difficulty until I checked the controls screen and learned you can press LT to do a boost that drastically increases your range of motion with the grapple. I beat the entire "Liar" track in the first level without knowing that, because either the game never tells you about it, or it does introduce it as just "running on the ground", resulting in me failing to internalize what it meant while grappling. Movement was a lot smoother once I understood the boost mechanic. I think the checkpoints could stand to be more generous, and I find myself unsure where to go now that I've gotten at least one light pillar in each of the cardinal directions from the central hub of the first level, but the vibes are extremely good in this game. There's also a solid few hours of content in this game, easily, and plenty past that if you're the type of person who would want to speedrun it. Judging by the fact that I was playing what the game describes as the easiest difficulty and was still struggling, it does feel like the developer got very, *very* good at their own game and tuned the difficulty accordingly, making the wonderfully calming and flowy music feel a bit at-odds with the tense all-or-nothing jumps I found myself making. All-in-all, if you love games about grappling with a high skill ceiling, there's a lot to like here.

Very fun game! If you like grappling hooks, this game is for you!

Extremely fun, easy to pick up "parkour"(more like grappling hook) game, with nice replay value and amazing speedrunning potential

This is a really pleasant, nice to play game. The core gameplay is nice and focused, the music sets the mood nicely, and everything else is more than good enough for a one man production. It's a bit hard on the default difficulty, but it's remarkably easy to tweak that. 9/10, would play an expansion

This is a nice take on swinging platformer. It's still a bit green in some aspects but its already an enjoyable experience. It's relaxing and has a simple mechanic overall, still I would say its hard to master. Didn't play a lot yet but already shared with the creator few hints that in my opinion could bring a bit more of fun into the project. Well done guys! :)

cute little 3d platformer, move around like spider man and it wants you to really learn the physics. it can be challenging bc the camera and aiming sucks and is very janky and makes you really wrestle with it but its fun

this is the most relaxing platformer ever made. 6 hours of pure bliss and a funny little guy to boot

Ultimately tedious and repetitive. The difficulty is tuned in that uncanny valley space, where if it were a little easier or a little more difficult then it'd be fine. Way too many long levels where you often can't even see the end when you start (which is a problem if you can't remember whether you've already completed it). The gameplay is fun for maybe an hour or two but progressing through the game requires completing 23 levels of which I've done 14. The checkpoints also don't trigger unless you take your time and get super close to them, but based on the trailer taking your time isn't really the intended way to play.