Stardust Demon

They've still got it

mibiblivania

Stardust Demon is my favorite jojo bizarre adventure part :3

It's a good Metroidvania with some really hard optional challenge rooms.

👍

Warning: The Platforming in this game is STUPID HARD. Stardust Demon is this strange contrast of DAMN GOOD creative design and storytelling, and SADISTIC platforming. It's honestly a REALLY good game with so many positives. The character designs are adorable and very creative. Both the sprites and portraits just ooze personality, and the level designs are distinct and bring you back to the classic days of Super Metroid. The story is surprisingly well told. It feels a bit amateur, and character development is a bit rapid and sudden, but it has a lot of heart to it. For as weird and silly as it gets, there were enough heartwarming moments to keep me wanting to see it through to the end. The soundtrack is worth the price of admission alone and will stay in your head a LONG time. The controls are also very tight and give you a surprising amount of control as you dash and jump about the level. However, all the game's positives smash head first into the above-mentioned INSANE platforming. It's not STUPID HARD the entire game. The first half I found the platforming to be fair and even enjoyable. But once you're past the mid-point, the game starts throwing platforming challenges that requires absolute pixel-perfect jumps and dashes around instant-death-spikes, often under a time limit. Even worse is how many of the later challenges are dependent on special moves that are not properly explained and have very unreliable timing. This often means you can't properly 'master' one section of jumps before being able to practice and figure out the spacing of the next set. But the worst part is that many of these insane challenge rooms are optional, but some are not, and you have no way of telling which ones those are. You'll often not know if the reward for these extra hard challenges are the thing you need to progress the game, or just another incremental upgrade. I was eventually able to complete enough of these awful platforming sections to finish the game, so it is do-able, but I was NOT having fun trying to figure these out. In contrast, the combat is relatively simple, just jumping, dashing and shooting. However, the boss battles are all surprisingly well designed and balanced to be mini puzzles rather than reflex tests, and are gameplay-wise some of the best parts of the game. There's also more slower paced teleportation puzzles that on the surface look mind-bending but are actually very satisfying to figure out. It's utterly baffling that the developers got so much of this game right, but decided to make so many of the platform challenges so close to impossible. If those hardest rooms were sequestered to their own optional section, or if just a little more leeway was given on some of these jumps or if there were checkpoints between sections of a challenge room, this game would get a enthusiastic recommendation. So, do I actually recommend Stardust Demon? Was the fantastic boss fights, great sound track, truly loveable characters and the Actually-Fun puzzles worth the hours trying to dash-cancel over instant-death-spikes? Do all those positives outweigh that one massive negative? You know what? They do. By a single ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Pixel.

Not a lot of games captivate me to complete them all the way through. This one sure did

This game is really underrated, needs way more reviews and eyes on it. Really cute, simple game with a ton of charm and style. I would agree that there is a noticeable difficulty spike, but I don't really mind it. Some other minor complaints I had like not being able to skip boss cutscenes have actually been patched as of 8/12/25. I can really feel the passion the devs put into the game, highly recommend, even if the difficulty makes it too hard to finish for you, its still a great experience.

This game is beautifully presented, with well-chosen colour palettes and character animation which (at least for the most part) feels smooth. The soundtrack is a fusion of classic chiptune with real instruments which does a great job at setting the mood, both for the current biome and the adventure as a whole. The writing is okay - the backstory is revealed in a satisfying way, and there's a fun, diverse mix of characters. Friendship and character development are central tenets of the story, and it can come off a bit cheesy at times, but I thought that was a welcome change from other games I've played recently. The block puzzles never took me too long to solve, but were usually clever enough for the solution to feel rewarding. The platforming can get challenging at times, particularly when trying to get the optional collectibles, but the truly hard rooms have Revival Stones which respawn you instantly with whatever HP/items you came in with, so you're free to keep trying until you figure it out. Though there's a few sections which rely on well-hidden game mechanics which I didn't know about until I'd seen the developers mention them in Steam Community posts. Hidden mechanics aside, I thought the difficulty curve was tuned reasonably well - there were some truly challenging moments, but nothing felt too frustrating. The only exception was that my controller's battery died just as I had reached the third boss, and the game stopped responding to all input (even keyboard) so I had to force-quit and traverse that area again. There's a small number of quality-of-life issues like that. A major annoyance was having to sit through the dialogue again every time I retried a boss. Also, when you respawn after dying, the game only seems to restore 20 HP, which didn't make sense considering that I could quit+reload and return with whatever HP I last saved with. This might not be everyone's cup of tea, but I had fun with it. And I thought the true ending was worth the effort - all I'll say is "justice gets served".

very charming! requires a fair amount of patience (bosses can be pretty spongy and there are a lot of strangely cruel challenge rooms) but I had a nice time with it. I, too, want my very own blood castle...