Starstruck Vagabond

I enjoy playing truck simulators, so this game appealed to me. Same pick up items and deliver gameplay but with a story and more game elements. The gameplay got tedious at the 13 hour mark, but I was invested in the story and wanted to see it through. Unfortunately, the story is nihilistic. It builds to the climax only for the object of interest to explain the expectation of the player is wrong, and there is no point. It's disappointing when a story doesn't stick the landing. It's infuriating when the author rug pulls the audience.

The writing is a strong point when unique dialogue is written. The tutorial and the first crew member for example are very funny. However, the actual gameplay is incredibly dull. You walk up to things, pick them up and put them down on an elevator, activate it and then once in your ship pick them up and put them down off the elevator. Then you fly to a different planet and do that again in reverse. That's basically the whole game. Anything that is a normal quality of life feature like a run button is an upgrade instead. Even going to a different planet is restricted until the randomly generated quests send you there. The side quests are all variations on a very small number of possible tasks, transport something or fix something. I just don't enjoy playing it, it feels like a chore that is wasting my time and not letting me get to the next bit of good writing.

You play a starship captain who is frozen, Futurama-style, and wakes up 2000 years in the future. Earth is gone, and the galaxy has changed. It's up to you to explore and figure out what's going on, and deliver cargo to make money to improve your ship to deliver more cargo. You travel from space sector to space sector, encountering various hazards, answering distress calls, and gathering crew members as you go.  It's a pretty light sci-fi life simulator that I think could probably use just a little more variety in everything to not feel quite as repetitive once you get a ways into the game. To give on example, each sector has three random quests to complete that are picked from a list of maybe seven total options, so they start to feel very similar after a short amount of time. I enjoyed my time with it, enough to grab all of the achievements except the 'complete the game twice' one.  Be real, game. 

I paid full price for this, which I almost never do for video games. I don't feel bad for that, as I loved all the Trilby games and ZP and never paid for those. That cheapness, though, should indicate that I really wanted to get a lot out of Starstruck Vagabond. But this game isn't fun for me. And, man, I tried. It started great! It has a super funny alignment system it asks you to select from. In my three and a half hours of playing, I think that affected maybe two lines my character said. They felt like interchangeable barks, but at least they were on point. Troubles followed. The game then asked me to get to a shipyard. What's a shipyard? The game might tell you once, the first time it gives you this quest. But after many minutes of going back and forth between planets, I just had to look it up online. (It's not really a shipyard. A shipyard in this game is just a double-sized monitor next to certain planets' landing pads.) Then I didn't have enough oxygen and was told to buy more oxygen-making thingies. Okay, where? ♥♥♥♥ you, that's where. So I spent another who-knows-how-long looking for where to get those. (I don't even remember where, some random monitor sold them. The internet didn't help me here, and I can't help you. Sorry.) Okay, finally we could travel to a new star system! I wanted to go to another star system where a rumor told me an upgrade could be found on a derelict ship. Awesome, let's go to that derelict ship! Nope, can't do it. You fly right by it. Okay, turn around, try to stop right on it. Took another ten minutes to get this right. Then, I couldn't get ONTO the derelict ship. Every other derelict ship got me there automatically, and I was pretty out of it by this point, so when I couldn't figure out how to actually get my character onto this derelict ship, I was just tired of this whole misadventure and left. I think now I should have exited the ship DOWN instead of UP. Oh well. Wish something had let me know that was the right way to go. I was flustered and clearly did not feel enjoyably engaged. Soon after, my ship broke down AGAIN (this is the main theme of the game, and in three and a half hours I did more space janitoring than Roger Wilco did in six games), and some things needed fixing. I think one thing needed two types of fixing, and I chose the wrong tool -- I was trying to fix the bottom issue and I needed to fix the top issue first. It was difficult to understand, as the icons demanding attention were right on top of each other. Well, my air had run out, my stamina had run out (even after I prepared by leaving extra stamina-restoring food around), some little slime alien had slimed my whole ship suddenly, making me move extra slow, and I died fumbling in the dim emergency lights. Of course, the game revived me, but took 8 of my 10k earnings. The money loss really didn't mean anything to me, but I was done. It was time to quit. There had been very little gameplay (move boxes, fix things) with only three different sidequests. The sidequests were very repetitive: move a box to the correct place, kill slime aliens, destroy debris/destroy debris in space -- I did the slime aliens sidequest ten times and the others only two or three each, and that is not an exaggeration. The issue I have with the game isn't its simplicity or repetition, though they really highlight each other. It's that it has that simplistic loop that feels like it means to be a chill podcast game, and the music really runs with that vibe, and I can dig all that chillness and even groove with it. But then the game gives you confusing goals while everything is randomly breaking, the lights flash, you have irritating sudden setbacks, and the game demands more attention than it can reward. It's like blindfolded, low-stakes FTL, so instead of making hard choices with constant heart attacks, it's groping emptily, constantly feeling your arteries slowly harden until you unavoidably die/get robbed for 80% of your progress. The writing is fun! Your lawyer is clever enough, and the setup is cute! I'm sure the writing remains awesome throughout the game. But this game just doesn't have the affordances I need to play it the way I want and let me enjoy that writing. I don't know if I'll ever play this again, but I'm sure I'll play the Trilby point and clicks again. So, cheers for that. (Play 5 Days a Stranger, 7 Days a Skeptic, Trilby's Notes, and 6 Days a Sacrifice [in that order] on fullyramblomatic.com/games.htm! Play this, too, if you like, but temper your expectations better than I did, I guess.)

Not a awful game, but feels like a final college project that's been extended. The biggest personal letdown is the dialog/plot. His old old stealth game Trilby: The Art of Theft was simple with a fun story and his horror game The Consuming Shadow, while also struggling with gameplay, had lots of atmosphere and creative writing to carry it. This, well, just kinda feels a bit rushed, and the writing lacking? Gameplay very much wants a lot of misc small tasks per sector, but isn't enough to carry it, and rushing the story leads into having a crumb of dialog followed by asking you to return to a grind that's too simple to engage the mind, yet asks for enough attention that you can't just zone out like most logistics games. The biggest sin is all the microaggressions in gameplay. For instance, a key aspect is hauling crates back and forth, idle work in a logistics game, but if you turn during the setdown animation (buffering the next direction you wanna move) the crate will set down in the wrong direction. Lots of other small things as well, like breaking through rubble just to be stuck on a random drop, needing to swap tools to hands, pick up item, swap back to resume breaking. No one major problem, but death by papercuts. Lastly, and this is on me. I had gone into this hoping there would be more focus on the ship, and while yes you can upgrade things (most of which feel lacking) aside from color, you can't adjust anything really. Can't move most all parts, can't shift systems, can't even name the ship. I didn't expect full on customization, but when every ship in the game is the same, I can't form a connection to it either.

Not a bad game per se, but easily my least favorite Yahtzee games, and I played every game of his after the Rob Blanc series. Maybe I'm playing it wrong but it takes an insane amount of time, spent on time-wasting activities that exist only to waste your time, to do anything in this game. What little writing I could see in my ~50 hours of playtime was nice, but I wish I could get to it without doing a second job for free. Speaking of free, [i]Adventures in the Galaxy of Fantabulous Wonderment[/i] is a freeware adventure/space exploration game that Yahtzee made about 20 years ago. It has grinding a plenty too, but it's comparatively quick and easy, no need to engage endlessly in "dodge or clean your toilet" minigames. In Vagabond, grinding money is not enough, grinding just unlocks more opportunities for grinding and then some. Might change my mind later if we get sprinting in the Special Edition.

The writing's good, which got a few laughs out of me, but after 16 hours of wondering when the gameplay would start to feel fulfilling and less like a chore, I've come to the conclusion that it won't. This game is exceptionally boring, outside of its brief and infrequent story beats, and as much as I'd love to continue for the story's sake, the tedious pacing of Starstruck Vagabond's mind-numbingly repetitive and uninteresting gameplay loop has put me off bothering. For someone whose reviews are as critical as Yahtzee's, I'm impressed he put his name on a game this frustratingly dull.

Smart writing. Simple but oddly relaxing game loop. Decent cast of oddball characters. The procedurally generated aspects are interesting; I guess each playthrough of the game features different characters? Going to have to give that a shot at some point. So yeah, it's good. I'd try it.

Good writing, but everything is just so tedious, I'm not enjoying my time.

Disclaimer: I'm a huge fan of Yahtzee and have following this game since he started talking about it in his Dev Diary series. That being said, I also didn't think I was the target audience for this sort of game, as I don't super enjoy games like Stardew Valley that much or for very long. That being said, I did eventually pick this one up when it was on sale, and here's what I think: [h1] It's great. [/h1] Seriously. I found myself sinking way more hours into a game about delivering crates than I ever thought I would. I'm not an explorer in games, I usually just follow objectives, but I found myself jet setting around the galaxy looking for planets and upgrade units and new characters just to see what was there. In short, I had a ton of fun. There were some nitpicks, some things I didn't really care for, but nothing huge. Tl;dr, I highly recommend it. I go into more detail below. [h3] 1. The Story [/h3] For a game all about doing busywork in service of the larger story, this needed to be great. And, honestly, it is. Is it groundbreaking? No. Is it some work of fantastic metaphor or literature? No. Is it a story that made me laugh, made me sad, surprised me, and was honestly incredibly moving? Absolutely. Yahtzee has a great sense of humor, and an excellent understanding of how to make you care about characters that might, at the beginning, seem annoying or abrasive. My favorite character ended up being one I wrote off at the outset as a silly gag character. The turns in the story are good even if they aren't mindbending, the message is wonderful if not novel, and the whole thing comes across as a comforting, familiar tale of someone trying to carve out their own life in an unfamiliar, foreboding landscape. Story: 5/5 [h3] 2.The Gameplay: [/h3] Yes, there is gameplay here. The primary loop of taking jobs, delivering them, and getting paid is a lovely, dopamine driven loop that functions like the base beat in a song, continually pushing you along. Everything is built on top of it. Now, at the beginning, without much else going on around it, it can seem kind of boring. There isn't much to your ship, you don't have much of a crew, and there isn't even really much to do during travel. The piloting minigame is adequate for a while, but the game only really takes off once you get a crew member or two and expand your ship. By the end, I was having an absolute blast: I'd set the ship to move, and honestly felt like a race to try and get as much done as I could before we got there (sometimes I made the ship go slower so I could get more things done). That includes ship maintenance, but it also includes organizing your food, your fuel (Oh the fuel--I ended up going way too ham when I discovered [spoiler] the refiner and that you could refine fuel. I ended up filling the room completely [/spoiler]), and talking to your crew. My only complaint here is the snowball of gameplay--not a lot at the beginning, *almost* too much by the end. Still, it was very, very enjoyable. Gameplay: 4/5 [h3] 3. The Visual and Audio Design [/h3] The artwork is just fine. It's not incredibly beautiful, but it was nice and enjoyable in its own right. Most importantly, I think it conveyed the story and the gameplay very well without getting in the way of it. The music was great, if a little repetitive. I LOVE Sam Houghton from his work on BPM, and I wish that there had been a larger variety of music, especially maybe different types of music for different quadrants or a larger pool of random tunes to pull from. Still, the music was good enough that became a good backing track rather than a repetitive grating force. So overall, the visuals and sound design were solid and moved the game forward. They're not the focus, and they don't need to be. Visuals/Audio: 4/5 Overall, I think this was a fantastic game. To some it might be a little expensive at full price, but on sale it's definitely one you should pick up and enjoy. I love seeing games flourish, especially when they're by solo devs, so support Yahtzee for making a great game!