STARWEAVE

a short and sweet story. the voice acting is great and the characters are compelling! i like the combat mechanics as well. perfect if you are running short on time but want to experience a good story.

I feel bad leaving a negative review because Starweave clearly has a lot of heart and soul put into it. I REALLY wanted to like this game, and in its best moments, it IS absolutely fantastic. But those moments ultimately just emphasize the rest of the game’s issues. Overall, the flaws hold the project back too much for me. Starting with the positives - the art is GORGEOUS and easily the highlight of the whole game. Character designs are charming and the environments are atmospheric. The music and voice acting were both solid and suited the mood well. Combat is intentionally frustrating at first, but the longer you play, the more those limitations slowly start feeling like a fun puzzle to solve. Getting a hang of the gameplay is what ultimately kept me playing to the end and I had a lot of fun with the turn-based combat. It’s a simple twist on a standard formula that suits the game’s themes well. However, what ultimately held the project back for me was the narrative - which, since this was sold as a story-driven RPG - is ultimately what I was playing the game for. The story has some interesting ideas, but really needed revisions and a tighter scope/focus. Every time I got invested in a character or idea, the spotlight would immediately shift somewhere else, which is kind of a big deal in a narrative-based game. Starweave is also pretty short (I played through twice just to see what I missed. I think a normal playthrough is ~2.5 hours?) which means the story doesn’t have enough time to flesh out a lot of its broader world building concepts or arcs. I’m the kind of person who typically likes when a story gives you small chunks of an idea and trusts the audience to piece together the rest, but the setup and payoff happen SO quickly that twists feel like they’re coming out of nowhere in a jarring way. Conversely, ideas that I THOUGHT would be foreshadowing never end up coming back into play at all. Especially since the game limits the number of party members you can talk to during breaks between battles, you can VERY easily miss crucial details for character arcs. Blackguard suffers from this the most imo, but they all do to some extent. I get what the game was aiming for by limiting your number of conversations, but after having replayed the game to see what I missed, imo the story would have been better off just letting you see everything in a single run-through. By the end, I was left with far more questions than answers, and no clue where to even start on imagining or theorizing those answers myself. On a narrative level, the idea that keeps getting brought up most is “What does it mean to be assigned a role/assigned a destiny?” But this idea falls flat when the intricacies of Lucid’s worldbuilding, the clearly defined stakes for success/failure on the ‘save the world’ quest, and the characters’ real life backstories are never elaborated upon beyond a few vague lines. In some cases, this vagueness is kind of the point (Blackguard at the start of the game questions why we’re just believing a bird who gives us no answers - which is fair, but made me expect that there’d be some sort of in-depth elaboration or twist later - which there really wasn’t). But in other cases, I felt like things truly did come completely out of nowhere. You don't have enough time to sit with or explore the implications of whatever happened either. Meanwhile, the gameplay pushes this idea of “Teamwork/learning to trust and communicate with others in order to grow as a person,” but this idea isn’t reflected in the script at all. If anything, I’d say the team’s trust in each other wavers as the narrative progresses, despite my combat understanding and finesse improving. I feel like the game probably would have benefitted from one or two more battles and free-roam sections in the early game to let players get a feel for the mechanics, characters, and stakes - especially before the fourth battle - but I imagine that was a budget or time limitation issue. TLDR: I feel really bad for leaving a negative review, because when this game is at its best, it’s REALLY good. I genuinely enjoyed Troubadour’s character, and there’s a conversation towards the end of the game between Dreamer and Lighthouse about the nature of friendship and connection which moved me on a personal level. The gameplay is a perfect mix of fun, distinct, and challenging which kept me playing even as it became increasingly clear that most of my questions about the world or its characters would go unanswered. The environment design is beautiful in a way that’s unlike anything I’ve seen before and I really want to see more art like it. It’s these moments of polished brilliance that make the loose ends feel all the more unsatisfying because the potential for greatness is CLEARLY there!! Overall though, even if Starweave wasn’t quite what I hoped it’d be, I genuinely look forward to seeing what this team and its members make in the future. PS: There’s a party menu, but the game never tells you that it exists or how to find it. It’s accessible with J and tab. It’s pretty fun, but I would have never known about it if I hadn’t read the dev logs.