Stellar bewitching is a free, lighthearted RPG maker game, perfect for some casual unwinding. The story and the characters are not that serious. If the text wouldn’t make that clear enough, the derpy portraits surely make the intention of the creator(s) obvious – you are supposed to have a silly ride, with no need for seriousness.
At the early fights there will be only two party members, and those fights will be somewhat challenging. Later on the party extends to 3 then finally to 4. There are several skills, opening up some variations. But in most cases I just stuck to the “optimal” setup – applying all the buffs and debuffs, and casting the double action on Elya, the protagonist, who was responsible for the healing and protection. On longer fights I mostly forgot to keep up some buffs / debuffs. Those are shown on small cycling circular icons for each effect (positive or negative). In the first half of the game you will have to figure out the weaknesses of the enemies through trial and error. Once learned, they will be shown later on. Eventually you will be able to just scan for them, in a single step for all enemies.
The graphics of the game are nice enough. Most main characters will be derpy. There is a reasonable variety of enemies, mostly fantasy creatures. The backgrounds will be a bit barebone, a few levels barely more than some corridors with a few buttons to press. Speaking about buttons, there will be a few puzzles to solve in the game. They are easy to figure out, so it won’t be an obstacle for the playthrough. The game played in a fixed size windows, perhaps 16:9 and 720 lines? I didn’t even bother with finding out the built in full screen options, just upscaled it through Losless Scaling. Strangely, the window caption remained in the upscaled image, usually that doesn’t happen. For such a casual experience, I just went on with that.
The background music was good enough, the main style being synth-pop I guess. As far as I remember, there was no voice acting, not even some acknowledgement lines, unlike the preview of BlueSkies 3.
There are vendors in the game. Throughout the game it was no problem to keep up with the consumables, I had plenty of money for that. Almost till the final boss fight I didn’t even had to use the higher tier consumables, the normal ones served well enough. Similarly, the lower cost talents were plenty enough for the fights. Only in the final boss fight did I resort to the ridiculously high cost skills, and the high tier consumables. Gear management won’t be problem, all weapons are just straight upgrades for their specific characters.
I played the game with the keyboard, being away from my home computer with a controller. While you can redefine the keys, the numpad wasn’t allowed as the target for that. I use Num5 for forward, so the backed in Num8 forward wasn’t good for me. For longer games I would probably set up an Autohotkey mapping to resolve it, but for this short game I just used the arrow keys and enter/space.
The game can be saved from the party management menu, out of fights. There are 20 manual save slots. You can load straight away from that menu too, no need to exit to the title screen just for that – not that I ever had to use it.
The whole game took me a bit more than 5 hours, though I missed the optional fight. I guess that was before the nightmare boss fight. I even saw the stars which probably lead to it, but decided to first kill the big monster, and pursue those stars after that. As it happens, after killing that boss I got transported out of the nightmare – the existence of the door behind it mislead me.
So why did I play this game? I was actually searching for Stellar blade, and found out that it was still not ported to Steam. But a free RPG maker game showed up instead for typing in “stellar b”. Checking out the reviews, it was around 4 hour, perfect for my final vacation day after new years eve, away from my computer. Since I played this game for free, I wishlisted Blueskies 3 from the developer. When on cheap on a summer or winter sale, I will probably buy it, even if I won’t play it.
The game was stable for me, it didn’t crash.
