I'm a massive sci fi nerd and a pervert so this was purchased as a Christmas gift for me.
I wanted to like Stargazers, I really did. The premise is neat sounding - it's supposed to be a self contained story in a retro-kitsch future with a pulp feel to it. Front and center is the relationship between two human women and a female-gendered biometallic polyamorous space elf. Intriguingly the story allows you to switch perspectives at certain points. Ideally this adds replayability to the game, as well as giving some flexibility to how the story gets told.
Unfortunately the game falls short on several levels.
On a technical level the game, though it has no crash issues, has several problems that should have been fixed at the time of this review. The game came out on the 4th of November, 2016. As I write this it is the 6th of February, 2017. At a certain point in the game assets the game tried to load simply weren't found, and the game continued for a while with an error message in the corner. At another point the game seemed to simply not load any character images for what seemed to be a perfectly normal sequence, leaving nothing but the background. While the game eventually 'popped' back to normal, I was completely unsure if what had just happened was a technical error or simply an unfinished scene.
There are also grammar and spelling errors at a frequency which is disappointing considering reading text is what you do all game, including spelling the name of the ship incorrectly. I can understand errors like these happening and the aforementioned technical problems existing during the initial launch, but they should have been patched by now. Out of curiousity I clicked the help button to see what it was and it opened a text file with an email address. Okay.
The perspective mechanic works correctly; however I found myself sticking mostly with one character, with a few scattered switch-ups. Unfortunately this ended up limiting perspective, as what seemed to be major, exciting events happened entirely off-screen because I had selected the wrong person. While this might have been ok (sometimes it pays to be alone with a character and their thoughts), it becomes clear that the character is usually informed of major parts of what happened without the player necessarily finding out, making random references utterly meaningless if I hadn't selected a certain perspective.
And now that I've dealt with the mechanics, I can really get into the story. The most glaring problem is that the game ends after interesting things have finally begun to happen, both in terms of world-building and relationship progression. The game ends up feeling like playing through the first act of story, except that random paragraphs on each page disappear and reappear because of the perspective mechanic. And then it ends.
I'm concerned that what happened was an attempt to feel very 'pulpy' without consideration for how well done pulp (or more recent pulp inspired media) plays out. For a modern example, Pulp Fiction has many stand-alone stories that intertwine and weave through perspectives, but the story comes full circle due to the non-linear narrative, filling itself in. The sort of fulfillment of a stand alone didn't happen and I'm unsure how much different perspectives can consistently offer. The other, somewhat less recent example would be Star Trek - The Original Series, and the game does have a certain pseudo-episodic feel to it over a somewhat vague amount of time. The problem here is that TOS episodes were still full stories in and off themselves, and also had a lack of actual major character development as a feature - TOS characters were archetypal. Stargazers characters are not, unless they are secondary, which means no matter what I always felt like I was missing out on important events or inner monologues, and actually did aside from brief references. The game would have been better served with a more traditional structure that allowed focus. Imagine if you cut a TOS episode down to scenes that exclusively featured a selected character. Gonna make for some really lopsided and weirdly paced episodes.
The 'romantic' plot also seems much too easily 'solved' and devoid of any kind of heat. Should the threat of a love triangle be boring even if constrained to one perspective?
"So replay the game" you might say. Unfortunately I can't say I feel like it. My playtime is inflated because I privately streamed it to a handful of friends and insisted on voice acting every role (in part because of an uncomfortable lack of music and sound effects), but even if it had taken less time, there's just not enough interesting going on. There is the hint of interesting things developing, both in terms of the setting and in terms of the relationships the game is supposed to be about, and I mean that in totality - whether you wanted the story to feel like a somewhat real presentation of a relationship or something really gratuitous and deliciously sleazy and thrilling, you won't find it here. The game ends before it's even finished getting to first base with you.
Some might chalk this up to censoring, but I have to question that since there's ample opportunity to raise heat and stakes without being too over the top. In the steam version, the developers removed the bulk of the 'cg' pictures and the scenes where they would come into play are simply skipped over or worse - the player is faced with a black screen and the text to read. From what was linked to me, some of the cg is pretty tame regardless (though some isn't, though it's nothing too wild still) and already exceeded by all kinds of non-romance games. The developers stated on the forum that there's no patch to "uncensor" the steam version to avoid competing with the site where they do sell the uncensored version. I don't know the fine details of such a choice were so I won't guess.
However this presents a major problem in that sex and sexuality is a major part of both relationships and personality, particularly given the thrust of the story and the 'resolution'. Either there was no character development made through any kind of deleted content, which utterly squanders many opportunities, or there was character development which was removed. What's left is clumsy and unconvincing of libido or romance.
As for the art while I didn't find it horrible I wasn't sold on mecha design and the character art felt unevenly done.
It's a shame. There's bits of neat stuff seen through the cramped windows, but the shuttle ride is over before it hits escape velocity.
