Recent reviews by Titon

Look, I was having a blast with this game for about an hour or so.

Then I got to the stupid water level. Died repeatedly for an hour or so on the same 4 or 5 screens. A checkpoint somewhere in the middle might have made it tolerable - hell, maybe there is one, but I couldn't be arsed to keep trying to explore and drowning half the time cause, yay, it's not a checkpoint, nor is there any area for you to try to catch your breath and drop the leeches, it's just a dead end that you can't swim back from without drowning! Again!

So, I just gave up. In games, you can get fun difficult, and stupid difficult; start of the game is firmly in the first category, but I couldn't bring myself to continue trying to power through the stupid difficult part.

I have a strict "don't buy games in early access" policy. I caved and bought this one to give it a try.

That was late Wednesday (seems it had just come out too). Now it's early Friday, I'm standing at 18 hours played, and I'm very glad I waivered my policy.

Yeah, it's a difficult game. Yeah, it lacks a tutorial and that makes it even harder. Try a couple of games, fail hard, go read a beginner's guide, then try again. I promise it will click.

Most reviews mention this being "RimWorld meets FTL" and it's pretty bang on, if you like both you'll probably dig this one, though it is much more RW than FTL. It succeeds at what to me is the biggest flaw in RimWorld: pacing. While I spent hundreds of hours building unnecessarily complicated fortresses in Dwarf Fortress, in RW after a couple hours in a map I feel like I don't have anything else interesting to do. It's now a boring game of amassing resources so I can get to some arbitrary end game tech (never got to that point but I assume the objective of RW is building a ship and buggering off).

In that regard, ST feels like DF: I'm building a ship just for the sake of building a ship, and it's fun to do it and there is always something I'm aiming to do. Resources are hard to come by, research takes a long time (which is possibly what makes RW reach end point so fast), so your ship will be ragtag for a long time before it starts getting powerful enough to stand up to enemies. Stars are a pain in the ass, mostly because your pawns are kinda stupid regarding putting out fires sometimes, but once you learn to set up so you vent areas of your ship while crossing stars it becomes an interesting addition to the challenge of designing your ship.

It has a lot of things that are not as good as DF and RW (pawn psychology is very simplistic and they have little skills, save scumming is very easy), but it does other things better, which makes it worth the try for fans of the genre. As far as early access goes it's not the buggiest by a long mile - had one crash once while loading a save, paws sometimes get stuck trying to perform a job - but it's definitely not an impediment to making the game enjoyable.

Best thing to happen to the adventure genre in the last 20 years

Short, but a beautiful homage to the evolution of games over the year. Does the job of showing said evolution with a decent dose of humour and nice gameplay. The only negative point I'd make is the inclusion of the horrible Final Fantasy mechanics (i.e. random encounters and boring combat), but at least there is much more to the game than just that.

Kinda nice art, but is just a waste of half an hour and a few quid

This is awesome. PLAY IT!

I have always yearned for a game that dealt with insanity well. This game has satiated that thirst. For now :B Seriously, play this, it's pretty good.

Achievement unlocked - Waste money on a crappy 13 year old game.

Possibly the best horror experience I ever had. Or the least sucky, it's hard to tell since horror games are pretty awful at the "horror" part.

An interesting way to tell a story. A pretty dark one too, in a Game of Thrones kinda way.