Stars Die was an impressive début by Eric Juvi and his team. Mechanically it has lots of things that remind me of a mix between Outer Wilds and Sentient with the obvious fact that this is a necessarily more restrained experience coming from an independent developer. Having played it once before in 2022, and with 5 more endings to go, this was a game that stuck in the memory as one to replay in the future.
Immediately you’re off to a great start, with little information as to why you’re on a boat that’s heading into the strangest island you’ve ever seen. You soon discover this strange island is already a base for some sort of scientific research. How you get out is now your choice (fuel’s out, by the way).
The gimmick here is both the real time clock, as well as a conversation system that attempts to be very skeptical of what NPCs tell you and, for that reason, appears less game-y and more realistic. Being able to second-guess or operate in a way that’s different from video game logic gives you more freedom in how to rationalize your approach to the story even if the end result is more or less the same and sooner or later you are forced to make a decision and suffer its consequences story-wise.
The meat of the game, that warrants multiple playthroughs, are the interactions, motives and schedules of the 4 NPCs and yourself as the main character and, in a way, the island itself. For this reason the characters are complex. Even though you might only have one or two conversations with each, they have their specific reasons and motivations for being on the island, and for wanting or not wanting to leave it. This gives them a lot of depth and, in a way, you end up being able to relate to each and everyone of them. They all have specific schedules that happen at determinate times. You can make use of a radio to know where each character is, or even to set up a meeting somewhere at a certain time, and characters will traverse the island in real time to that destination.
One unfortunate aspect of the game that is needlessly confusing is traversing the world. The island is, of course, quite weird, yet your movement is more akin to a speed racer on a Wipeout track, and you glide away through confusing and quite long tracks (for lack of a better term) as you attempt to reach the designated area you are supposed to get to. Should you fall off a cliff, no problem, you just keep walking on – and feel free to take comically large jumps. This breaks immersion even though you might accept that perhaps reality’s rules do not apply in this place. I can understand this choice as a way to let you freely explore the strange world and to add time and distance between places but, in pratical terms, and because you’ll be replaying the game, you end up feeling like you’re doing laps following the other characters around the map. I feel, for this type of game, it would probably be beneficial to have a different approach to character tracking or perhaps better defined areas, like a text adventure.
A relaxed playthrough, pondering over the story and taking in the lo-fi vistas will hardly take an hour. In the end, most of the gameplay is centered around about 4 or 5 key conversations and travelling between where these happen. Even though the island is mysterious, it’s not overwhelmingly large. The characters themselves may have a lot to say, but they will only talk about matters at hand. There is also a decent amount of secrets, especially considering the scope of this game, that you’ll need to discover to see all endings. The story, perhaps because this game came out in 2020, focus somewhat on doom through life, on the unknown and on paradigm shifts. As you go through each playthrough and explore different options you get the full picture and realize a lot about yourself – and by this I mean not only your character, which is as mysterious as the island, but your own self as a person.
This is perhaps the game’s biggest virtue and the one that made it so interesting. As you peel away the story you discover that people are indeed complex, that perhaps these 5 characters are 5 personality traits, 5 little voices in your head, that all are valid and that are not dogmatic, they second-guess themselves. This perhaps shows, in the end, that we can only solve complex problems and go through crises when we hear everyone out and understand each others’ actions and motivations. Notably, when faced with the same problem, people react differently, whether because they gauge risk differently or because of their own sense of self. Thus, as a message that could only be conveyed through interactive media, it’s become game as art.
What we have on offer here, then, is an intriguing, replayable, experience worth more than its price of admission. An inquest into personality when push comes to shove and, on a more base level, a satisfying exploration of a complex but contained sf story. For these reasons, and unless you need gameplay with more action than introspection, it’s hard not to recommend this one.
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