I have to admit, I’m a sucker for a good mystery to uncover in a game. And to that end, I saw a lot of promise in this title when I picked it up for cheap money. I knew it wasn’t going to be a big game, but I was looking forward to figuring it all out. This week I was on a family vacation, and since I knew downtime would be fairly minimal, I decided such a short game would fit that little bit of time here and there well. Well, it did that, but not much else…
Story: You woke up in a chamber barely large enough to lay down in and with no memories. The interfaces inside the box were not working right, leaving you stuck. But all is not lost, for a little work on the software can restore it to functionality so the OS can reboot and let you know what is going on.
Your ship has been damaged and the atmosphere outside your chamber is too low to be safe for it to open. With no one coming, it’s up to you to use the few remaining maintenance bots functioning on board to fix things up enough to get out and, depending on what you find onboard, get help or escape the Damrey.
This basic premise will guide your entire adventure aboard the ship. The game is generally very straight forward, so do not expect much in the way of twists or turns. It is also a very simple plot with few details scattered about the world to discover as you play. In fact just about all the important details of your adventure will be revealed only as you finish the game and after the credits play. Which is a shame, because there is a lot of detail that, had the game trickled it through the details in the game or things you could find within them, would have been far more effective.
But while the game leaves a lot in the story-telling to be desired, the total story is a nice neat little package.
7/10
Graphics: In the past, Max and I have argued about whether another game (Doom 3) was a good game. I argued for it and enjoyed the atmosphere while he argued about limited weapons (which I never experienced), a slower pace, and most importantly, how dark the game is. I can not say I agree about Doom 3, but I do have to level this complaint at Starship Damrey. Most of this game is played in the first person perspective of the maintenance robot you control by remote through a dimly lite set of corridors and rooms. And by dim, I mean anything from you can barely see the walls a few yards ahead (aside from bright green and red panels and the correlating glow of doors) to literally pitch darkness to the point you will rely on bringing up your map just to get around the room. This game is DARK to the point of detriment of gameplay.
And it is a real shame too. With the understanding of the limitations of the 3DS hardware, this game actually looks pretty good when you are allowed to see it. The whole thing properly gives the vibe of an abandoned ship with few to no survivors. It feels desolate, and while hallways are repetitive, different areas actually have different looks to them, giving a much more varied, but at the same time unified look when you get close enough to see through the darkness. But the fact that I have to specialize like that is a first and I simply can not approve of it.
4/10
Sound: There is almost no music in Starship Damrey. You get a little bit in the title screen and end credits and even a couple cut-scenes have music as well, but almost all the sound you will hear in this game is the treads of your robot and the clicks of the various choices menu selections you will need to make, resulting in an overall primitive sounding game.
Not that this is literally all you will hear. From time to time the AI will speak to you. And while these are rare they sounds very clear concise and perfect for an AI voice interface. There are maybe two other voices in total, but they are very limited and only at the end.
5/10
Gameplay: While the game is played from a first person perspective, Starship Damrey is much more akin to point-and-click titles then this would suggest. You will move around in a very grid-like manner as you examine everything in your mission to free your real self from your protective chamber. You will be given no hints outside of what you can find for yourself, leading you to investigate at your speed. Your only restriction in this way is you do not have an inventory so much as a single hand/arm in the robot you are controlling. As such you can only hold one item at a time. The game is designed to well enough, however, that you won’t ever get stuck for carrying the wrong item, which I will admit was a concern I had as I started this game.
However, this game does have other issues. While you move in a grid form, when you switch to looking around you get full movement of your camera within the range it can turn on your robot. This allows you to scan your environment far easier, but the game often demands you look from exactly the right position to see something is scannable/interactable. As a result, the game’s mechanics artificially create a new kind of “pixel hunt” where you need to be in the correct position before you will be allowed to find a potentially necessary item to progress the game. This happened to me multiple times during the very short game. One in particular convinced me the game was broken since I could see the legs of the guy who had his ID in his pocket, but wasn’t allowed to scan for it, not because I was too far away (I could scan his body and head for what cause his death and identity respectively), but because I needed to be exactly across from the locker he fell out of (which ironically put me further away from what I was trying to scan). And considering how linear this game has to be to accommodate for the lack of inventory, this really should never have been an issue.
4/10
Bugs: I can not say there were any actual bugs in this game. It ran perfect and liquid smooth.
Overall: I can not recommend this game. Seriously that is about what I can say about this game. It’s short, linear, doesn’t have any particularly tough puzzles, but it makes itself difficult by a very finnicky scan system that makes an even more obnoxious version of the classic “pixel hunt” issue old point-and-click games have. Add to this a plot which is just dropped on you as a “reward” at the end rather then discovered as you play and there is just not much here to like. The game is cheap, sure, but let’s just say I still feel a little cheated.
Score:
4/10
Source: Nintendo Game store
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