Metroidvania Meets VR in Star Child, Short Demo at PAX East!
PAX East 2018 has begun, and so has Stack-Up’s coverage of the convention! In the short hour of media access to the convention floor, one of the games that caught Stack-Up’s attention was an indie game called Star Child, created by Playful Corp. and GameTrust. The game was announced back in last year’s Paris Games Week, and while there doesn’t seem to be much info out about the game, what’s present at PAX East shows a lot of promise.
In a nut shell, Star Child seems to be a sci-fi Metroidvania in which the main character Spectra finds herself on a planet consumed with beings intent on destroying the world around them. With the help of some powerful allies (including a giant one-eyed machine on the cover art), Spectra must defend the friendly inhabitants of this planet by possessing the ancient weapons scattered around the world, and fight back against these overwhelming foes.
The premise sounds like hundreds of other games that have released before it, and hundreds more that will come after, but the plot wasn’t what caught Stack-Up’s attention. What interested us was the fact that this game’s located in the PlayStation VR booth at PAX East. Star Child appears to be a VR Metroidvania! The controls act just like any other platformer, but with the surprising (and slightly dizzying) twist of getting an extended view of the world outside the typical board of a platformer.
Star Child clearly appears to be in its early development, but even in this early stage the game’s art style is showing some great potential. The variety of color pallets used from the desert scenes to the mechanical caves are made only more marvelous with the over-encompassing vision. While the developers don’t drive you mad with a full 360 degrees of game, those extra details beyond the players peripherals show that the developers have put a lot of work into this project.
Music is rather subtle until the enemy’s grand entrance, but helps build the environment as something beautiful, but abandoned. Spectra has no friends to call on yet, no responsibilities but to unlock the massive machine deep within a cave.
The biggest complaint with this demo is its length: a few rooms with simple puzzles (so short they might as well be timed in blinks) and the whole thing’s over. The demo is more of a tease than a taste, but what’s present has the promise of something great in the near future. With any luck, Stack-Up will be able to play a more developed demo of Star Child either later this year, or in 2019.