![]() Getting from one point to the other, of course, requires fuel. You travel from location to location, analysing it before stationing the ship there in order to explore for resources, or interact with the people and areas that move the plot forward. You’ll be spending the majority of your time in this game on your ship. So let’s start with the main component of gameplay in this title. ![]() However, with Opus: Echo of Starsong I think that a different approach is necessary. I look at the setting, who our protagonist is, and their motivations. Usually when I write a review I start with the story. Instead becoming one of the most fully realised worlds I’ve had the pleasure of engaging with in a long time. It skirts the line of being overwhelming at times, but never crosses that threshold. ![]() Opus: Echo of Starsong is positively oozing with lore, backstory and exposition. The Nintendo Switch version of Opus: Echo of Starsong – Full Bloom Edition was provided and played for the purposes of this review.It’s been a while since I’ve played a game with this much effort put into worldbuilding. Release Date: (Nintendo Switch), 1 September 2021 (PC) Opus: Echo of Starsong is a very particular kind of game, but when you give your time to it fully, it’s a rewarding and wonderful experience. The narrative pace here is one of a slow burn – Echo of Starsong has genuine care for its characters and setting, and sets its moments of hope and heartbreak against a gorgeous score of strings and choirs.Įven moments spent floating quietly outside each uniquely designed station, tomb, or cave can be beautiful, as the starscape shifts in the nether and violins swoon softly through your headphones. Beyond the games fairly simplistic expressions of management and exploration gameplay, it’s the story that is the true draw. has crafted and grown the Opus series since 2016’s OPUS: The Day We Found Earth and 2018’s OPUS: Rocket of Whispers, games which both carry a similar melancholic, emotional tone into the subject of life among the stars.Įcho of Starsong too, is a slow, thoughtful rumination of memory and remembrance. It speaks to the love with which developer Sigono Inc. Much of the narrative itself is told as though it were long past, a subtle yet effective choice by the writers. The amount of extra information you can glean about the past, present and future of Thousand Peaks is impressive, on top of the writing of the main plot. In keeping with its constant allusions to the past, Echo of Starsong frequently hides items and other flavour text around the environment for the player to discover. The ‘puzzles’ which sometimes appear in Echo of Starsong’s description crop up as either simply matching the correct star-song to whatever machine is in front of you, or sometimes ‘tuning’ the song, matching the radial markings on enormous doors and pump systems. There are space station visits, which expand the broader lore of the game, and 2.5D side-scrolling exploration moments wherein Jun uses the titular starsongs (harnessed and amplified by Eda) to open doors and operate ancient machinery deep within the bowels of the asteroids that make up Thousand Peaks. There’s a spacefaring and resource management mode set against a gorgeous galactic map screen – which also presents narrative moments of risk, like whether to help a drifting ship, with the risk of there being pirates aboard. Gameplay in Echo of Starsong splits its time between a few modes. Read: Everything announced during the May 2022 Nintendo Indie World – Opus, Soundfall, Wayward Strand, and more He’s pathetic in some ways, sympathetic in others, and like many other anime game protagonists, has a good heart, and values friendship.Īfter the opening hours of the game see Jun lose both his travelling companion and his broader purpose for travelling to Thousand Peaks in the first place, he teams up with a duo of witches, Eda and Remi, to continue to explore caves in the sector, an activity known as ‘running’, in which teams can be contracted to retrieve lumen for their wealthy employers. Jun is a spiralling, desperate young man stuck playing by the rules of a society that positively relishes every chance to flex the power of autocracy over the weak. A disgraced scion of a low-level family dynasty many sectors away, Jun has come to regain his family’s meagre pride and status by laying claim to as many of the lumen-rich caves in Thousand Peaks as he can.
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