I wish there was a so-so rating because I'd give this game that, but as it stands, the achievement progression tells you all: people don't make it through this game even though it's pretty easy and straight forward. perhaps that speaks for itself.
63 Minutes. That was exploring every corner and niche. This game is a very linear labyrinth of sounds and lights and colors but a lot of repetition. The story is very minimal but pretty much the majority of the uniqueness in the game. You'll find yourself spending an hour going through the same hallways and rooms, maybe with minimal variation. The stamina and health bar are for very minor chase parts of the game. Otherwise, they're pretty annoying since the dev decided to also control when you can use them, speeding up and slowing down the game as their own punctuation to the story. The initial video shows your character as having absolutely hilariously massive hands, not sure why that happened. I would want to be supportive of an indie dev and small studio, but not all stories should be told and not all games should be made. STARBO really should be a demo at best. It's good to learn to sell your work, but this work was underwhelming. Lastly, the ending was pretty ridiculous. Sure, [spoiler]the ending is set up by the mention of confronting the creatures of the dark or nightmares or whatever in hopes that it wakes us up, but that last thing came out of nowhere.[/spoiler] Maybe that would make sense if the dev was trying to be comedic with the whole thing, but typically you want consistency across a story. All in all, it's clear that they tried to put in work with a team and got support from family and friends, they got themselves and their game out there. I know countless indie devs that struggle to make that leap. However, the jump scares were mostly annoying and forced in an underwhelming way, the lack of variety for such a short game was a bit disappointing, and a lot of the excessive lights and abrupt audio transitions could have been toned down.
All in all, I'm not sure what to make of STARBO - The Story of Leo Cornell. It felt like Leo really didn't have a story. All achievements are simply for story progression. You literally get 4 achievements for watching the intro video....the definition of Achievement is: "a thing done successfully, typically by effort, courage, or skill."
Since the only way to fail at these "achievements" is to simply not progress the story, I would not call these achievements. Maybe the dev could have added one for finding an interesting thing here, pursuing a path there, never getting caught by something chasing you, or a million other things that would have actually been achievements. The first choo choo train is missable, that could have been a thing?
Anyways, I've already spent 20% of the time it took me to play this game writing the review for it.
Feedback for the dev, David, and Diax Arts: If you're going to continue pursuing game dev, take a critical look at this game, the feedback you received from it, and how it fits into different genres and quality levels for games. For future ones: one of the most frustrating things with a walking simulator is not being able to control movement in expected ways. This game could have been maybe 15 minutes worth of gameplay without the stamina bar and if the player could simply toggle sprint. The walk vs run mechanic did not feel satisfying like it could have, it was just frustrating. Also, the unique warning at the beginning about "games can be dangerous for you" or whatever it was is the type of thing that's a clear red flag that's saying that the dev did something unique that will likely be abrasive instead of enjoyable. That was very much the case here. Other devs and studios put up a boiler plate version of that and then don't do wonky stuff in their game. Maybe there's flashing or abrupt cut scenes or even scary shocking things, but they don't blind their users by crazy intense lighting and effects.
If gamedev is something you want to pursue, don't give up. Often times the first thing that we do: our first blog, video, project, etc is crap, and if we keep going and learning and growing and mastering our art, we get better. Unfortunately, some people persist but don't deliberately strive to improve, and they simply attempt to impose their art on the world, other people give up before they even try.
It's up to you to make that choice.
