The trailer for Acme Game Studios’ debut offering, Asterigos: Curse of the Stars really stood out. The game’s combination of bold cartoony characters and sprawling Greco-Roman inspired locations wrapped up in some kind of action-RPG package looked right up my alley. Though the game can sometimes be its own worst enemy, it’s only a quality-of-life patch away from being excellent and on release day the developers were already posting plans to address specific issues players had pointed out, so I’ve no doubt the kinks will be worked out.
Asterigos stars Hilda, a young warrior from Anbari’s Northwind Legion, on a mission in a strange land to locate the rest of her legion, lost after being sent to find a cure for a mysterious curse afflicting their king. Aphes has been under a curse called Asterigos for 1000 years. Its citizens have been stuck. No one ages, they’ve all turned purple, and they must consume a mystical element, starite, in order to stay sane. Worst of all Anbari’s king has been afflicted, after acquiring a rare relic. With the Northwind legion missing, Hilda has to dive headlong into the thousand year long history of Asterigos to find her lost comrades, cure the king, and ultimately save the people of Aphes from themselves.
Gameplay consists of exploration, combat, and leveling up, all of which is very solid. The exploration and combat controls are fluid, there are all sorts of interesting skills to learn and lots of enemy types to fight. It even features a “story” (easy) difficulty for people like me who don’t much care for the nuances of parrying or boss fights at all. Exploring Aphes is mostly a smooth experience; climbable surfaces are marked, and the controls are really good, but falling into a bottomless pit (which is easy to do when sprinting around the levels) results in respawning to a checkpoint with all the enemies also respawning, rather than simply taking health and resetting player location, as most modern games do. It’s very annoying and another quality-of-life improvement that I’d like to see.
The game’s visual style is very striking, well realized, and cohesive. The characters and locations are colorful, bold, and cartoony making the game stand out from similar games. It’s also much tamer than many similar action games, having only a “Teen” ESRB rating. The style becomes especially interesting in light of the tone getting considerably darker as the game progresses, while the bold cartoony style remains consistent.
There are some technical issues, though, that hamper the style and gameplay somewhat. The game seems to render at 1080p on PS5 and enemy frame rates inexplicably scale down when they’re far away, so hopefully that can be patched. Up close, combat animations look great, and most of the running and jumping looks really fluid but a few of the character “emotes” while in conversations look straight out of a 2000s free-to-play RPG and Hilda’s jog animation is distractingly odd.
Though Asterigos’s story is technically “save the world,” it’s a foreign “world” about which the main character knows almost nothing that needs saving, and it works really well. There is a wealth of backstory to discover, the main narrative twists and turns, and the cast of characters are interesting and surprisingly multidimensional. In order to really dive into the world, though, you have to hunt through levels for scraps of paper and talk to everyone.
Doing so reveals not only the history of Aphes, but leads to side quests and character upgrades along the way. Unfortunately, the need to dive into conversations isn’t well explained and side quest-related dialog is mixed in with general conversations with no indicators to tell you which characters to talk to, which dialog options to choose for side quests, or if a character has anything new, and quest-relevant to say. It’s part of the biggest problem with the game; It’s almost impossible to track side quests, to the point where, near the end of the game, I had to abandon some.
The idea seems to be to reflect Hilda’s lack of knowledge of Aphes in the gameplay, which is initially really novel. There is no map, Hilda keeps track of everything in a journal of sketches and writing, and fast travel is gradually introduced, forcing the player to explore and begin to understand Aphes’ geography before being able to teleport everywhere. It’s very rewarding to stumble upon a new area in a labyrinthine quarter of Aphes. However, what Hilda writes in the journal is largely useless for actual quest tracking, the game features no quest log, and characters won’t repeat dialog lines telling you where to go so you end up needlessly traipsing through levels over and over again trying to figure out where a certain important item is used. This has no effect on the main quest, though, which is clearly tracked for the whole game, but completionists will get annoyed and should probably wait for a few patches.
Asterigos: Curse of the stars is a bit rough at present and it may seem like I’m down on it. That’s partly because it’s so close to being great that the annoyances really grate, because there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the game, and most of it is novel and excellent. Once the developers improve side quest tracking and clean up a few technical issues, it’ll be pretty close to an essential play!
A copy of Asterigos: Curse of the Stars was provided for this review.
