The Starship Damrey (3DS eShop) Review

A common complaint with game design today is just how accommodating it seems to be – it’s rare that we can boot up a game and not be told how to do every single thing in the game, as well as when to. The Starship Damrey is a game that is apparently meant to eschew this modern game design philosophy and instead drop the player into a cold situation and let them do all of the thinking and the work to reach the end result. The first part of LEVEL-5’s Guild02 collection, The Starship Damrey is available for a little over ten dollars exclusively on the eShop. So, despite the low price and the “free” approach to gameplay, is The Starship Damrey worth your hard earned coins or not?

The Starship Damrey opens with a rather solemn message telling the player that they will not be guided and will have to work things out for themselves. You, the player, wake up inside a cold storage pod aboard the Damrey, a starship. After some inspection, you realise that there is no chance of escape and that the systems have failed, trapping you inside the pod. Following some tinkering with the electronics, you take control of a maintenance robot and use it to explore the ship to discover what has happened to the ship and why you’re trapped where you are.

Despite being marketed as a horror suspense game, I personally didn’t find Starship Damrey all that frightening though I will admit that it is a very tense affair. It’s worth mentioning that despite being rated PG in Australia, the game does it’s best to offer a creepy experience without resorting to the usual blood and gore and it does this in a very good way. The story as a whole is interesting to piece together, though not all questions will be answered and it’s not going to be told without piecing it together either. This is good for most players from an older generation, but newer players might be put off by having to actually remember things told to the player (rather than the game recording them or recalling them when they are needed).

The game plays like a very simplistic adventure game – the robot you control can move on a grid like plane and only the immediate front of the robot is viewable. This not only adds to the sense of claustrophobia when navigating the dark corridors of the Damrey, but also ramps up the tension of what is up ahead – you literally will not see anything until it’s right in front of you. The way the tension ramps up without using much noise (and of course, in space) reminds me a lot of the original Alien film. Add to this a creepy young girl and you’ve got a recipe for horror. Items are interacted with rather simplistically and the puzzles, if we can even call them that, are very easy to get through.

The adventure isn’t very long either – it won’t take players any more than four hours to unravel the mysteries of the Damrey although the payoff is kind of worth it, but as I said previously it will vary between player to player. Once the game is completed, there’s not really much more to do. Those who bought a Guild01 game previously will have access to a new story that further expands the universe, which is nice, but ultimately lacks too much impact on the main story. The variety isn’t really there either – this game barely uses the touchscreen to its full potential and instead is something that (I dare say) could even be featured on a Gameboy (bar the graphics, of course).

The presentation is very basic, though its bleak artistic design admittedly works well in combination with the very bleak and desolate atmosphere. The robot animates rather jarringly too, though that is probably the way a robot should be. The Starship Damrey looks good, does its job rather well at conveying an atmosphere, but visually it’s just nothing super impressive.

All in all, The Starship Damrey is a very short experience that builds atmosphere and tension perfectly, with a story good enough to experience at least once. But, despite this, I can’t help but feel it’s hard to recommend the game to someone for a price as exorbitant as $10. The experience is great, and I really enjoyed it, but it feels more like an interactive story book rather than a game itself. If you’re aware of that, then jump into Starship Damrey without any hesitation. If that’s not your thing, then it’s probably better to stay here on Earth.