Star Story: The Horizon Escape

Review

You have been sent by the Archaeological Society to the Planet Horizon to find an ancient artefact, The Generation Database. You’ve been preparing yourself for months for this incredible and daring mission. What comes next wasn’t part of your training. Upon reaching Horizon, your spaceship experiences extreme stress. A powerful force takes control of your vessel and drags it at full speed towards its surface. In fact, the only way to survive is to use the escape pod. From here, every decision you make is important to your story, The Star Story: The Horizon Escape.

Star Story: The Horizon Escape is a combination of a 2D adventure / visual novel / and turn based style of fighting. Your goal is to find the Ancient Generation Database Artefact.

As you start the game, you’ll go through a quick background of the story and take on a few bots to enhance your fighting abilities. Then the story progress rather rapidly and you find yourself in the pod making decisions. Every decision you make from that point on will go towards three of your character’s threads, which are: resolve, insight and goodwill. These threads are crucial as they’ll give you access to new abilities further down the track. There are actually 24 different tracks and endings to discover.

The gameplay is pretty much a combination of a visual novel (without endless texts), turned-based fighting scenes (very short), and crafting and upgrading your inventory at your base. As the story progresses, you’ll be prompted to make some decisions and this is where you’ll accumulate points towards your character’s threads. You must accumulate a certain number of points to be able to upgrade your character threads. Bear in mind that your first walkthrough will be around one to two hours. At the time of writing this review, I am in my third walkthrough.  The beauty is that you’ll never lose what you have accumulated in terms of threads from your previous gameplay. Thank God! The enemies are progressively harder to eliminate in each play through. Yes, some of the decisions will lead you to battles. Your hero and his enemies will each have a gauge. These gauges have three aspects in them; orange is health, green is armour, blue is the shield and each section will have a number allocated to it. For example, you might fight a sand shrimp which could have 10 points on the health section and 10 points on the shield. And of course, you must use the correct weapon to destroy the shield before sending the shrimp to an eternal barbie. After each encounter, you’ll collect resources which you can use to upgrade or craft additional items and weapons at your base.

In terms of enemies, I personally like the sand shrimp. You’ll fight against bandits, bots, pigmy and a few others!

What happens when you finish your first play through? Well, you’ll keep your character’s thread points and restart the story when you’re in the escape pod.  Then, depending on your choice, you might be on your way to finding the next ending.

This is truly an enjoyable game to play. The combination of reading, making choices, turn-based fighting and crafting is well-proportioned, and the fact that you have 24 endings to discover gives the game great re-playability.  

Great 2D graphics and a good soundtrack, too. This game is very easy to get into!