Witch cards will drop: Steredenn

I spent way too much money in October (hint: Chicago is expensive) and now I need to get my ass in gear for the Christmas sale! And what place does one take one's ass for the Christmas sale: That's right, grinding on cards. While I idle most of the cruddier games that have cards, there's a ton of good, or at least good looking games that can be short reviewed for fun and cards. And everyone loves selling cards.

One advantage to playing a lot of games is getting to see the filtering of ideas, or even hypothetical parallel evolution. That is to say when designs are not influenced by each other, but rather arrive to the same design conclusion independently. It makes gaming feel a little less like closed individual systems and more like ecosystems of ideas, which almost makes it feeler grander in the way art likes to be played as. We're all aware of basic copying, of taking a basic "thing" from one game or a basic genre, like platformers in the 80s and FPSes in the 90s, but the more subtle cues and design hints make for a more interesting way to see games made.

And to mock their short-comings.

Steredenn has one of the oddest little names I've ever seen. Google's best translation is from Breton and it translates into Star. So the game is basically named Star. It's a simple name for what is ultimately a pretty simple game.

Anyway, Steredenn is a shmup of the side scrolling variety, built from the higher end level of pixel art where style and aesthetics are both emphasized. If the game has much of a story, well, I didn't notice. Instead - as games are wont to do in the modern indie paradigm - the game is a psuedo-roguelike, or roguelite, or something I'm tempted to call rougelite since we've fallen so far from the original design that boy is my face red.

Rougelites kinda drive me batty. Ha! Get it?

Like I said, Steredenn is a shmup. The usual systems apply; you shoot mostly forward, you dodge bullets and you gun down enemies. You get a singular life, but a health bar with a modest number of hits, assuming you don't blunder into giant lasers or huge explosions. Those will cost you a big chunk of the bar. Levels are a generally short affair somewhat lacking in variety; you fight several waves of enemies and then battle it out with a boss. The boss encounter tends to rotate around figuring out their attack pattern and then sneaking in damage when they're vulnerable, with a lot of bullet hell screen spam attacks being the norm.

Visually, Steredenn is that really upper tier of still clearly pixel art that I really enjoy. Amigalike, I suppose. There's lots of gorgeous details, the backgrounds are wonderfully done with a real flair for a 'space opera' kind of feeling. You can fly through asteroids, ruins from previous battles and other special areas, with the backdrop of glittering worlds, nebula and solar flares. Enemy design is a little more barebones, and the game is a bit repetitive in this regard. On the other hand the cardinal rule of shmups, that the number one priority is being able to rapidly sort the visuals, stuff like being clear when an enemy is dead or never having the player's bullets be the same color as enemy shots or obscure opposing fire? Yeah, Steredenn isn't perfect about this. And in a shmup, "not perfect" here is "bad".

The music is also really excellent, though there's not that many tracks, but I wasn't tired of them before I was tired of the game. You don't hear much other than the music, in fact, I can't bring to mind if there even are sound effects. I feel like yes, but the music dominates the audio.

Where Steredenn differs from the usual shmup lies in its attempts to be a roguelite, which is implemented in all honesty rather half-heartedly compared to something like Nuclear Throne. If I was going to compare Steredenn to any roguelite, it would indeed be Nuclear Throne, but far more shallow than it should be. First thing first, Steredenn has random drops. Your ship can hold two weapons (just like Nuclear Throne) and you need to switch to the weapon to to switch it out. There's no ammo, but there are melee weapons, including a giant sword and a huge saw.

I don't remember if Nuclear Throne had a saw, but it did have melee weapons. On the other hand, melee weapons on a space shooter are pretty cool, if rather uncreative - given you can come up with cool space themed ones but instead you just have a giant sword - so that gets a pass. Using the sword is really satisfying.

Regardless, you have two slots, you have two weapons. There's no ammo and no weapon upgrades, which I guess is fine. You do get personal upgrades; each time you kill a boss you're offered several options and can only take one. The upgrades aren't immediately evident in that they're color-coded and only upgrade weapons of the given color type. Unless they're universal, which I think might have individual slots per upgrade type, but the game didn't explain this or I wasn't paying enough attention to the boring tutorial.

Upgrades options are kind of annoying and kind of stupid, to be honest. They're very good if you line up useful ones with their respective weapon type - each weapon can receive a flat damaged boost, or the best upgrades add damage and a special ability - but you won't always have a weapon of the needed type, or any of the weapons any of the upgrades need. Then there's a lot of wonky bonuses, or just stuff like "score more points" and so forth.

Something about this system just rubs me the wrong way. Since the best upgrades are weapon specific, you end up essentially locking a slot. Unlike Nuclear Throne, where it's generally pretty easy to sort your loadout midgame, weapon switching is a pain here. Of course this runs into the other problem: a lot of the weapons are extremely unwieldly and don't really do the amount of damage they need to do to justify their usage complications. I ended up finding that at least half of the weapons aren't better than the blaster. The game does have 35 weapons, though, so I guess I can excuse some stinkers.

Beyond that, there really isn't a great deal to say about Steredenn. The game is billed as a roguelike, but it lacks different characters or unlocks, so it's pretty half-assed in its devotion. There's some randomization to the boss encounters and how waves are set up, but there's so little variety in enemies until the game gets so screen dense you're barely even paying attention. And that happens really fast, so it just gets... Well, I found it pretty dull redoing levels 1-3 just to die on 4 again and again. If you were unlocking better weapons and characters as in Risk of Rain, I feel like I'd have enjoyed it more, but there's no sense of progression, just redo the same levels and there you go.

One feature I wish every roguelike, roguelite, rogue one a star wars story had is the "superplay" option. I don't know why it's called superplay, but it reduces the amount of randomness in a given run; you can pick which one you want to do, and roll with that. I believe the intended use is to challenge your friends or something, but the main benefit is giving you a somewhat more reliable run to practice on, which I like. The game also allows you to practice on bosses in an arena, which is more commonly seen but good to have.

So, in conclusion, do I like Star? The game is visually attractive and has excellent audio, with a couple quibbles vis-a-vis controls and clashing visual elements. It's certainly attractive, but it's unfortunately a bit more shallow than I need to keep mashing my face into a roguelike or whatever you want to call this game. I don't remember how much I paid for Steredenn, but I certainly don't feel ripped off and had a good two hours of fun with it. In terms of longevity though, roguelikes really need a way more variety in the opening levels for me to keep playing them, and this game simply does not.

It's unfortunate, maybe, that you can so readily compare it to similar games and see all the obvious pieces it is missing. The game just doesn't feel like it has enough of a system to interact with. But shmup fans might find it deep enough anyway. It's good. But it's not great. And it could have been great.