Preview – Star Birds [Early Access] PC
I’m a serious dweeb for edutainment content on Youtube. I’m never without a dozen tabs open for later watching/listening as I’m coding away, or cooking dinner. Popular classics like Numberphile, VSauce, CGP Grey, and tons more from channels of all sizes (covering every topic imaginable), are always streaming though a device nearby, and Kurzgesagt is one that jumps right to the top of that playlist when a new video drops. And it’s been that way for over a decade. I even got one of the original ‘year 12,000’ calendars from when they first started creating them (2016/7, I believe it was). In much fewer words – I’m a big fan. Naturally I had this game wishlisted as soon as it popped up on Steam without even knowing what it would be, but I would have never guessed it was exactly what I had been searching for.
That’s no exaggeration, either. And I can prove it! It was November-ish of last year I started digging back into Factorio, Astroneer, Planet Crafter, and a couple of other resource management and automation building gems looking for something I could really sink my teeth into and relax with. I even started prioritising demos in the genre, such as Blossom: The Seed of Life. But nothing quite hit the note I was craving. Too much exploration required in games I’d already played, and other titles had me distracted with fighting off hordes of enemies instead of focusing on my EFFICIENCY. I just wanted to be left alone in my own corner of the universe to architect pipelines and organise my throughput into exquisite little self-contained systems.
Star Birds provides exactly that.
Wrapped in a joyful cartoony design that sings life into each bouncy animation, and told through a mysterious and comedic narrative perfectly indicative of the videos we’ve learned so much random trivia from, this captivating and easy-going campaign is brought to us by none other than the Dorfromantik team. Man, do they know how to make games that pair just right with a cup of tea and a cozy chair. Being left alone to reach a win condition (the hierarchical gathering and synthesising of specific resources) however you prefer to tackle it – no time limits, no railroading, no creatures to come kick over your sandcastle – is a rare gift.
I mean, there are extra sub-goals you can go for, such as dispatching specific groups of materials to build out your ship’s amenities for a higher rating; or refraining from using too many of certain apparati. But all entirely optional and more often than not simply require spending much more time than you’d need to simply complete the stage refining your networks or shuffling around machinery and logistics to maximise for balanced outputs.
Though, I must admit, after the completionist in me forced me to push for 100% on all of the earlier solar-systems (stages), it could get a little tedious to be performing the exact same strategy over and over. Firstly, spend some credits discovering which celestial bodies contain the foundational elements you need to get going. Secondly, set up some basic extraction and exportation to a more centralised location for processing. And finally, get a nice regulated stream of generic resources that can be used to satisfy repeatable goals for a steady income you’ll be using to construct what you need to meet your actual goal. The procedural generation of the locations, then, seems superfluous when you’re frequently tackling them the exact same way.
Where Star Birds really shines is when you’re starting out and constantly unlocking tools for producing new materials and discovering new obstacles to overcome, but even more so when your goal isn’t so straight forward. I believe it was only one of the spin-off side missions, but having to puzzle my way around a single, claustrophobic, and resource-scarce asteroid forced me to have to consider and reconsider my channels matrix in order to fit in appliances I needed whilst continuing to harvest at a decent pace. And when they threw in the stepped layers of ground you had to work up via a meagre few ramps, it turned my neatly organised map into a spider-web lattice of criss-crossing cables that I had to frequently revise and squeeze through any gap I could muster. I’d call it a standout like a diamond in the rough, but it was more like a masterfully cut red emerald in a field of shallow diamonds – It’s all great, but every now and then it knocks it right out of the stratosphere.
All I can hope for from the full release is more of that: hand-crafted and unique challenges over randomised layouts. The core is already a solid tellurian surface with plenty of room to dream up new ideas on. As long as they figure out how to get those loopy tubes to behave when being dragged around, that is!