The Starship Damrey (Nintendo 3DS)
Developed/Published by: Kazuya Asano, Takemaru Abiko / Level-5 Released: May 16th, 2013 Completed: 11th June 2017 Completion: Finished it, I didn’t manage to get all of the leeches though, and I missed the one last thing you need to get a true ending I guess :/ Trophies / Achievements: n/a
The Starship Damrey is notable for being the last game released in Level-5’s Guild series in Japan, a series I began reviewing all the way back at the beginning of this blog (in January 2014!) with Crimson Shroud. Basically, it was a very excellent attempt to get Japanese developers pushing out indie-esque, bite-size games, and this one, The Starship Damrey is probably one of the weirder ones for western audiences, coming as it does from the creative team behind awkwardly-named Super Famicom “sound novel” The Night of The Sickle Weasel, Kazuya Asano and Takemaru Abiko.
(Things get a bit interesting here, actually, because on release the creators of The Starship Damrey would have been completely obscure to western audiences, but in 2014 The Night of The Sickle Weasel was translated and released on iPhones as Banshee’s Last Cry, so there actually is a chance for non-Japanese speakers to learn about why these dudes in particular were picked to make a Guild game.)
(Although, apparently, the localisation is a bit controversial, with changed images and some heavy-handed localisations akin to Phoenix Wright characters being obsessed with burgers and so on. Not sure if I’ll play it... and is it 32-bit? If so, it won’t even work on iPhones soon.)
Anyway. The Starship Damrey is pretty much a visual novel, and I’m a bit burned out from them still after drinking down Nine Persons, Nine Hours, Nine Doors and Virtue’s Last Reward, but I had my 3DS with me and I was on a plane and I just sort of randomly decided to play it because I’d heard it was pretty short.
It is! Really short! Shorter than Attack of the Friday Monsters, even! It’s about as long as a Hollywood movie; not even a grossly distended Michael Bay blockbuster, just a regular one. And it's not a game with too much going on, really. To summarise the plot, you wake up in a cryo-sleep pod that you can’t escape, and so you have to use one of the few working ship’s robots to navigate the ship with the aim of unlocking your pod and finding what the hell happened on the ship—while the ship itself seems to be trying to stop you. You do this by moving the robot around in a sort of Dungeon Master kind of way and solving very simple puzzles (very simple. “Fill a can with water” simple). You pretty much can’t fail and the worst that can happen is that you’ll end up walking in circles for a while, so it’s weirdly lacking in tension, and the mystery doesn’t actually get fleshed out enough (until the very end, when you’re done) you’re not going to find yourself playing for any other reason than you started it, honestly.
Ultimately this is another really good example of why short games are a good idea, because I think this cost me like $2.99 in a sale and it so definitely didn’t outstay its welcome—some simple puzzle solving, a compact plot, the end—that I could even almost recommend it for anyone who wanted to do something other than watch a movie with a couple of hours.
You’re probably better off reading a book or something though.
Will I ever play it again? Nah.
Final Thought: The best I can say for The Starship Damrey is that I kind of kept imaging that I could be playing a Red Dwarf game instead? The “AR Robot” you control is functionally a skutter, and imaging a Red Dwarf prequel game designed pretty much the same as this where you play a skutter that has to wake Lister, or something, would be pretty cool! Sadly this isn’t a Red Dwarf game, where it could have been jazzed up with some more humour/interesting ship design. It’s a lot more generic than that.
