In preparation for Opus: Prism Peak, I'm replaying the series and getting ready to give Opus: Echo of Starsong a spin.
The series are gorgeous, musically incredible, and live to stab you in the feels. And I say that as someone who rarely cries at games of films. Would these games work better as VNs or books? Maybe. But damn are they pretty.
Opus: The Day we Found Earth
Opus is functionally a hidden object game where you're playing "where's the planet/star/galaxy" with the giant telescope. There's a lot of background lore as to what happened, and essentially (without spoilers) humans have advanced and spread so far across Space that the records of their homeworld's been lost.
You play as a robot who was built by the two last desperate members of the space station, one hoping against hope and the other more cynical about the odds but still trying. With you still trying to find Earth for your creator after a power blackout. As a robot, your character doesn't understand some things he finds while looking through the space station. The AI helping you has a better idea though.
I vaguely remember playing it on Android so it makes sense that the click-and-drag and tap are more in line with touchscreen gameplay. And the 'hub area' (the space station) is vertically designed.
2. Opus: Rocket of Whispers, and the Prologue
Rocket is essentially baby's first resource hunting game where you're wandering around a gradually bigger and bigger zone finding items and helping settle ghosts as you build better and better rockets. Why rockets? Weeeeell, spoilers aside there's this whole thing about sending spaceships off planet with the help of "witches" who pray to send the dead to the afterlife presumably back on Earth.
So kind of like FFX with Sending. Except it's in a post-apoc world where like... maybe two people in the whole area are still alive. There might be more! I hope there's more...
There's also a free prequel game that is a straight walking sim of a P&C game where the other main character wakes up from cryosleep and quickly realizes things went horribly wrong.
3. Opus: Echo of Starsong
Starsong for the record looks to be an insane magitek space drama with spaceship resource management and music-based puzzles. Take Titan AE, mix in some post-war Gundam or similar Space Mecha anime series where things are just absolutely insane, sprinkle heavily with space magic... maybe a dash of Xianxia if there's anything with clan bullshit.
Am I going to be good at this? Nope, not the space resource part anyway. Will I play it anyway? Getting it as part of a bundle definitely helped and while I don't normally play post-apoc games like Rocket I enjoyed it so I'm definitely giving this one a shot.
Prism's big thing here is a camera and absolutely gorgeous graphics. Functionally it looks like a photography game (examples being Pokemon Snap, Alba: A Wildife Adventure, Umurangi Generation, and Beasts of Maravilla Island) where you're either trapped in memories or the spirit world and... I have no idea how the camera will change things but it looks beautiful. Every title got more and more extra with the graphics (in a good way) and the music so this is gonna be so damn pretty. And the story will probably break my heart like the other Opus games.
