Together they join forces to try and restore Jun's honour with his clan, but Eda and her pilot Remi have their own reasons for seeking out these caves, and it culminates in a big emotional finale that I won't spoil here.įor the most part, though, OPUS: Echo Of Starsong is an enthralling and heartfelt coming of age story, accompanied by a sumptuous piano score from Triodust (seriously, check it out on Bandcamp). Each point on Starsong's map just has the most gorgeous artwork.įortunately for Jun, he stumbles across Eda during one of his botched lumen runs, a young woman who can imitate the starsongs with her voice to help track them down in her ship. New ones aren't easy to discover, either, as they require someone who can hear their fabled 'starsongs' - witches, in the game's parlance, who are often looked down on as weapons of war by the citizens of space. Lumen is probably best described as being a bit like the spice melange in Frank Herbert's Dune novels - it's a valuable energy source that's been the cause of several wars in this corner of the universe, and several of the existing lumen caves have already been claimed by big corporations and pirate factions. You play as Jun, an exiled prince who lost his clan a bunch of important lumen caves and is now trying to make it up to them. You can get more articles like it, alongside an ad-free version of the site, by becoming a supporter today.Īt its core, OPUS: Echo Of Starsong is very much a story-driven visual novel, but it's also a story-driven visual novel with light, 2.5D side-scrolling puzzle sections, space exploration, ship resource management, an upgrade tree, and a giant, almost 80 Days-style star map full of asteroids, abandoned pirate outposts and sprawling cities to visit as you make your way around The Thousand Peaks. It was first published on January 24th 2022. This article was originally exclusively available to RPS supporters, but we've brought it back From The Archive for all to read. I played it without any knowledge of the other two OPUS games and got on absolutely fine with it, so you needn't swat up on the rest of the series before playing - although I've since bought both of them on the strength of how much I loved Starsong. It's loosely connected to Sigono's other two OPUS games, The Day We Found Earth and Rocket Of Whispers, but only in the sense it's vaguely set in the same universe rather than being a direct sequel. I'd seen a few other games journalists raving about it when it came out on Steam last September, and hey, over 3000 overwhelmingly positive Steam reviews can't be wrong either, so I took the plunge, and golly, it sure is something special. I ended up going with Studio Pixel Punk's Unsighted in the end, but it was very nearly OPUS: Echo Of Starsong, a stunning visual novel adventure game from Taiwanese studio Sigono Inc. There were a lot of games I played last year that could have been on our Best Games You Missed list at the end of 2021.
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