Level-5's The Starship Damrey is one of the most oddly, obscure and interesting games I've played in a long while, an adventure visual novel point-and-click first person puzzle hybrid with a space/sci-fi theme for the Nintendo 3DS. If this isn't Virtue's Last Reward then we're talking about this very peculiar title that I've seen absolutely no one talk about, I had to discover it via someone talking about having a problem with it in the Nintendo Homebrew Discord server of all places. As a part of the Guild series of collaborations the developer had with different game designers, in this case it was both Takemaru Abiko and Kazuya Asano working on this project having both previously worked on the teams that made up for the cult classic SNES visual novels Banshee's Last Cry and Otogirisō respectively.
The game's premise is very simple but pretty effective for an adventure game of its caliber, you wake up from being put in deep sleep inside of a pod, and with no way out you make your way through computer inputs until you're able to remotely control one of many robots that used to be available in the starship, then using said robot to go on some usual point-and-click tropes. Getting one object to use somewhere, going to this place where you can investigate something else to use to your advantage, even at some point too being able to mix some of them, kinda. I won't talk too much in detail about the story elements because the game asks you specifically to discover things on your own, and that's what the game excels at.
As a deliberate choice, most of this game doesn't count with any sort of background music at all, it's all set in a very dark atmosphere and what could basically be considered as space horror, it makes it all the more tense to actually uncover the story and experience by yourself the different events that go on in the starship, even the story, as little as it is can get rather compelling and fun to piece together.
Sadly, by the time you're fully invested it's already over and it sucks that there aren't any other sweet one-timers like this one in the platform, this game pretty much screams of the time of the very early 3DS eShop where not a whole lot could be expected as we weren't as informed, so wild experiments like this came around every now and then. Maybe that just has to do with the entirety of the Guild series of games by Level-5, but I can safely say that The Starship Damrey, as basic and short as it is, does remind me of a simpler and better time, and I think it shouldn't be left forgotten and in the rough, the game is neat and needs to be talked about more in general.
The game's premise is very simple but pretty effective for an adventure game of its caliber, you wake up from being put in deep sleep inside of a pod, and with no way out you make your way through computer inputs until you're able to remotely control one of many robots that used to be available in the starship, then using said robot to go on some usual point-and-click tropes. Getting one object to use somewhere, going to this place where you can investigate something else to use to your advantage, even at some point too being able to mix some of them, kinda. I won't talk too much in detail about the story elements because the game asks you specifically to discover things on your own, and that's what the game excels at.
As a deliberate choice, most of this game doesn't count with any sort of background music at all, it's all set in a very dark atmosphere and what could basically be considered as space horror, it makes it all the more tense to actually uncover the story and experience by yourself the different events that go on in the starship, even the story, as little as it is can get rather compelling and fun to piece together.
Sadly, by the time you're fully invested it's already over and it sucks that there aren't any other sweet one-timers like this one in the platform, this game pretty much screams of the time of the very early 3DS eShop where not a whole lot could be expected as we weren't as informed, so wild experiments like this came around every now and then. Maybe that just has to do with the entirety of the Guild series of games by Level-5, but I can safely say that The Starship Damrey, as basic and short as it is, does remind me of a simpler and better time, and I think it shouldn't be left forgotten and in the rough, the game is neat and needs to be talked about more in general.