Level 5 is a pretty interesting developer that seems to fly under the radar a lot, despite having been making stuff for over 20 years. They were very prolific during the 3ds era, and the Guild series is a bunch of budget titles released by them that cover a wide variety of genres. Starship Damrey is one of them, and it is a puzzle survival horror type thing (?) that doesn't quite work for me. To its credit, the start of the game is genuinely cool and immediately caught my attention. You wake up inside a futuristic cryopod inside a spaceship with no memory of anything and are unable to get out, so you connect to the spaceship's OS and start remotely controlling a work robot to explore the ship and solve puzzles. The robot is a slow clunky piece of shit that can only carry one item at a time, but that was never too much of a bother because the game is designed with it on mind. Exploration is all right, I guess. The ship is actually pretty small, and kinda boring. It's a space you can feel was made with purpose in mind more than aesthetics. There's not really many interesting things to see or find, though the atmosphere is not bad. You can feel the emptiness, and the occasional sounds keep you on your toes. I think the game wants to be a horror game? The setting is there, and there are relatively frequent jumpscares for the 3 hour duration, but I think the game really misses the mark by having no fail state that I could find. There is no way to get a game over, and it makes all of the jumpscares lose their impact because you know you will always be safe. So if it doesn't work as a horror game, maybe it does as a puzzle game with horror elements? I'd say not particularly. The starting screen saying that the game had no tutorials or explanations left me hopeful. My mind was left to get hyped wondering what kind of free form puzzle solving that could entail, and the previously mentioned very interesting start of the game seemed to indicate something good. But in practice, I was really let down. Puzzles only have one way to be solved with no room for creativity, and there's not really many things to interact with, so the answer tends to be obvious just by exploring, and only one puzzle where you are required to mix some ingredients together to make something explode has what I'd call experimentation. And even then, in basically the next room over there is a very easy to find document telling you exactly what ingredients to use. So puzzles are lame and easy, the horror is almost only jumpscares with no payoff, and while the setting has a decent atmosphere, it started to feel samey and like it had run out of ideas pretty soon despite being a barely 3 hour long experience. The narrative has cool ideas, but like pretty much every other facet of the game, it stumbles. It tries, but besides the fun twist right at the end that I did not see coming, It's mostly kinda dull. Story is not very overtly present throughout most of the game, existing only as documents you read and environmental storytelling like things on a crewmate's desk or just corpses, killed by unclear means dotted around the ship. The crew of the Damrey had complex relationships with each other, but in the end it doesn't really feel like any of that matters in the game, it's all just set dressing that would be a chore to read if it wasn't just a couple of lines each. Having said all that, the game was a budget release, going for 8 dollars. I guess you get what you paid for? But I can't help but feel like there was a lot of potential here that is wasted.