Starfighter: Eclipse is an erotic BL visual novel that takes place on a spaceship in the Starfighter world. Play as a new character, form relationships with other characters (including some from the series), and figure out the weird mystery going on.
Official Description:
A Mystery in Deep Space
Your mission: join an Alliance surveillance team with Selene, your newly-assigned navigator, to investigate a derelict alien spacecraft. But when you return from the away mission, something is amiss, and it’s up to you to figure out why. Along the way, you can interact with Starfighter characters new and old, and maybe attract the attention of your favorite!
Explore the Kepler
Navigate the difficult politics of the alliance starship Kepler as you explore the beautiful sci-fi backgrounds designed by HamletMachine and the Date Nighto team. Play through all the routes to unlock sexy scenes and bonus art!
Long Review:
I read the entire comic, so I was excited to play this, but I ended up being disappointed. There were still some enjoyable things though, and other may like it more, depending on what you’re looking for.
What I Disliked:
This could’ve been a great opportunity to flesh out the world a bit more or let readers get to know some of the characters a bit more, but it did neither of those things. In fact, Cain and Abel often seemed out of character.
That would’ve been fine if this had just had good developed storylines for each character route on its own as a kind of alternate world, but it didn’t do that either. It had one main storyline, and then sex scenes with different characters that were sudden and forced into the story and most of the time just felt weird. Pretty much all of them except for Selene’s amounted to you barely knowing the character but them deciding to thank you for your help with sex. Sometimes the ending I got didn’t even make sense, like on my first game when I was going for Selene and, out of nowhere, Helios was being told to take off his pants by Commander Hayden, despite me not going along with his requests.
Another thing is, if I hadn’t read the comic, I think I would’ve been super confused about the whole premise with the navigators and the fighters, and I don’t think I would’ve cared much about most of the characters if I hadn’t already known them.
Unfortunately I also had a lot of technical complaints and issues. The skip feature still takes a while to skip since the game has a lot of panning and zooming during scenes. And there aren’t a lot of save slots, so I ended up having to start over a lot or go back pretty far to try different answers, which meant a lot of skipping. The game also kept crashing or doing this thing where it wouldn’t let me click the menu, and I’d have to close it. Thankfully it at least has an auto save. And I swear sometimes the gallery would show me 1 empty slot left for a character’s route, but then I’d find 2 more that went under their section, so I’m not even sure how many CGs I’m missing still.
What I Liked:
The main storyline was fun. It was a bit creepy and mysterious.
Selene’s good ending was enjoyable with the most developed relationship of all the routes (also Selene himself was just great) and feels like it could almost fit into the comic as a sort of side thing that happened that we just never knew about.
The art was wonderful. Much of it is NSFW. (It’s explicit in game, the one in this post is cropped + censored. Originally I just cropped it, but then I realized there were two dicks in the picture and had to cover up the one still showing lol.) There’s also a gallery to see CGs again after you unlock them. And there are a lot of CGs, for endings and just scattered throughout.
Everything Else:
I have mixed feelings about the complexity of the choices and routes. It’s cool that everything isn’t a clear-cut orderly process with certain choices that clearly branch or obvious “correct” answers. A lot of things change depending on your choices, and much of it is interconnected. But that also makes it really hard to find all the CGs and endings, and I never found a guide that explained how to get them all. (Maybe one is out there by now, I don’t know.)
In case it helps anyone, I managed to find the following sex scenes and endings, organized by whose section they’re under in the gallery (kinda spoilers):
– Selene (HJ #1, HJ #2, Selene/Helios sex ending)
– Abel (Abel/Helios sex ending, Cain/Abel/Helios sex ending)
– Cain (HJ, Cain/Selene/Helios sex ending, Cain/Abel/Helios BJ ending)
– Hayden (I can’t remember if there’s 3 or if 2 of these were combine, but there are CGs for Helios touching self, BJ, Hayden/Helios sex ending)
– Deimos (Deimos/Helios sex ending, Deimos/Cain/Helios sex ending)
– I am still missing a few CGs, but those might be non-sex ones.
It took me about 5.2 hours to get almost all the CGs.
Full price at the time of this review is $19.99. I got it on sale on Steam for $9.99.
Overall:
Not a bad main story, the artwork was beautiful, and you may love it if you mostly just want to see some sexy art! But relationships and character routes lacked depth, and as a fan of the webcomic, I was disappointed.
Short Review:
– One main storyline, which was mysterious and fun
– Sex felt sudden and forced into story
– Lack of depth to characters and relationships
– Not enough save slots
– Skipping text is slow
– Beautiful art, lots of it NSFW
– Overall steamy and nice to look at, but disappointing as a fan of the comic
Accessibility:
(May not include everything)
– No TTS or screen reader option for visually impaired players. It worked with NVDA, but only with much difficulty, and menus are not navigable. I would not recommend trying to play this with a screen reader.
More Info:
Official Site // Steam // itch.io
Sounds interesting. Glad you liked it for the most part.
Thanks!