![]() We found ourselves immediately returning to older chapters after the credits rolled, just so we could see every visitable location. Learning this board game, mastering it and then cleaning up the systems that remain unexplored, was a constant highlight. OPUS: Echo of Starsong – Full Bloom Edition’s star navigation feels like a board game at moments, as you pull a card from the event deck and wonder whether it will leave you with enough fuel or shields to make the journey home. Weirdly enough, though, our favourite moments were in the exploration. Equally, the world-building is superlative: if you wanted to construct a Silmarillion-like text to summarise all of the factions and their histories, you absolutely could. The relationship between Jun and Eda is so adorably chaste and tentative, and the rest of the cast grate initially but then become favourites by the time curtains drop. So much of OPUS: Echo of Starsong – Full Bloom Edition near-perfection comes from these characters. Events take place over seven chapters and ten hours or so – dependent, largely, on how much you dive into the Mass Effect 2 starmaps – and you will be put through the wringer, one or two times, just to make sure. But, otherwise, the pieces can fall in a multitude of ways, and it’s down to you to watch – near helplessly – as they do. The story is told decades in the future from the perspective of Jun, so at least he’s safe by the narrative’s end. Are Eda and Jun going to fall in love? Will Jun abandon them all for his clan? Will Remi find a way to ship Jun to the authorities? Eda’s other crewmate, Remi, is extremely wary of Jun, and there’s the sense that things are frothing up to a critical moment. Jun is desperate to find abandoned lumen caves, claim them in the name of East Ocean, and return as a hero.Įarly on, the paths of these two characters cross, and an uneasy alliance is forged on Eda’s ship. He is shadowed by Kay, an older bodyguard who has followed him into banishment. Jun, meanwhile, is a noble who has effectively been exiled by his clan, East Ocean, for a past mistake. These have been forgotten, the casualties of a war that obliterated virtually everything. But this isn’t the pointy-hatted interpretation of the term: she is more of a space-siren, able to hear and interpret starsong, and then sing it back to open various gates that are strewn about the universe. Eda is a witch, although not officially – she never passed the exams that enshrined her as one. It’s the story of Jun and Eda, who take turns at being the centre of the narrative. It’s big-hearted, and that comes from the relationships that anchor the story. Though they are very different games, we would suggest that fans of one should search out the other. ![]() Inkle’s masterpiece shares OPUS’s pervasive sense of loss, and a world as a palimpsest, desperately trying to find its own identity even though its foundations are in the past. Longer journeys, better protection against enemies, and greater capacity for exploration are all possible.Ībove all, OPUS: Echo of Starsong – Full Bloom Edition is an accumulation of all these things, interweaving perfectly to create an experience that – if we were to compare it to anything – most resembles Heaven’s Vault. ![]() Build those upgrades, and you may find yourself better positioned to explore the starmap. Other times, you can use up stored exploration kits to return with salvage, which in turn can be converted into cash or upgrades for your ship. Events pop up, offering choices that might lead to a dice roll (modified by the items and events that you have previously experienced), or simple dialogue choices. Virtually every dot on the map is a location to be explored, whether abandoned or inhabited, and you are at the whims of what lies there. The universe is presented as a zoomed out map, but that map is astonishingly dense. It gives the universe a sense of entropy, a diminishing, as people cling to what was once important.Īnd then there’s the starmap navigation, which recalls – of all things – the mining sections in Mass Effect 2. One of the most haunting and successful elements of OPUS: Echo of Starsong – Full Bloom Edition is that everyone seems enthralled with the past, to the point that people are sleepwalking into the future. Your knowledge of the universe and its history is scratched together from found items and artefacts. At other points, it feels like a game centred on the codices from games like Dragon Age.
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