August has been a great month for fans of roleplaying games. Smash success Baldur's Gate 3 and the upcoming and hotly anticipated Starfield have kept fans hungry. But sandwiched between those massive launches is Sea of Stars, a sophomore project from indie developer Sabotage Studio, which has gotten the attention of RPG lovers. Indeed, Sea of Stars' reviews have been nothing short of stellar, and it's an experience any RPG lover would be wise to check out.
Oftentimes, a roleplaying game puts players in the shoes of a plucky hero who finds their way into a battle over the fate of the world with the great evil force. In the retro-inspired Sea of Stars, the curtain rises after that great evil is already gone. It has been for generations. Instead, Solstice Warriors like protagonists Valere and Zale are tasked with cleaning up the remainder of the evil Fleshmancer’s forces–a task that’s almost complete before the game even begins. In fact, players are tasked with a lot of sewing early on, which is about as mundane as it gets for supposed Solstice Warriors.
Creative director Thierry Boulanger set the stage for Sea of Stars in a recent interview with Game ZXC.
“In this world, there were two immortal alchemists who had the great clash, they fought for millennia, and it left sort of remnants in this world. And the evil one of the two is known as the Fleshmancer, and his creations are left behind…When children are born during a solstice, if you're born under the Winter Solstice, you get the power of the moon; if you were born into the Summer Solstice, you get the power of the sun. Those who are born on the solstice are delivered by a magical great eagle to a remote village where they are trained to become Solstice Warriors.”
Part of the training to become a hero in Sea of Stars is taking up needle and thread, much to the chagrin of Valere and Zale. Part of the reason the game’s prologue focuses heavily on cloth is simple, Boulanger said: school should kind of suck.
“If you just go to school to learn to, you know, shoot moonbeams and strike with your sword, it sounds like a pretty fun school, but I still wanted some flavor of ‘it sucks to go to school.’ As a kid, you're eager to be done with it, you know, where otherwise it just sounds like a fun school to go to. So I think it handles that part of, like, the homework flavor narratively.”
That said, sewing makes a solid reminder to meditate and reflect, something Sea of Stars encourages its protagonists to do with some frequency. It also acts as a metaphor for stitching together the individual skills and pieces of a party into a cohesive whole, which is a major focus of the game’s battle design. And, of course, in a narrative sense, the cloth made by Valere and Zale is there to protect them when they embark on their quest to stop the last Seed of Evil and wash away the Fleshmancer’s legacy for good during the eclipse.
But as a prequel to Sabotage’s post-apocalyptic title, The Messenger, something clearly looms over the horizon.
Four other characters will join the Solstice Warriors in taking on whatever comes after the eclipse, two of which were not revealed before the game’s launch with developers preferring players to discover these allies on their own. The remaining two are opposites, in a way, acting to balance the party’s overall attitude. Garl is a chef and the heroes’ childhood friend, eager to venture with them across the archipelago and reminding the player to stop and smell the roses. By contrast, portal assassin Seraï is a tough, no-nonsense ninja girl focused on the mission.
While those six comprise the playable roster, other characters join the Solstice Warriors journey in a supportive capacity. From Teaks the historian to a band of wacky pirates, these characters can appear at the player’s campsite and offer insight into the world or the tasks at hand. Boulanger explained that a part of the campsite–and later a player's personal ship inspired in part by Mass Effect’s Normandy–is just that: to remind players what course they’ve set should they step away from the game for a while.
That ship, when it's acquired, really opens the game up both in terms of narrative and gameplay, said Boulanger. It frees players to revisit old locations with new traversal tools, chase down legends of the archipelago like the castle of the mysterious Watchmaker, and acts as a home for players to unwind with music found throughout the world.
Where the Solstice Warriors will explore, at that point, is entirely in the hands of the player.
Sea of Stars is available for PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
