Star Story: The Horizon Escape

I picked this one up precisely because nobody was talking about it, and that quiet felt suspicious. What I found was a hand-drawn text adventure from a small team at EvilCoGames that genuinely believes in the power of a branching choice, even when the writing holding those branches together is a little unsteady on its feet. The setup is gloriously pulpy: you are Van Klik, space archaeologist, crash-landed on the planet Horizon with your AI companion Verdana as your only company. From the wreckage, the game splits almost immediately into three divergent opening paths, and the decisions you make from that point feed into a three-axis alignment system, Resolve for aggression, Insight for intellect, Goodwill for cooperation. That alignment is not cosmetic. It gates which weapons and equipment you can craft back at base, and it shapes which dialogue options are even available to you mid-encounter. Choosing to help a faction of scientists versus throwing your lot in with the local warlord called Bullet King genuinely rewires chunks of what follows. The morality framing draws obvious comparisons to the paragon/renegade idea from the Mass Effect series, but here it feels lighter and less binary, more like a personality dial than a scorecard. The crafting loop is real but slightly awkward. You gather resources out in the desert, jungles, and underground caverns, then teleport back to your crashed ship to forge weapons, bandages, and gadgets. The round-trips become a quiet rhythm rather than an inconvenience if you settle into the game's unhurried pace. Combat is turn-based and genuinely uncomplicated: different damage types peel through shields, armor, or soft targets in sequence, and the tension sits mostly in resource management rather than tactical depth. Puzzles appear occasionally, offer mild resistance, and can punish you with damage if you fail them repeatedly, a small but appreciated bit of friction in what is otherwise a very relaxed ride. The whole thing runs to about four to six hours per playthrough, with single runs clocking in closer to two. The loop the game is actually asking for is iterative: die or reach a thin ending, carry experience and inventory into a new run, and slowly build a picture of what Horizon really is. That structure either clicks or it doesn't, and players who resent replaying scenes will hit a wall. The art is where EvilCoGames earns the most good faith. The visuals carry a hand-drawn comic-book warmth, vivid, slightly anarchic, genuinely expressive for a one-panel-at-a-time format. The soundtrack has a quiet ambient quality that a handful of Steam reviewers specifically called out as a highlight, which tracks: the music sits underneath the text rather than competing with it, and that restraint is the right call for this kind of game. The writing, however, is the honest weak point. English localization has grammar and punctuation roughness throughout, and the prose can feel wooden in moments that want emotional weight. The 24 endings are real and the branching is real, but the connective tissue between choices and consequences is thin enough that the world never fully breathes on its own. Characters who deserved development, the alien girl, the revolutionary, Verdana herself, pass through without quite landing. For the right reader of the wrong planet, none of that is fatal. If your happy place is a short-session text adventure with a comic-book shrug and genuine consequences attached to your choices, Star Story has a specific warmth that bigger, more polished games in this genre often sand off. Steam's player base gave it an 89% positive rating across about a hundred reviews, and that signal feels honest for what it is: a small, handmade thing that knows its size and mostly respects it.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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