Stardander Revenant

I have a soft spot for game jam projects that punch cleanly above their weight, and Stardander Revenant is one I keep thinking about. Fancy Fish Games built this in a single month for the Spooktober Visual Novel Jam, and the seams show in the best possible way: everything here is deliberate, nothing is wasted, and the story closes on its own terms without overstaying its welcome. At its core this is a visual novel with a dual-character turn-based RPG layered on top. You play as Griselda, a cheerful witch student at Stardander who desperately wants to befriend her prickly classmate Dianthus. The two are forced together by a crisis involving dangerous fae creatures in the surrounding forest, and the slow unspooling of their dynamic, Griselda's relentless warmth meeting Dianthus's armored resentment, is the real game. Choices you make across the short runtime determine how their relationship lands, and the multiple endings give you a reason to replay on a lazy afternoon. The story carries content warnings for death and grief, and it earns them with more sincerity than you might expect from something this small. The battle system is where Revenant surprises. Each turn you spend mana to cast spells across Griselda and Dianthus, with multi-cast options that let you fire multiple strikes in a single action. Spells like Sever drain enemy mana generation each turn, Barrier soaks incoming hits, Pact channels a powerful effect, and abilities like Farspeak produce different outcomes depending on which witch casts them, Dianthus always picks the wrong option with fae, which produces genuinely funny dialogue without being a throwaway gag. The system has a Hard mode that asks you to think carefully about mana curves, barriers, and ability sequencing, and it holds up as a real tactical puzzle rather than a checkbox for completionists. A post-launch quality-of-life update overhauled the battle UI, added quick-cast shortcuts, potion animations, and adjustable text speed, so the version on Steam today plays considerably more cleanly than the original jam release. The honest caveat is length. At one to two hours, Revenant is a genuine short story, not a full game, and the spell list and enemy roster reflect that origin. Players who found their way here looking for a meaty RPG will need to manage expectations. The class-selection mechanic, where you pick which school lessons Griselda attends each week and thereby gate which spells she learns before the final Hallow's Eve Bout, is a tantalizing hint of a deeper system that simply does not have room to breathe here. That itch is by design, pointing toward Stardander School for Witches, the full follow-up. Think of Revenant less as a demo and more as a self-contained short story set in the same world. For the right audience, people who love a handcrafted fae-gothic atmosphere, character-driven writing with real comedic timing, and a battle system that rewards reading tooltips, this is an uncommonly well-shaped little thing. The dev knew when to end it, and that restraint is rarer than it sounds.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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