Still There

My first hour with Still There was spent staring at a console crammed with over 80 dials and switches, clutching an in-game technical manual like a lifeline, quietly convinced I'd broken the entire space station. That feeling of controlled confusion is exactly what GhostShark intended, and it turns out the studio was right to trust it. You play as Karl Hamba, the sole human operator of the Bento, a deep-space lighthouse responsible for relaying signals and guiding passing ships. Karl chose this job for the same reason he chose everything after his daughter's death: maximum distance from anything that hurts. His only company is Gorky, the station's resident AI, who is simultaneously your hint system, your chess opponent, and your most reliable source of dry, caustic wit. The premise draws inevitable comparisons to Firewatch and the film Moon, and they're fair, but Still There pushes harder into the technical side than either. This is not a walking sim with feelings. You are actually running a space station, and it will not coddle you. The puzzle design is the game's sharpest edge. Tasks range from routing jumper plugs across a numbered signal grid, to triangulating a stranded ship's position, to rewiring a MIDI keyboard and playing specific tunes to broadcast your beacon. Every solution routes back through the Bento Technical Manual, a dense but learnable reference document that becomes second nature by the midpoint. An easy mode exists that lets you skip the heavier mechanics, and there is zero shame in using it if the puzzle layer is standing between you and the story. That said, players who persist through the harder problems get a rare reward: the satisfaction of genuinely understanding a fictional machine. The puzzles feel grounded in the setting in a way most adventure games never bother with. What earns Still There its Very Positive rating on Steam is how deftly the mechanical and emotional layers support each other. Karl's grief isn't delivered through cutscenes dropped between puzzles. It seeps out through environmental detail, through Gorky's conversations, through dream sequences where the game quietly refuses to let you claim you're fine. One early sequence literally moves your mouse cursor away from "I'm not OK" every time you try to select it. Touches like that hit harder than any monologue. The hand-drawn art style reinforces the mood without being precious about it, and the ambient piano-and-synth soundtrack earns its space rather than papering over silence. The criticisms are real but narrow. Some players find the puzzle-to-story ratio tilted too far toward the puzzles, especially in the first act before Karl's emotional stakes fully crystallize. A minority of Steam reviewers felt the final act's payoff didn't match the slow build. And the click targets on the Bento's console can be fiddly, requiring a certain patience with the interface that the game never fully apologizes for. At roughly five to seven hours depending on puzzle speed, it is also a genuinely short experience, which cuts both ways: it doesn't overstay its welcome, but it leaves you wishing certain threads had more room to breathe. Still There is the kind of small, precise game that does one thing exceptionally well: it makes isolation feel inhabited rather than decorative. If you have any patience for puzzle-heavy point-and-click games and a tolerance for stories that take grief seriously without becoming insufferable about it, this one is worth your evening.

Alex · Scout Team

Catch-all

Be the first to comment on Still There.