STARBO - The Story of Leo Cornell

This game isn't worth spending money on, even with a heavy discount. It only lasts 20 to 30 minutes with a weak storyline and linear gameplay. There's little to do besides walking towards the end, punctuated by chase scenes where strange creatures pursue you. While the graphics are good and some areas are screenshot-worthy, overall, it's not worth buying and feels like a complete waste of money.

I wish there was a so-so rating because I'd give this game that, but as it stands, the achievement progression tells you all: people don't make it through this game even though it's pretty easy and straight forward. perhaps that speaks for itself.

63 Minutes. That was exploring every corner and niche. This game is a very linear labyrinth of sounds and lights and colors but a lot of repetition. The story is very minimal but pretty much the majority of the uniqueness in the game. You'll find yourself spending an hour going through the same hallways and rooms, maybe with minimal variation. The stamina and health bar are for very minor chase parts of the game. Otherwise, they're pretty annoying since the dev decided to also control when you can use them, speeding up and slowing down the game as their own punctuation to the story. The initial video shows your character as having absolutely hilariously massive hands, not sure why that happened. I would want to be supportive of an indie dev and small studio, but not all stories should be told and not all games should be made. STARBO really should be a demo at best. It's good to learn to sell your work, but this work was underwhelming. Lastly, the ending was pretty ridiculous. Sure, the ending is set up by the mention of confronting the creatures of the dark or nightmares or whatever in hopes that it wakes us up, but that last thing came out of nowhere. Maybe that would make sense if the dev was trying to be comedic with the whole thing, but typically you want consistency across a story. All in all, it's clear that they tried to put in work with a team and got support from family and friends, they got themselves and their game out there. I know countless indie devs that struggle to make that leap. However, the jump scares were mostly annoying and forced in an underwhelming way, the lack of variety for such a short game was a bit disappointing, and a lot of the excessive lights and abrupt audio transitions could have been toned down.

All in all, I'm not sure what to make of STARBO - The Story of Leo Cornell. It felt like Leo really didn't have a story. All achievements are simply for story progression. You literally get 4 achievements for watching the intro video....the definition of Achievement is: "a thing done successfully, typically by effort, courage, or skill."

Since the only way to fail at these "achievements" is to simply not progress the story, I would not call these achievements. Maybe the dev could have added one for finding an interesting thing here, pursuing a path there, never getting caught by something chasing you, or a million other things that would have actually been achievements. The first choo choo train is missable, that could have been a thing?

Anyways, I've already spent 20% of the time it took me to play this game writing the review for it.

Feedback for the dev, David, and Diax Arts: If you're going to continue pursuing game dev, take a critical look at this game, the feedback you received from it, and how it fits into different genres and quality levels for games. For future ones: one of the most frustrating things with a walking simulator is not being able to control movement in expected ways. This game could have been maybe 15 minutes worth of gameplay without the stamina bar and if the player could simply toggle sprint. The walk vs run mechanic did not feel satisfying like it could have, it was just frustrating. Also, the unique warning at the beginning about "games can be dangerous for you" or whatever it was is the type of thing that's a clear red flag that's saying that the dev did something unique that will likely be abrasive instead of enjoyable. That was very much the case here. Other devs and studios put up a boiler plate version of that and then don't do wonky stuff in their game. Maybe there's flashing or abrupt cut scenes or even scary shocking things, but they don't blind their users by crazy intense lighting and effects.

If gamedev is something you want to pursue, don't give up. Often times the first thing that we do: our first blog, video, project, etc is crap, and if we keep going and learning and growing and mastering our art, we get better. Unfortunately, some people persist but don't deliberately strive to improve, and they simply attempt to impose their art on the world, other people give up before they even try.

It's up to you to make that choice.

A game that is essentially a walking simulator with a single simple puzzle.
A guy that was fired by his boss decides to go to his family and live the rest of his life there, but the pilot of the small plane was drunk and drugged, so they crashed. He ends up in a coma, wandering the corridors of his mind, trying to wake up.

flaws:
The audio was lagging at some parts of the game and having a vsync on seems to fix it.
The running/stamina gimmick a bit out of place it seems.
There's inventory which appeared to be pointless.
You will never find out if he woke up.

1/16 STORY
🔲 No story
🔲 Not main aspect
🔲 Bad story
✅ Average
🔲 Good
🔲 It'll replace your life

2/16 GAMEPLAY
🔲 Lifeless / static
✅ Poor UI
🔲 Average
🔲 Good
🔲 Excellent

3/16 DIFFICULTY
✅ Playing asleep
🔲 Some brain usage
🔲 Easy to learn / Hard to master
🔲 Difficult
🔲 Dark Souls

4/16 GRIND
✅ Nothing to grind
🔲 Isn't necessary to progress
🔲 Average grind level
🔲 Only if you care about leaderboards/ranks
🔲 Too much grind

5/16 GAME TIME / REPLAYABILITY
✅ Long enough for a cup of coffee
🔲 Short
🔲 Average
🔲 Long
🔲 To infinity and beyond

6/16 MULTIPLAYER
✅ No multiplayer
🔲 Trashy servers
🔲 Some hiccups
🔲 Smooth and pleasant experience
🔲 Co-op
🔲 PvP
🔲 PvE

7/16 GRAPHICS
🔲 Stuck in the last century
🔲 Low Effort
✅ Average
🔲 Good
🔲 Reality 2.0

8/16 AUDIO
🔲 Earrape
🔲 Bad
✅ Not too bad
🔲 Good
🔲 Eargasm

9/16 AUDIENCE
🔲 Kids
🔲 Teens
🔲 Adults
✅ Everyone

10/16 PC REQUIREMENTS
✅ Potato
🔲 Decent
🔲 Fast
🔲 Rich boi
🔲 > NASA

11/16 PRICE
🔲 It's free!
🔲 Not recommended
✅ Wait for sale
🔲 Worth the price
🔲 Best investment ever done

12/16 FREQENT UPDATES
✅ Abandoned
Last Update: 7 May, 2020 (1036 days ago)
🔲 Last year
🔲 Once every year
🔲 A couple per year
🔲 Every week

13/16 BUGS / CRASHES
🔲 None / Not discovered
✅ Minor bugs
🔲 Can get annoying
🔲 Frequent crashes
🔲 Complete mess

14/16 MISC
🔲 Steam Workshop
🔲 Steam Trading Cards
✅ Steam Achievements
🔲 Content for Steam Points Shop

15/16 {?/10}
🔲 1
🔲 2
✅ 3
🔲 4
🔲 5
🔲 6
🔲 7
🔲 8
🔲 9
🔲 10

16/16 VERDICT
✅ Recommended
🔲 Not recommended

pathetic bull$hit "running under water simulator" with no purpose.
at least i didnt have to re-watch the into every time i died.

After playing for an hour im fucking raging, because the game just don't tell you what to do or where to go, while getting chased by an instant-kill-monster and the movement speed is spiking and lagging and you need to replay the whole fucking scene after dying over and over again. It was starting nice, but this shit? No thank you.

For the record: I'm not a fan of walking sims and I despise The Stanley Parable.

This one was enjoyable for me, though. I want to get my hands on the soundtrack. Oh, and, play this properly — with your headphones (preferably, ANC ones).

blue whale / 1o

45 minutes long walking simulator. But a quite boring one. Usually nothing happens and you just wander through the same looking corridors over and over again.

Reminds me of playing DOOM...without the shooting and without the fun :-|

It's endless corridors and dead ends you have to memorise before some random monster comes to kill you. That's the game in a nutshell. It does have great ambient music and FX to scare you. The lighting is dim and smoke filled at the start. I guess that's a cheap way to make the game scary.

The feeling of being powerless as you have no weapon. A reminded that you are in dire need of going to the gym to improve your cardio because you can't run and are breathless after going down a quarter of a corridor.

First off, this is not a bad game. It looks gorgeous, handles smoothly, and has a coherent story. That said, I didn't find it particularly enjoyable or rewarding. If you like surreal games that are stunningly beautiful, you'll enjoy this. I just found it too linear, lacking in interactivity, and unfulfilling story-wise.

This game had a great promo and got me hooked to buy it, however, once I started playing it my expectations were not met. The Graphics appear 20 years old and it's all corridors and no guidance. I'm sorry, but if you can't play a game and get the vibe of what exactly is going on without the a Wiki then the game is broken.

Long copy-past halways, slow running with long rechargeable time, and it fell like someone made everything in slow motion. I tried a lot of games but i lose interest in games witch are using this type of mechanic without something more from the creator.

STARBO is art in its purest form.

The scenery is beautiful, story really neat and music on point! I absolutely loved every second of this. I especially enjoyed how Leos (the main character) life falls apart in real life but also in his wicked mind. Visualized in the form of an alien environment that we all go to when we fall asleep. In our very own ways.

Leo’s former boss, co-workers and wife all meet up with him in different shapes and ways (mostly as strange and terrifying robots out for his blood) and the way its all put together seriously makes me consider this as one of my favorite indie-games of all time. Mainly because it not only handles the story but also the gameplay just as if you would actually be stuck in a very dark dream.

It doesn’t really care about making the gameplay fun, instead it completely focuses on giving you the experience Leo is going through and this can of course to many, be seen as a flaw. Which I totally get because when you buy a game you do want more actual gameplay but for Starbo it is absolutely perfect as it is. Because how often are we really able to control our dreams? How much control do we really have over our real-life destinies?

Starbo really does a great job bringing these topics up and twists them into a psychologically terrifying scenario where Leo Cornell finds himself completely stuck in the blue.
I strongly recommend Starbo if you’re out for a more cinematic experience rather than an action-packed shooter. Because in Starbo you are not one to shoot. You get shot.

I had high hopes for STARBO. I am usually a huge fan of the “walking sim” type games. Sadly STARBO fell short in many ways. Some of it’s issues could be chalked up to low budget and not enough manpower to relize the developers ideas but regardless they are still issues. It had great concepts and ideas and had it been a little more fleshed out I may have enjoyed it more. The developer has talent though and I do hope he is able to try again in the future.

STARBO didn’t really know what it wanted to be. There were parts where it was a walking sim but other parts where it tried to be survival horror. One problem with that is that walking sims typically want you to look around it’s surroundings and soak up the atmosphere where survival horror games are supposed to be tense. The walking sim part didn’t work because STARBO didn’t have surroundings worth looking at. That’s not to say the graphics were poor but it was just kind of barren, lifeless, rooms with nothing going on. The survival horror part didn’t appeal to me because it is the kind of survival horror I despise: enemies that can kill me with 1-2 hits and that I have no way to fight back at. I can just run, hide and try to escape. I prefer games like Condemned: Criminal Origins or Resident Evil 1-3 where the ammo and weapons are sparse but I can fight back. The story could have been a saving grace for the game except it had no real end and lacked context in many parts. No real resolution is given at the end and many parts make no sense because while the main character says stuff like robots and whales are from his childhood he doesn’t expand on that and we are given no flashbacks. The music was well done though and it had a great art direction.

STARBO never crashed on me at all but it had a huge glaring issue that has never been fixed: It has to be played in windowed mode on Linux. When you chosoe fullscreen mode it won’t allow you to click on any main menu buttons and you have to force close the game. I have tried the game on various distros, AMD and Intel CPUs, as well as both AMD and Nvidia GPUs and always had that issue on Linux.The game did run well and was almost always at 100+ FPS on my system. It had multiple levels for AA, a toggle for Vsync and a few other graphics settings to tinker with. Alt-Tab didn’t work though and my game settings were not saved. Every time I launched the game I would have to reset my options.

It took me 95 minutes to beat STARBO. I don’t mind the length. I have played games with similar lengths such as The Station which I loved and played games such as The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion which I pumped over 60 hours into but was bored with. I paid $5.74 CAD for STARBO and felt that was a fair price for what I got. I played STARBO on Linux.

Overall I can’t recommend STARBO. It has too many flaws and issues to offset it’s great ideas and art direction. It needed a more fleshed out story and some technical bugs fixed at the very least.

My Score: 6/10

My System:

AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 18.3.3 | Manjaro Mate | Kernel 4.20.11-1-MANJARO

I'm lucky I bought this one sale. It's a walking/running simulator. There are no puzzles, the writing is cliche and weak, and the gameplay is slow and boring. The 0.9 hours I have spent on this game is all it took to complete the game in one sitting, and that includes assuming the phone segment was a puzzle (apparently I gave the devs too much credit). If you want to waste an hour of your life and 85 cents, buy this game, otherwise, stay away.

This game has the look of a AAA with the feel of a poorly designed mod. There's not really much gameplay to speak of besides running down nearly identical cooridors over and over again and then being surprised by a monster that you either run away from...down a corridor...or around some darkly lit areas with lighting to either show you the way or completely get you off course - which essentially turns the game into a memorization game rather than a thrilling experience. The design mentality here appears to be, "Let's lengthen gameplay by killing the player needlessly -- or by introducing multiple mechanics simultaneously when death is on the line." The other issue is the clipping, which is fairly consistent. I've fallen through the floor a bunch of times and the funniest thing about it is that a sound effect plays when it happens and you're instantly killed, so the devs knew it was an issue and never fixed it (and in unity this is pretty unforgivable. Clipping isn't rocket science). With another 6 months or so perhaps this could have been retooled and made great, beacause the concept, while not original (I'll save you the spoilers) is still compelling and cool. I can't recommend this though. Buy Monstrum if you want a thrill from a small dev. It's a much more rewarding experience.

I'm heavily conflicted about STARBO, but I do recommend it. Just not at full price.
STARBO is something you can't really explain in one review, because it'd get lengthy and unwieldy really quickly. But, bottom line, if you like artistic walking simulators that leave a lot up to the player to interpret, look no further than this diamond in the rough.

STARBO is a game that I really want to see expanded upon either in a sequel or an update of sorts. I want to know the backstory of Leo and what's going on in his head. I want to know what the robots are, or what the various creatures that hunt you are supposed to represent. I understand that a lot of this is symbolic (especially towards the end), but since we're told absolutely nothing about Leo's character or life story, we don't really know what these symbols could represent.

The biggest flaws of the game are that there's some shoddy collision detection at times, and I fell through the floor more than once. Also, for some reason, a recurring thing is that Leo says "you're ret0rted" to his boss. Which is about as childish as it gets. That word has ruffled some feathers in the past, so I think it should be mentioned here. Also, the voice acting for Leo is really unfitting in my opinion. Based on the banner artwork, he looks and sounds like two completely different people.

It's short, sweet, and the ending did give a sort of chill down my spine. So I suppose that's good enogh to leave a review and recommend it.

I bought this game yesterday before going to sleep and had a dream i reviewed it, so I'm reviewing it.

STARBO is an hour long walking simulator that offers a very dream-like experience meant to be played through in one sitting, that you really shouldn't get if you have photosensitive epilepsy or if flashing bright lights bother you. There are no weapons to pick up or combat, no stealth. Just walking, running, occasionally picking up keys to open locked doors so you can continue to run and a puzzle.

It has a good story, good soundtrack, good atmosphere, some really good moments and okay but still beautiful graphics. The gameplay part of it isnt as good, but i personally think it's worth it for the experience. I really like short walking sims like this one.

As of writing this review, the full price of the game is $8.99 which is pretty expensive for a game this short, but i got it at 90% off for less than a dollar and at that price it's absolutely worth it. If you get this game, play it the moment you have a free hour for it. Don't let it get lost to the depths of your steam library backlog.

Excellent atmosphere and dreamy setting. Powerful sound effects and music used well. Story itself? Kind of David Lynchian tale, like a dream sequence, lots of questions with no answers. Some people despise that kind of story, some people love that kind of story - I belong to the latter group. Only two major downsides I'd say:

1) Game length - surprisingly short, could/should had been notably longer
2) No option of loading / resuming a game - gotta finish the tale in one session

I played the game through in two sessions, as I didn't know I couldn't resume / load a game. In first session I played perhaps 20% of the game, and from start to finish in the second session. As it's a short story, replay value is not too good, either. About 10 euros price tag felt afterwards bit too much, perhaps 5 euros would had been more fitting.

It's a worthy little experience - at least if you get it dead cheap from Steam sale. Dont expect tens of hours of gameplay. Expect some hours if you play it slowly and enjoy all the details.

1.3 hours gameplay and that was with a restart because I accidentally went back to the title page while trying to figure out the save process. I liked the potential of the story a lot but it didn't really get fleshed out properly. Also, the insult that gets used for the antagonist? A little too 1990 for my comfort. The horror aspect was good, reminded me a fair bit of SOMA and there were some genuinely lovely/surreal/tense moments. Overall, I would recommend but I think the pricepoint is way too high. I am pretty passionate about paying for indie games but if a game is going to be this short, it needs to be made clear upfront so that consumers can choose whether or not it's a worthy investment.

It's an interesting game. You really feel like you are journeying within a dream. But, It's quite short.

In general, It's okay.