Following the successful Kickstarter campaign, developer Epictellers Entertainment kicked off the public closed beta playstest for cRPG Starfinder: Afterlight. Lucky players who signed up in Steam got a chance to try a short demo version for themselves, yours truly among them.
The full version of the game promises an exciting single-player, party-based cRPG adventure set in the Starfinder universe. Players are in for six unique companions, tactical turn-based combat, branching narrative that focuses on choices and consequences, multiple difficulty modes, and much more.
Of course, the playtest version is only a tiny vertical slice of the game and features only a very limited selection of the promised features. Still, even an hour-long demo is enough to see where the game is going in terms of narrative tone, combat, and more.
So get that drift engine ready, we’re diving into an extremely early look at Starfinder: Afterlight.
First things first, what is Starfinder? Coming from Paizo, Starfinder is a science-fantasy tabletop RPG that blends magic and technology and serves as a sister setting to Pathfinder, being set thousands of years in the future in the same universe.
Technological armor, guns, spaceships, aliens and cosmic threats coexist with magic, gods, fantasy races such as dwarves, elves and goblins. In a word, Starfinder can be described as diverse, flexible or imaginative, much like Star Wars.
Golarion, the planet that Pathfinder events are happening upon, mysteriously disappeared during the event known as “The Gap”, its current fate unknown – although there are rumors that it still exists somewhere that neither magic nor technology can touch. However, there are still many links to the original Pathfinder and Golarion, such as familiar gods, be it Iomedae or Urgathoa, and even the names of locations such as the Absalom Station.
Enter Epictellers Entertainment with Starfinder: Afterlight, the first proper PC game to use the Starfinder 2e system. You do not need to have any degree of knowledge about the Starfinder or the Pathfinder universe in order to play Afterlight, be it the narrative setting or the way combat works in the TTRPG.
Personally, I am only familiar with Paizo’s universes through Owlcat Games Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, but I did not feel lost in a whole new setting. The game does a respectable job providing enough information to get its points across without feeling like you’re being repeatedly smacked up the head by a dictionary.
Although, the dictionary is present should you need it.
Welcome to the Pact Worlds, enjoy your stay!.. even if it begins with crawling out of a lifepod on some random planet – all adventures have their rough spots.
The new game begins with a short comic sequence that shows how you arrived in this situation and leads to the character creator. The full game will provide you with an actual custom character creator and all that it entails: race, class, skills, etc., but the current playtest has three pre-created characters up for grabs:
- Versatile human, Soldier
- Briskwander vesk Envoy
- Courtier shirren, Operative
All have their strong and weak sides and unique set of abilities and equipment to start with. Additionally, it seems that the game will feature backstories as the conversations have such options as [Pirate] to choose from.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves: your protagonist is stranded, hurt, alone, and quickly attacked by a malfunctioning Secubot. Following a short introductory combat, you meet your first companion: a Shirren Priest that goes by the name Preach and the larva that he protects.
Together with Preach, you work out a plan of action to find your crew – or what remains of it. Your old captain Khali, is somewhere around, hanging out with a guy named Sterling, another playtest companion. In turn, he is being rather relentlessly pursued by the cult of Urgathoa and needs your help before he will aid you.
The playtest focuses on Sterling’s recruitment mission and concludes right after – just as things were getting really good, you were starting to see the promised non-linearity, skill-based dialogue options, and perhaps be teased with answers. Which is exactly what makes it a great demo since you can’t help but want for more!
Since the game only covers the very first hour of gameplay and likely not fully at that, the combat is present in a very rudimentary way. There are a few items that you can pick off various containers, chests, bodies, etc., but for the most part you will be using auto-attack (and reload for those using ranged weapons) and 1-2 abilities per character.
Starfinder: Afterlight will have you manage 3-action economy wisely, especially considering that not all actions are made equal, with some taking one action point, another demanding two, and so on. The system is quite intuitive and easy to grasp – although, with the current lack of abilities and interesting items, a bit boring and basic. Once Afterlight wheels out buffs/debuffs, interesting item procs, more abilities and so on, it will be more interesting and complex to use.
The animations are kind of in the same spot, which is also to be expected. However, voice acting is way ahead of the rest of the game, with not only character dialogue being voiced, but certain character barks as well – dying, death, etc.
To sum it up, in the early playtest demo, the early vertical slice of Starfinder: Afterlight showed itself as an ambitios, bright project that is still quite a long way from the release. If you are someone who enjoys seeing how games change overtime and want your feedback to shape the final version of the game, consider jumping right in. However, if you prefer the final, polished experience, it’s worth keeping Afterlight on your radar since it will likely be a while before it’s ready to come out of the oven.
In its full version, the game will have 40-60 hours long campaign with custom character, 6 companions to join your adventure, and much more.
