OPUS: Echo of Starsong
If you want to feel sad, here’s a game for you
This is the first guest post I’ve commissioned for Have You Played, by Malindy Hetfeld! I first encountered her writing while researching my piece on Season; her incisive review explored important ideas other reviewers had overlooked. If you enjoy this newsletter, you’ll love this post – I know I did.
PC, iOS, Xbox, Switch
$24.99, free on Xbox Game Pass
10-12 hours long
OPUS: Echo of Starsong is an adventure game set in the Thousand Peaks planetary system. You mostly navigate from location to location using a map of the system and explore so-called lumen caves from a side-scrolling perspective. You follow the crew of the spaceship Red Chamber in their search for caves that hold a highly sought-after resource called lumen. The only people able to find lumen are witches, women highly attuned to the resonance lumen gives off. This resonance, called starsong, must be recorded by witches and then played at specific points in the caves in order to activate doors and other mechanisms during cave exploration.
Jun Lee, the first character you meet, is a lesser noble of the Lee clan. When he talks back to the wrong person at the wrong time, he costs his clan most of their precious lumen caves (in the world of Echo of Starsong, the explorer who finds a cave gets to register it to their name and mine the lumen within, thus ensuring a steady income for as long as there’s lumen). The Lumen Association, an intergalactic body handling cave ownership, reassigns the Lee clan’s caves following Jun’s faux-pas, leaving the clan shamed and with little income. From this point onwards, Jun becomes obsessed with finding new caves so he can restore the clan’s honour and return home. Jun eventually meets the witch Eda and her companion Remi, and joins their crew aboard the Red Chamber.
If you are now thinking “lumen what? Witch who?” I can’t blame you, because EoS unleashes the full brunt of its worldbuilding onto you immediately within its opening hours, nay, minutes. There’s a large war in the planetary system’s rearview mirror; lumen, which isn’t only a pretty form of space diesel but also sometimes-sentient and definitely magic; and we can’t forget about the galaxy’s genesis and religious practices. From a worldbuilding perspective, it’s nothing short of amazing. As context for a plot-driven video game, it’s a lot. What’s more, what you experience is actually Jun as an old man reminiscing, an interesting narrative device that allows him to fit in some more background info on how he felt at the time and how he feels about certain situations in hindsight. It also means I don’t spoil anything by saying that things for Jun will not be going well, but he will live to see old age. Because of this foregone conclusion, there’s no game over in Echo of Starsong, and there are very few situations you can outright fail, themselves clumsily framed as old Jun forgetting what actually happened.
As a player, you do quite a lot in Echo of Starsong, but the way you do it is simple. Travelling from planet to planet is an exercise in navigating an interface – you select a signal, move your cursor there, press a button to analyse it and then press the same button to make the trip there with your starship. Over the course of the game, you will also navigate an asteroid field, tune into the lumen’s frequency, put out fires and repair broken computer terminals, all with the simple action of pointing your cursor at something and pressing a button. Many games without puzzles are essentially just you moving a stick around a pressing a button, so while this can be considered light gameplay, I liked the idea that a game would allow me to do a plethora of things nonetheless. Each journey costs fuel, and you regularly need to stop at travel hubs to refuel, otherwise someone has to come and rescue the ship.
Before you reach your actual destination, you run into other ships. Some may hail you with an SOS, some may turn out to be military vessels that want to inspect your ship. In these situations, you need to make a choice – you can voluntarily take damage and lose armour plates, or you can let a random number generator determine your luck at subterfuge. I liked these parts a lot for providing some friction, but unfortunately the danger of encounters decreases as part of the ongoing narrative. With increasing resources and reputation, the Red Chamber crew becomes almost too good at evading space pirates and other unsavoury folk, and even if you don’t, you can fix almost any damage. You may for example lose armour running into a military convoy, but you’re almost guaranteed to make enough money to quickly replace it at your next stop. While the interface gameplay and wayfinding is similar to that in games such as inkle’s 80 Days and Jump Over the Age’s In Other Waters, unlike those games, you don’t have to think about the consequences of your decisions much, since EoS’ focus is on telling a story, and failure may get in the way of telling that story.
The world of Echo of Starsong is rather gloomy but it is gloomy in a way that is familiar enough – the Lumen Association functions like a giant megacorporation that has unleashed never-ending bureaucracy on people, and the only part you get to see of their lives is the one where they are working to survive in a system fundamentally stacked against them. The three protagonists are all highly dysfunctional, which, given these circumstances, is hardly surprising. All of them are orphans who have hardly experienced kindness, and all three of them latch onto the first person to show it to them, however sparingly, that they devote their entire lives to them. Jun’s motivation to restore his clan to glory is not his own, neither is Eda’s hunt for caves or the reason Remi follows her. All three of them are broken by the time you meet them, and conventional means of success can’t change that. You watch your funds go up, your ship become more modern, and the general public's attitude towards the Red Chamber crew change, but while this was partly your original goal, the game keeps moving the goalpost for its characters.
In a way, this is relatable, after all humans often strive for economic security and success at the cost of their interpersonal relationships. I liked Echo of Starsong most when it wasn’t about its protagonists at all – through their encounters with other people, and trying to help them, I learned more about the world and its inhabitants, and this worldbuilding was ultimately what I enjoyed most. I enjoyed it so much in fact that I would recommend it to anyone interested in worldbuilding, and even as I came across aspects I didn't like, the daring mix of luck-based decision-making and the many small stories you come across this way really made the experience worthwhile to me. Echo of Starsong is a brilliant exercise in building a believable world with a strong visual identity from scratch, and it explains even the most ridiculous pseudo-magical concepts with so much conviction you just stop asking questions and appreciate it for what it is.
However, as someone trying to follow a story, I need progress, and there’s more of a sense of progression to the small favours and battles you keep running into than the actual plot. It feels as if Echo of Starsong isn't particularly tethered to the adventure you’re supposed to experience. The game cuts away several times to skip time, and many things seem to happen off-screen in order to facilitate further plot developments. At the same time, it uses plenty of dramatic flashbacks to slowly uncover its character’s backstory. This way, while you learn how these characters came to be in the situation you find them in, you don’t know much about them as people, and you don't see them develop meaningfully, either.
Part of how I feel about the game can be explained by the differences in Western and Asian storytelling traditions. Made by Taiwanese studio SIGONO, Echo of Starsong uses a lot of the Asian storytelling conventions that you may recognise from anime, and that can feel very unusual to Western audiences. The biggest difference lies in the story structure, the way a story is built. Western media uses plenty of different structures, but fundamentally they are all built on an inciting incident, a moment of conflict that sets events into motion. It’s the spider bite that turns Peter Parker into Spider-Man, Colm telling Pádraic he doesn’t want to be friends anymore, Arielle deciding she wants legs. The storytelling structure prevalent in Asia, called kishotenketsu, does without such a dramatic turning point, and uses plot twists instead. This structure also employs fewer peaks and valleys than its Western counterparts, fewer opportunities for characters to catch a break. If something isn't exploding, someone is trying to deal with emotional abandonment, and only questionable types of people seem to make it anywhere in this planetary system. That is of course also a tonal choice on Sigono's part. Many people find a great deal of enjoyment in melancholy, as well as characters that purposefully don't reveal their true feelings, and eoS excels at both.
The biggest conflict you have in Echo of Starsong however, is the unresolved trauma each character is carrying around. At choice moments, their emotional pots will boil over, forcing dramatic confessions which then ultimately lead to very little change. A dramatic explosion of feeling by someone who has been bottling up all of their worries can be very satisfying, but for that to work they have to signify an aftermath; some sign of change. It is very Western of me to want to shout at characters and go “just tell each other what your problem is”, when a lot of this kind of storytelling demands characters very pointedly don’t talk about their feelings, but this game just overdoes it. Everyone is sad and angry and confused without any real outlet, the explosive emotional moments, when they come, seem overdue, but no one dares discuss them.
I have experienced Asian subdued emotional expression and how it leads to people and characters showing affections through actions rather than words, but Echo of Starsong is a game of many words, and so few of them are kind that it left me mildly exhausted.
Malindy Hetfeld is a freelance game writer and journalist. She has recently completed work on the upcoming Mythwrecked: Ambrosia Island by Polygon Treehouse and still works as a game critic and consultant with a focus on narrative design. You can read her work on and in Eurogamer, PCGamer, The Guardian, EDGE Magazine, among others. Follow her on twitter @yourkyotowife.