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cover-Star of Providence

Friday, March 21, 2025 2:02:06 AM

Star of Providence Review (clay gamer)

It's my favorite "roguelite where you explore room-by-room and after defeating a boss you descent one floor and it gets harder until you get to the final boss"-like, and I had fun with it in the ~5 or so hours I've played, but it falls flat in some places.
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The difficulty in this game is not very good. Most bosses are easy, have spaced, slow patterns and not that many attacks.
Most of the challenge with regular enemies will stem from not knowing how they work. Expect to be shotgunned in the face by enemies that shoot projectiles on death, or catapulted lesser enemies towards you on death, enemies that teleport around (and then shotgun you) or enemies that are part of the room you're in that only activate once you kill all enemies in the room.
These are all damage sources that will stop existing when you play the game for enough time and just get used to the enemies and recognize who does what, and by that time both the regular enemies and most of the bosses will just not be particularly fun to fight.
The game showers you with lots of resources, damage increases, upgrades that greatly boost your survivability, rechargable bombs (when less than two on hand) that wipe all projectiles and push back enemies, weapons with limited ammo, some of which are really strong to the point of killing mini-bosses before they get to properly attack you and upgrades that just straight up give you a shield when you play well.
You get health or ammo when: defeating a mini-boss, defeating a boss, bombing open rooms behind bomb-able walls, in shops, when picking up a weapon while already having one equipped, when beating certain challenges and so forth. You can probably get hit over sixty times on a floor 5 run and still win.
Combine these two things and you have patterns that (MOSTLY) aren't that hard to avoid (considering the small hitbox size) and so many resources that you can get hit, say, 10 times per floor and still win if you make it to the end.
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There is a "hard mode" (first additional ship you unlock) that you get to when you:
Beat floor 5 boss -> collect 3 more seals and unlock floor 6 -> beat floor 6 boss (3 runs in total)
which increases enemy health and makes almost every attack a bit more challenging, but if you beat the floor 6 boss with over half your health, the slight difficulty increase is unlikely to make the game much more exciting.
The exciting part is the new floor 6 boss you unlock when you play on hard mode. This is the highlight of the game (and the only time I died). This boss is agile, has fast attacks, has a relatively big move-set, has multiple phases - all of which are cool - and feels fun to fight. He also has a fat health bar so you can't just blow through him by face-tanking for twenty seconds or so.
It's just a bit of a shame that you have to restart the game three times just to get to him. It would've been nice if Hard mode (and by extension, access to floor 6) was available from the get-go for people who wanted to jump right in.
It also pains me to see, that, seemingly, most people who have this game never even got to him!
Only around 20% of all people who have played this game on steam got to floor 6, and the amount of people who then beat floor 6 and successfully re-played the game in hard mode is only 6%! That means that only around 1 in 16 people who played this game GOT TO SEE THE BEST PART OF IT!
This might have to do with the unlock condition for floor 6 itself. When I beat floor 5, I had no idea what I had to do. I saw that there was some sort of locked door and on my score card it said "1/4 seals", but I didn't know how to get the other three and looked it up. It wouldn't surprise me if there is a substantial amount of people who beat Overlord and thought the game was over, or just didn't want to bother looking up how to proceed.
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Other than that, I think it's a pretty nice game.
The cash multiplier that goes up when you beat rooms without taking damage is a great idea, because it makes it so that you can buy every item in each shop if you just play well enough (in turn, making you even stronger and adding to your survivability for sections of the game you haven't seen yet).
The limited weapon system and keywords are also pretty nice, but I feel like some of the combinations aren't that great. I don't think I've ever picked up a strong revolver variant, it's mostly laser, vulcan or charge that have the best damage per second. There are also blessed variants that give a flat damage and ammo boost to that specific guns and cursed variants that increase your health but make your gun break after a random amount of rooms you clear (max 20).
There's also "unique weapons" which are just stronger variants of existing base weapons, also quite epic.
The gauntlet systems are also nice. You get a FAT reward for beating the one where you have to go room by room without getting hit (10% dmg upgrade guaranteed and a bunch of other stuff on top of that) and the core-thing that gives greater rewards based on damage dealt to it is also a great idea. There's also the temple that will give you a cartridge that gives you one of the four buffs with the condition "if mult >=2.5x".
~12€ for a bit less than 5 hours of game is a bit steep, but in the end I'm glad that I played it.
There's also extra content like "Trials" and "Loops", but it doesn't seem interesting to me.